The very emphasis of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours.
SIGMUND FREUD
Objectivist ethics, in essence, hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.
AYN RAND
Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.
MACHIAVELLI
The natural world is “grossly immoral.”…Natural selection “can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.”
GEORGE C. WILLIAMS
These deeply ingrained assumptions tilt the jen ratio of our culture toward extremely low values, and they have led us astray in our pursuit of the meaningful life.
THE MIDLIFE CRISIS OF HOMO ECONOMICUS
Social life would be a strange affair if humans had no sense of self-interest, no competitive drive, no attunement to the bad in the world, if their jen ratios had no input into the denominator. Just ask the parents of children with Williams syndrome. These children often have elfin features and intellectual deficits (for example, language delays, distractibility, difficulties controlling attention). Yet they can possess a fascinating combination of savantlike talents: They may sparkle in conversation, be exquisitely sensitive to music and loud sounds, and be preternaturally at ease with others. Unsettling from the parents’ perspective is that children suffering from Williams syndrome often have little sense of individuality, few boundaries, and a pure and at times problematic interest in the welfare of others. They tend to catapult themselves into friendly relations with people they have just met—the pimply checkout guy, the traffic officer, the psychotic panhandler hustling a dollar reciting poetry about the end of the world.
Clearly we are wired to pursue self-interest, to compete, and to be vigilant to the bad. Those tendencies make evolutionary sense, they are built into our genes and nervous systems. They are part of human nature. But that is half the story. Several lines of thought suggest that Homo economicus, and its proponents, are experiencing a crisis in faith, that this model of human nature is only part of our story.
Economists themselves have asked whether maximizing self-interest is always the core motive of human action. This questioning found galvanizing expression in a 1988 book, Passions Within Reason, by Cornell economist Robert Frank. Frank offers a series of observations that reveal humans to be more than bar-pressing rats seeking that pleasure-center buzz. Here’s one: From the perspective of maximizing personal desire, why do we tip a waitress after grabbing breakfast in a diner in a town we will never set foot in again? There really is no personal gain to this costly act, no promise of reciprocity, no speeded-up service the next time we frequent the restaurant, no burnishing of our reputation in the eyes of the other diners who witness our largesse. Our economic lives, Frank observes, are punctuated by actions that harm our self-interest while enhancing the welfare of others: generosity toward co-workers, acts of charity to faraway children and the protection of other species, buying Girl Scout cookies at exorbitant prices. The health of long-term bonds, Frank continues, depends upon high jen emotions like compassion, gratitude, and love.
An outpouring of empirical findings has lent credence to Frank’s prescient claims. Consider one such set of results, generated by studies that use the ultimatum game. In the ultimatum game, an allocator is given a sum of money, say $10, and told to keep a certain amount and allocate the rest to a second participant, a responder, who can either accept or reject the offer. If rejection is the choice, neither player receives anything. The enlightened self-interested approach would be for the allocator to give the responder 1¢, or perhaps in a fit of generosity $1, and for the responder to accept. In the end, both individuals’ overall wealth is advanced, and Adam Smith smiles.
Across ten studies of people in 12 different cultures, however, economists Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt found that 71 percent of the allocators offered the responder between 40 and 50 percent of the money. Most people showed a strong preference for near-equality. Remember these are strangers they’re making these offers to, not kith and kin. People around the world will sacrifice the enhancement of self-interest in the service of other principles: equality, a more favorable reputation, or even, God forbid, the advancement of others’ welfare.
So we don’t always act in the pure pursuit of self-interest. What about a more basic question: Does material gain make us happy? Certainly this is a pervasive notion. Seventy-four percent of today’s undergraduates cite economic gain as the primary motive for going to college (compared to 25 percent twenty years ago, above other motives, such as developing a philosophy of the meaningful life or contributing to the greater good). We are increasingly defining our needs in terms of gratifying materialistic desire. Look at the table below, adapted from Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety, which portrays recent shifts in the percentage of U.S. citizens who consider different products to be basic necessities.
1970
2000
SECOND CAR
20
59
SECOND TV
3
45
MORE THAN ONE TELEPHONE
2
78
CAR AIR CONDITIONING
11
65
HOME AIR CONDITIONING
22
70
DISHWASHER
8
44
Does money make us happy? The answer for those who have very little is yes. Material gain allows individuals in the lowest economic strata to avoid the innumerable problems associated with economic deprivation, including depression, anxiety, compromised resistance to disease, and higher mortality rates.
For those in the middle classes and above, however, the association between money and happiness is weak or nonexistent. Researchers have now asked millions of people the simple question: “How satisfied are you with your life right now?” It is not personal wealth, the strength of the stock market, inflation, or fluctuations in interest rates that cause the ebb and flow in our personal well-being. This same literature reveals time and time again that what makes us happy is the quality of our romantic bonds, the health of our families, the time we spend with good friends, the connections we feel to communities. When our jen ratios are high in our close relations, so are we.