I studied a lot of stuff linked to this, what follows is my attempt to organise my knowledge. Here are the main processes I think are draining the kind of cooperation you described from society.
Inequality
Cooperation in society is suffering immensely from the rising economical inequalities. The evidence and theories linking the rise of economical inequality to the rise of a wide series of social problems, including a strong decrease of mutual trust, cooperation, altruism and a decline in social bonds between people. These are all factors that would be needed for the kind of cooperation described in the question.
Essentially, the two minute version of the theory it’s that in a society where wealth is unfairly distributed, with a very small percentage of people owning most of it and a lot of steps in the social ladder all the way down, everyone is stressing over social status all the time, seeing everyone else as a potential rival, and so everyone is worse off, even the rich.
I highly suggest The Spirit Level by Wilkinson and Pickett, they do an excellent work at explaining the theory and the evidence, and all the rest of the scientific evidence coming in is saying the same things.
Deregulation
Most of the progress obtained by western societies was made when the worse (domestic) follies of capitalism were kept in check by good rules that were there for extremely good reasons.
You can go see the results of deregulation with extreme clarity in the banking sector, from the exact moment a bunch of rules went out of the window with the various deregulation sprees we got stuck in a repetitive cycle of banking crisis.
With these deregulation sprees there were also massive cuts on a lot of forms and institutions of social welfare, which studies are showing now to have been things society extremely needed to function properly. I think most of the research I had read on this was in The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills by Stuckler and Basu, which were able to present really strong evidence of the harmful effects of these welfare cuts and deregulation sprees on society. These policies of welfare were essential to keep inequalities more or less in check, with the effects mentioned above. So deregulation interacts with inequality by being one of its main causes, the richest part of the population has basically turned into a black hole that keeps getting richer every year why the rest of the population isn’t, and it’s wealth is not so slowly getting eroded. The less rules there are in an economy, the more the strong can grind down the weak. A lot of rules were also related to how much company should pay employees, how easy is to fire people and so on, so more inequality for everyone.
Also, deregulation walked hand in hand with privatisation, and it turns out (I think it’s in The Body Economic as well) that public company are not, in fact, less efficient than private ones, and that they do actually tend to have incentive systems that are more aligned with providing good services than to just make money.
I remember reading deregulation and privatisation being linked in attempts to cut public information medias in the UK by Thatcher, since you explicitly mentioned newspapers.
General thoughts on this
So it seems that if you try hard to optimise only for a single factor, say profit, and take off all the rules that try to limit the allowed tactics to those that don’t actually harm society, thus letting a large number of psychopaths get real creative at making money while also being able to learn from each other tactics, and if you keep accidentally selecting for said psychopaths in your managerial levels as well, what you get it’s not more wealth for everyone, but all kind of horrible consequences, and an extremely messed up society.
And why should you, if you systematically try to make your genies less aligned to human and society values before you make your wish.
Managers who don’t care about long term consequences but just rake up short term profits are systematically advantaged over the ones who would care for the company in the long term. The less rules there are, the more their advantage grow. The occasional billionaires that own the whole company and have on top of that a vision for the future are just too rare when the number of psychopaths between managers is six times the common ratio in the population.
Oh, and there is also a lot of research showing that employees mostly acted in the interest of the company if the company was perceived as being loyal to them, wages and other incentives didn’t even got close to get that kind of results. Research also showed that just thinking about moneys made people less moral and more likely to cheat, so there’s also that problem in trying to use money as the only goal someone should have in a system.
Fairness is an extremely powerful incentive for optimisation, because if someone is being fair toward you, you try to be fair in return, you don’t try to game the incentive system to get more fairness. Cialdini studies on reciprocity come to mind.
But this kind of relationship between company and employee was being enforced by rules that have been long thrown out.
Then, if we add on top of all that an ideology that explicitly praise only personal economical success and egoistical individualism and we market said ideology to the masses, and we add in the common knowledge that your society would just let you alone to die if something goes wrong with your health or wealth…
If a hunter-gatherer brain found itself in a pack where everyone was just in a competition to get more resources, was explicitly told the rule in this pack is to care only for its own success, didn’t know most of its members at all and knew for a fact the pack would abandon you to die if something went wrong… well, it seems pretty hard this brain would care at all about trying the kind of cooperation you describe. It would mainly care about getting to the top, or staying out of troubles and looking out for himself if he wasn’t confident in its skill.
