Don't be fooled by the theory of Homo recriprocans

By way of Economist's View, at Economic Principals: The Practice Turn by David Warsh. Mark Thoma quotes the first paragraph:

It being August, and, unable to contribute anything worth saying about trade wars and currency politics; inspired instead by reading Joel Mokyr’s account of how a distinctive passion for useful knowledge emerged and flourished in Europe before spreading around the world, I lit out for the library to have a look at Mokyr’s preferred sources on the evidence of choice-based cultural change. The economic historian has underscored why evolving preferences, social learning, and its diffusion, are among the most interesting topics in all of social science.

I quote the second:

In Mokyr’s index, anthropologist Robert Boyd and economists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis are at the head of a column of other cultural evolutionists and evolutionary psychologists who argue that humankind is an inherently cooperative species. If in fact, in the view of experts, Homo recriprocans is gradually replacing Homo economicus (as Bowles and Gintis once put it), that development would certainly be news.

Economic Man is evolving into Reciprocating Man? Never heard of this before.

Wikipedia:

Homo reciprocans, or reciprocating human, is the concept in some economic theories of humans as cooperative actors who are motivated by improving their environment through positive reciprocity (rewarding other individuals) or negative reciprocity (punishing other individuals), even when without foreseeable benefit for themselves.

This concept stands in contrast to the idea of homo economicus, which states the opposite theory that human beings are exclusively motivated by self-interest.

Yeah, I dunno, maybe like humans on Star Trek. Or like players of that "collaborative" video game, The Castles of Dr. Creep.

Perhaps we find acceptance and rejection of this idea of evolution in today's political perspectives. I don't pay attention to politics so I'm just guessing here, but maybe liberals accept the idea and conservatives reject it? Sounds about right to me.

I'd say it's not realistic to expect the rise of Reciprocating Man. It's not realistic to expect a change in human nature. So maybe Mokyr's Boyd and Bowles and Gintis think they see this change. I'd say, short and sweet, what they see is not a change in human nature, but a phase of human nature, a phase that occurs during the decline of civilization.

It could be that it isn't a change in human nature. It could be that human nature has always included the "reciprocating" feature, but this feature is ordinarily suppressed by the way the economy works. And then, in contrast to the economics of scarcity, the economics of plenty allow and encourage reciprocation. Could be, but I don't think so.

I think the economy runs in cycles, including those massive cycles that we call the rise and fall of civilizations. And I think that when you see something that looks like a change in human nature, it's probably just a phase of that massive cycle.