In this book, I make use of an idea from economics to suggest how noble human tendencies might not only have survived the ruthless pressures of the material world, but actually have been nurtured by them.

Sympathy and other moral emotions described by David Hume (1740/1978) and Adam Smith (1759/1966) motivate people to incur a host of costs they could easily avoid. Such emotions pose a challenge to evolutionary biologists, who have long stressed the primacy of narrow self-interest in Darwinian selection. In earlier work, I argued (Frank, 1987, 1988) that natural selection might have favored moral sentiments because of their capacity to facilitate solutions to one-shot social dilemmas. Here, I present a capsule summary of the (...) basic argument. (shrink)

In earlier work, I proposed the 'adaptive standard of rationality', according to which narrow self-interest models can be broadened by positing additional tastes, but only upon a plausible showing that those tastes do not hamper resource acquisition in competitive environments. This proposal is related to the green beard hypothesis from biology, according to which altruism might be adaptive if its presence could be reliably signaled by some observable feature, such as a green beard. In their contri- bution to this issue (...) Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher o er theoretical arguments and describe laboratory experiments whose results they interpret as refuting my version of the green beard hypothesis. In this response, I argue that their theoretical arguments and experimental evidence pose no threat to the green beard hypothesis. (shrink)

Rachlin's attack on the internal commitment model rests on the demonstrably false claim that self-punishment does not exist. He is correct that habits are an effective device for solving self-control problems, but his additional claim that they are the only such device makes it hard to explain how good habits develop in the first place. Someone with a self-control problem would always choose the spuriously attractive reward, which, over time, would create bad habits.

Recent decades have seen a resurgence of contractarian thinking about the nature and origins of the state. Scholars in this tradition ask what constraints rational, self-interested actors might deliberately impose upon themselves. In response, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, and other early contractarians answered that laws of property were an attractive alternative to “the war of all against all.” More recently, James Buchanan, Russell Hardin, Mancur Olson, Gordon Tullock, and others have used contractarian principles to justify laws that solve a variety of (...) Prisoner's Dilemmas and other collective-action problems. And in the distributional realm, John Rawls and others have applied contractarian analysis to investigate how material wealth ought to be allocated among people. (shrink)

Studies have shown that when students are tested about their knowledge of basic economic principles six months after completing an introductory economics course, they score no better, on average, than those who never took the course. That remarkable failure is explained in part by the fact that many professors try to teach their students far too much, and in part because many employ excessive mathematical formalism. This paper describes an alternative approach inspired by evidence that the human brain absorbs new (...) ideas most efficiently when they are expressed in narrative form. It describes an extraordinarily effective pedagogical device?the economic naturalist?writing assignment, in which the student is asked to pose an interesting question based on personal observation or experience, and then use basic economic principles in an attempt to craft a plausible answer to it. (shrink)