The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens by Samuel Bowles

Author:Samuel Bowles [Bowles, Samuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.3. Cultural differences in mean contributions with and without a punishment option in a Public Goods game In each of the panels, the left observations are the treatment without punishment, and those on the right are from the same game with the punishment option. (Data from Gaechter, Herrmann, and Thoni. 2010; the cultural categories are from the original source.)

As expected, cultural differences in game play among the subject pools were significant. But in all of them (as is common in other experiments with the Public Goods game), subjects contributed substantial amounts in the first period.27 In the absence of the punishment option, however, cooperation soon unraveled. When available, the punishment option was widely used, especially in the early periods, and the contributions stayed consistently high in all fifteen subject pools as a result. In the treatment with punishment, the subject pools with the highest average contributions were (in order) Boston, Copenhagen, St. Gallen (Switzerland), Zurich, and Nottingham; the lowest average contributions were in Athens, Riyadh, Muscat (Oman), Dnipropetrovs’k (Ukraine), and Samara (Russia).

Average contribution levels in the subject pools correlated positively with measures (for the populations in which the experiment as conducted) of rule of law (the correlation coefficient between these two measures was r = 0.53), democracy (r = 0.54), individualism (r = 0.58), and social equality (r = 0.65). Positive correlations were also found, as expected, with survey measures of trust (r = 0.38).28

Voluntary contribution to a public good is surely a plausible measure of the civic virtues that Marx thought would die out in a market economy. The same is true of rejections of stingy offers in an Ultimatum game, because they show that people will sacrifice their own material gain to punish those who violate social norms of fairness. That these behaviors are stronger in nations with a greater extent of market interactions is puzzling. Understanding why these cross-country correlations occur will cast further doubt on the idea that market-based economies necessarily promote “universal venality.”

Sustaining Social Order in Liberal and Other Societies

The difference between the cooperating and free-riding subject pools in this cross-cultural study—between, on the one hand, Boston and Zurich, and, on the other, Athens and Muscat—lies in the use of punishment and the response to being punished. In the experiment without the punishment option, subjects in Samara, Dnipropetrovs’k, and Muscat contributed more than those in Boston, Nottingham, and Zurich. The reason these subject pools did less well in the punishment version of the game is that a significant amount of punishment was directed not only at shirkers but also at high contributors. This may have been done in retaliation for punishment received in earlier rounds by subjects who believed (correctly) that the high contributors were doing most of the punishing (figure 5.4). The authors termed this practice—punishment of those contributing the same or more than the subject—“antisocial punishment.” Other experiments have found the same patterns.

The extent of antisocial punishment was significantly and inversely correlated with the societal measures mentioned above: rule of law (r = −0.

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