The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest
Yochai Benkler
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0385525761
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
What do Wikipedia, Zip Car’s business model, Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and a small group of lobster fishermen have in common? They all show the power and promise of human cooperation in transforming our businesses, our government, and our society at large. Because today, when the costs of collaborating are lower than ever before, there are no limits to what we can achieve by working together.
For centuries, we as a society have operated according to a very unflattering view of human nature: that, humans are universally and inherently selfish creatures. As a result, our most deeply entrenched social structures – our top-down business models, our punitive legal systems, our market-based approaches to everything from education reform to environmental regulation - have been built on the premise that humans are driven only by self interest, programmed to respond only to the invisible hand of the free markets or the iron fist of a controlling government.
In the last decade, however, this fallacy has finally begun to unravel, as hundreds of studies conducted across dozens of cultures have found that most people will act far more cooperatively than previously believed. Here, Harvard University Professor Yochai Benkler draws on cutting-edge findings from neuroscience, economics, sociology, evolutionary biology, political science, and a wealth of real world examples to debunk this long-held myth and reveal how we can harness the power of human cooperation to improve business processes, design smarter technology, reform our economic systems, maximize volunteer contributions to science, reduce crime, improve the efficacy of civic movements, and more.
For example, he describes how:
• By building on countless voluntary contributions, open-source software communities have developed some of the most important infrastructure on which the World Wide Web runs
• Experiments with pay-as-you-wish pricing in the music industry reveal that fans will voluntarily pay far more for their favorite music than economic models would ever predic
• Many self-regulating communities, from the lobster fishermen of Maine to farmers in Spain, live within self-regulating system for sharing and allocating communal resources
• Despite recent setbacks, Toyota’s collaborative shop-floor, supply chain, and management structure contributed to its meteoric rise above its American counterparts for over a quarter century.
• Police precincts across the nation have managed to reduce crime in tough neighborhoods through collaborative, trust-based, community partnerships.
A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of cooperation in 21st century life, The Penguin and the Leviathan not only challenges so many of the ways in which we live and work, it forces us to rethink our entire view of human nature.
resources—perhaps an invitation to a function, or news of a career opportunity—that are similarly exchanged for social capital, and so on. While the kind of social capital in this example takes place between individuals, social capital can also be exchanged in less direct ways—most notably, through reputation. Most people understand that there are bene ts to being seen as kind, generous, and trustworthy; in fact, in economic experiments, people behave more cooperatively when they know that their
and thinks is right). Just as it is important to us to be seen as fair and benevolent, there is much evidence to suggest it is extremely important to us to be seen as socially appropriate—perhaps even more important than it is to obey authority or the law. In 1991, legal scholar Robert Ellickson published a brilliant book, Order Without Law, that looked at how a community of ranchers in Shasta County, California, handled the problem of trespassing cattle. He found that the ranchers blatantly
about recycling), matter as well, but how well it works is in uenced in turn by how convenient or “inexpensive” it is to recycle. What this tells us is that if we want to encourage cooperation, we need to keep an eye on how burdensome or less so we make it for individuals to act on their better instincts (such as when some municipalities switch to curbside recycling pickup). Almost a decade ago, when I rst started studying cooperation online, I called this e ect the “modularity” of contribution.
personality or by appealing to Americans’ deep desire for change, Obama inspired three million donors to open up their wallets and give for a cause they believed in. The Obama campaign wasn’t the rst political movement in history to use the power of the web to harness social and political action, though it was the most e ective. Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign used email and online forums to organize voters. But even before that, MoveOn.org had succeeded in building the seeds of successful political
receive advice from others on everything from what movie to see, to where to buy a used bicycle, to how to cope with our child’s illness. Whether it’s via Wikipedia, a blog, or our Twitter feed, we volunteer our knowledge and expertise and expect nothing in return. The anonymity of the web makes us feel safe enough to join support groups for problems we would have otherwise su ered alone, nd people who share interests we were embarrassed to indulge o ine. We help one another expand our