The evidence for the advantages of cooperation is best interpreted as a lack of our ability to manage large complex structures effectively. We are so bad at it that even a stupid evolutionary algorithm can do better—despite all the duplication and wasted effort that so obviously involves. Companies that develop competing products to fill a niche in ignorance of each other’s efforts often is the stupid waste of time that it seems. In the future, our management skills will improve.
This is the argument for communism. Why should we resurrect it? What conditions will change so that this now-unworkable approach will work in the future? [...]
Nature excels at building large-scale cooperative structures. Multicellular organisms are one good example, and the social insects are another.
If the evidence for the superiority of competition over cooperation consists of “well, nobody’s managed to get cooperation in the dominant species working so far”, then it seems to me, that’s a pretty feeble kind of evidence—offering only extremely tenuous support to the idea that nobody will ever get it to work.
The situation is that we have many promising examples from nature, many more promising examples from history, a large trend towards globalisation—and a theory about why cooperation is naturally favoured.
Nature excels at building large-scale cooperative structures. Multicellular organisms are one good example, and the social insects are another.
If the evidence for the superiority of competition over cooperation consists of “well, nobody’s managed to get cooperation in the dominant species working so far”, then it seems to me, that’s a pretty feeble kind of evidence—offering only extremely tenuous support to the idea that nobody will ever get it to work.
The situation is that we have many promising examples from nature, many more promising examples from history, a large trend towards globalisation—and a theory about why cooperation is naturally favoured.