As an European, I think USA culture is just poisoned with this kind of out of control individualism and “free market” ideology. Reasonably free market are good for society, excessively free market… aren’t.
I’d advise everyone from USA to try and look at those concepts with fresh eyes, and to check how other societies are seeing the issue. I was really surprised nobody here seemed to have noticed this.
I don’t know if I can really do any justice to everything I’ve studied on this without trying to write a sequence, I tried my best to explain but there’s too much to cover...
If anything I tried to explain was unclear or anyone would be interested in more links and evidence please ask me so. I only mentioned studies and facts on which my memory was certain.
Edit 06/11/20: If it’s not a bother, I’d like to ask people to give me their hypothesis on why this answer is so “controversial”, karma wise. I don’t mean this as a complaint at all, I simply plan to write more about this subjects here on Lesswrong and feedback would be useful.
I strong-upvoted this out of the negative because it seemed disproportionate for it to be there; I think it has some flaws as an answer and it might’ve been better as a comment, but there are other answers that are just as shaky on an explanatory level. (Though I don’t think some of the adversarial framing is doing it any favors.)
My intuition is that there’s a strong underlying point here, even if the surface markers have run afoul of some memetic antibodies. I’d love to see a better framing of this and better-explained actual counters if they’re there; if the latter are part of local canon, they haven’t propagated to me. “spirals of inequality leads to spirals of distrust” as a central thesis certainly plays well enough with some of the EEA-psychology and historical-cycles modeling on the surface.
I had the feeling I wasn’t really managing to throughly explain the background of evidence behind my point, and I can definitely see that my writing style has slipped into showing my annoyance toward these issues in several points.
I’ll be careful not to make the same mistakes when I’ll write about it in the future.
I studied a lot of stuff linked to this, what follows is my attempt to organise my knowledge. Here are the main processes I think are draining the kind of cooperation you described from society.
Inequality
Cooperation in society is suffering immensely from the rising economical inequalities. The evidence and theories linking the rise of economical inequality to the rise of a wide series of social problems, including a strong decrease of mutual trust, cooperation, altruism and a decline in social bonds between people. These are all factors that would be needed for the kind of cooperation described in the question.
Essentially, the two minute version of the theory it’s that in a society where wealth is unfairly distributed, with a very small percentage of people owning most of it and a lot of steps in the social ladder all the way down, everyone is stressing over social status all the time, seeing everyone else as a potential rival, and so everyone is worse off, even the rich.
I highly suggest The Spirit Level by Wilkinson and Pickett, they do an excellent work at explaining the theory and the evidence, and all the rest of the scientific evidence coming in is saying the same things.
Deregulation
Most of the progress obtained by western societies was made when the worse (domestic) follies of capitalism were kept in check by good rules that were there for extremely good reasons.
You can go see the results of deregulation with extreme clarity in the banking sector, from the exact moment a bunch of rules went out of the window with the various deregulation sprees we got stuck in a repetitive cycle of banking crisis.
With these deregulation sprees there were also massive cuts on a lot of forms and institutions of social welfare, which studies are showing now to have been things society extremely needed to function properly. I think most of the research I had read on this was in The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills by Stuckler and Basu, which were able to present really strong evidence of the harmful effects of these welfare cuts and deregulation sprees on society. These policies of welfare were essential to keep inequalities more or less in check, with the effects mentioned above. So deregulation interacts with inequality by being one of its main causes, the richest part of the population has basically turned into a black hole that keeps getting richer every year why the rest of the population isn’t, and it’s wealth is not so slowly getting eroded. The less rules there are in an economy, the more the strong can grind down the weak. A lot of rules were also related to how much company should pay employees, how easy is to fire people and so on, so more inequality for everyone.
