The economics of man's nature

Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophers typically began political treatises with an exploration into the "state of nature," the premise being that the ideal form of governance should follow logically from mankind's true condition. But what is mankind's true nature? Good or bad? Thomas Hobbes took a famously dour view: Life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," at least without the rule of a Leviathan. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, justified direct democracy by claiming that man is naturally compassionate, "born free, and everywhere he is in chains."

Oh, pity these thinkers! For they were writing before armies of social scientists learned to coax subjects into rooms with half-silvered mirrors and into high-tech brain-scanning machines, generating reams of data on what people are "really" like.

But would any of this have changed our dead philosophers' minds about human nature? After all, the evidence remains decidedly mixed -- at best, we are a wondrously complicated mess of contradictions and stunningly silly tendencies. And one of those silly tendencies is the "confirmation bias" -- that is, people tend to believe only the evidence that confirms what they already think.

Such is the pleasure and frustration of the new book "The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales From Evolutionary Economics." On one hand, we have author Michael Shermer, founder and director of the Skeptics Society, captivating raconteur of all the greatest hits of behavioral, evolutionary and neuropsychology, provider of wonderful cocktail party material, like the one about 50% of an audience challenged to count the number of completed basketball passes failing to notice the gorilla walking across the crowded court. But we also have Shermer, the tendentious libertarian, doing logical back-flips unbecoming a self-proclaimed skeptic to marshal human nature's unruly contradictions into a political program of minimal government and extreme market capitalism.

Interestingly, Shermer's first target is the very neoclassical economics on which so much free market fundamentalism has been built. He has a legitimate beef with the discipline's fundamental assumption that people can be reduced to nothing more than rational, self-interested utility maximizers. Rather, he contends, whether we are selfish or altruistic depends on the context: "We evolved to display within-group amity and between-group enmity."