The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [41]
Taking the first step to proffer the hand of cooperation to a homicidal enemy must have been momentous and almost impossibly difficult, which is perhaps why it is such a rare trick in the animal kingdom. It took primatologists such as Sarah Hrdy and Frans de Waal to notice just how peculiar this is: how inconceivable it would be for an orderly queue of stranger chimpanzees to board an aeroplane, or sit down in a restaurant, without turning violently on each other. And generally speaking the more cooperative a species is within groups, the more hostility there is between groups. As a highly ‘groupish’ species ourselves, still given to mutual aid within groups and mutual violence between groups, it is an extraordinary thing that people can overcome their instincts enough to have social commerce with strangers.
I think the first overtures may have been ventured first by human females. After all, homicidal raids against neighbouring groups are – in human beings and in most other primates – conducted always by males. So encounters between strange females are not necessarily going to turn violent. Moreover, in all apes females are the sex that leaves the group into which they were born when they mate; in monkeys, curiously, it is males that leave. Assuming human beings follow the ape pattern – as they do to this day in most human societies – then women would have had close relations in other groups in the shape of their mothers, fathers and brothers with whom to build relation ships. There is even a curious, much later echo of such a femalecentred pattern in the trading patterns of south-east Asia before the arrival of Westerners. The traders of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines were often women, who were taught to calculate and to account from an early age.
Again and again throughout history, trust has to start with relatives before it can be extended to strangers; sending relatives abroad as agents has a long history. The trading ports of Asia each had their own communities of Gujaratis, Fujianese, Persians, Armenians, Jews and Arabs, just as the ports of Europe had their separate communities of Genoese, Florentine, Dutch, English and Hanseatic merchants, keeping the trust within the family as their diasporas spread. The financing of Wellington’s armies in Spain in 1809–12 was made possible because the British government trusted a Jewish lender named Nathan Rothschild to trust his brothers on the continent to buy bullion with British paper.
Finding a trade buddy
In 2004, a series of volunteer undergraduates sat down at computer screens at George Mason University in Virginia to play games for money. In the game each person found himself in a virtual village with his own house and field in which he could produce and consume red and blue virtual ‘units’ during brief sessions of the game. In each case, he knew that the more he acquired and the closer he got to a certain ratio of blue and red units (e.g., 3:1) the more real money he went home with. But unknown to him, he was either an ‘odd’ player, who was programmed to be faster at making red units, or an ‘even’ player, faster at making blue units. On his screen each player could see what other players (two, four or eight in total) were up to and he could chat with them on-screen during each run and in the 100-second gaps between runs. On one run of the game, in session six, two players had the following exchange:
‘wonder if u can give me objects’
‘oh yeah.’
‘heyyy, i make blues faster, what color do u make faster?’
‘red’
‘lol ok’
‘LOL’
‘so ill make all blues and u make all reds’
‘then drop them to each other’s houses?’
‘yea do it’
‘ok 100% red’
‘100% blue’
The purpose of the experiment, run by Bart Wilson, Vernon Smith and their colleagues, was of course to see if people discovered exchange