Also, deregulation walked hand in hand with privatisation, and it turns out (I think it’s in The Body Economic as well) that public company are not, in fact, less efficient than private ones, and that they do actually tend to have incentive systems that are more aligned with providing good services than to just make money.
I remember reading deregulation and privatisation being linked in attempts to cut public information medias in the UK by Thatcher, since you explicitly mentioned newspapers.
General thoughts on this
So it seems that if you try hard to optimise only for a single factor, say profit, and take off all the rules that try to limit the allowed tactics to those that don’t actually harm society, thus letting a large number of psychopaths get real creative at making money while also being able to learn from each other tactics, and if you keep accidentally selecting for said psychopaths in your managerial levels as well, what you get it’s not more wealth for everyone, but all kind of horrible consequences, and an extremely messed up society.
And why should you, if you systematically try to make your genies less aligned to human and society values before you make your wish.
Managers who don’t care about long term consequences but just rake up short term profits are systematically advantaged over the ones who would care for the company in the long term. The less rules there are, the more their advantage grow. The occasional billionaires that own the whole company and have on top of that a vision for the future are just too rare when the number of psychopaths between managers is six times the common ratio in the population.
Oh, and there is also a lot of research showing that employees mostly acted in the interest of the company if the company was perceived as being loyal to them, wages and other incentives didn’t even got close to get that kind of results. Research also showed that just thinking about moneys made people less moral and more likely to cheat, so there’s also that problem in trying to use money as the only goal someone should have in a system.
Fairness is an extremely powerful incentive for optimisation, because if someone is being fair toward you, you try to be fair in return, you don’t try to game the incentive system to get more fairness. Cialdini studies on reciprocity come to mind.
But this kind of relationship between company and employee was being enforced by rules that have been long thrown out.
Then, if we add on top of all that an ideology that explicitly praise only personal economical success and egoistical individualism and we market said ideology to the masses, and we add in the common knowledge that your society would just let you alone to die if something goes wrong with your health or wealth…
If a hunter-gatherer brain found itself in a pack where everyone was just in a competition to get more resources, was explicitly told the rule in this pack is to care only for its own success, didn’t know most of its members at all and knew for a fact the pack would abandon you to die if something went wrong… well, it seems pretty hard this brain would care at all about trying the kind of cooperation you describe. It would mainly care about getting to the top, or staying out of troubles and looking out for himself if he wasn’t confident in its skill.
As an European, I think USA culture is just poisoned with this kind of out of control individualism and “free market” ideology. Reasonably free market are good for society, excessively free market… aren’t.
I’d advise everyone from USA to try and look at those concepts with fresh eyes, and to check how other societies are seeing the issue. I was really surprised nobody here seemed to have noticed this.
I don’t know if I can really do any justice to everything I’ve studied on this without trying to write a sequence, I tried my best to explain but there’s too much to cover...
If anything I tried to explain was unclear or anyone would be interested in more links and evidence please ask me so. I only mentioned studies and facts on which my memory was certain.
Edit 06/11/20: If it’s not a bother, I’d like to ask people to give me their hypothesis on why this answer is so “controversial”, karma wise. I don’t mean this as a complaint at all, I simply plan to write more about this subjects here on Lesswrong and feedback would be useful.
I strong-upvoted this out of the negative because it seemed disproportionate for it to be there; I think it has some flaws as an answer and it might’ve been better as a comment, but there are other answers that are just as shaky on an explanatory level. (Though I don’t think some of the adversarial framing is doing it any favors.)
My intuition is that there’s a strong underlying point here, even if the surface markers have run afoul of some memetic antibodies. I’d love to see a better framing of this and better-explained actual counters if they’re there; if the latter are part of local canon, they haven’t propagated to me. “spirals of inequality leads to spirals of distrust” as a central thesis certainly plays well enough with some of the EEA-psychology and historical-cycles modeling on the surface.
Thank you very much for your feedback.
I had the feeling I wasn’t really managing to throughly explain the background of evidence behind my point, and I can definitely see that my writing style has slipped into showing my annoyance toward these issues in several points.
I’ll be careful not to make the same mistakes when I’ll write about it in the future.