People Like Me

If the world were full of people like me, I fantasize, it would be a much more peaceful world. It would be a world in which time and resources were more efficiently used because people would not use them against one another. I enjoy being good. People from my past, some of whom I had completely forgotten, keep re-emerging on social media hunting me down to share their memories of me. I’ve done some not-so-good things as well, but it appears, from my reputation, that the good things have prevailed in my image.

But there is one very real sense in which the world would be a shambles if everyone was like me. You see, I don’t consume very much. I do not take expensive vacations or patronize expensive entertainment. I do not go out to eat very much. I am frugal and I enjoy it. A lot. And my wife is even more frugal and enjoys it even more. The high point of her month is when she shows me the utility bill, which compares the average Tulsan, an energy-conscious Tulsan, and us, and we use less electricity than even those considered to be energy conservationists.

Our French in-laws have a similar view of life. Their idea of a good time is to get together and eat sausages, sauerkraut, and pretzels, or go hiking in the mountains. Their only non-frugal expenditures are on wine and fragrant cheese. Of course, this is because they are French. But just as you will not find me and my wife taking a vacation to Vegas, you won’t find our French relatives going to the Côte d’Azur or Monaco.

As the economy “climbs out of the recession caused by the pandemic,” many sectors (particularly hospitality and entertainment) cry out for us to patronize them. My wife and I are the world’s worst big-time consumers. We were before, and we are even more so now, living as we do in Oklahoma were only a little more than one in three people are vaccinated.

 

The only way our economy can recover is if a lot of people start wasting money. This is, however, a problem that results from our unrealistically hedonistic economy.

What Is a Forest Worth? More Requiem for Nature

Whenever I write about somebody else’s book, I fear that I might have represented it. I sent the link to the previous essay to John Terborgh, author of Requiem for Nature. He responded that my summary was essentially correct. He added, reprinted with his permission:

“The world has moved on in a way that is predictable but not conducive to protecting nature. I say predictable, because the fundamental economic goal of nearly every country on the planet is to maximize economic growth. With this as the background to nearly all important policy decisions, nature doesn't have a chance. It is the empty chair at the conference table.

Perhaps the most memorable lecture I heard in college was one delivered by my Freshman biology professor in which he laid out in vivid terms the consequences of unchecked population growth. That, my friend, was in 1955. Here we are, 64 years down the road, and putting the brakes on the human population is still a topic that can't be mentioned in polite company - much less in open political debate.”

One issue in my essay remains unresolved. Terborgh said that a tropical forest is worth more dead than alive. In my book Green Planet, I said that a forest is worth more alive than dead. Which of us is correct? I realized that it depends on who is making the decision. For people collectively, as in a community or a world, a forest is worth more alive. But for individuals or corporations whose only goal is short-term profit, a forest is worth more when it is dead. Alas, evolution (biological or cultural) rewards individual, not collective, benefits. Collective benefits accrue only when they provide a direct and immediate benefit to individuals. For example, altruism within a group of animals offers immediate benefits to most, even if not all, of the individual animals in the group.

In the first photo, I am leaning against a rainforest tree (I have no idea which species, there are so many!) in 1989; in the second, I saw an area in which the rainforest had been hacked away, exposing soil to erosion.

Meanwhile, all I can do is to teach and to write. I continue to do these things even if they are likely to have little effect on the course of the future. As John added at the end of his message, “Carry on with your efforts to prod students into thinking out of the box. It's the only way we'll get out of this mess.”

Would We Rather Go to War than to Recycle?

We need aluminum (for those of you in the UK, it’s aluminium). Lots of it. It is a light and strong metal. To make new aluminum, you begin with bauxite ore, and use a lot of electricity. But to recycle aluminum, you start with aluminum, and use ten times less electricity than it takes to make it from bauxite.

In addition to the energy used to refine bauxite into aluminum, there is also the fact that the largest bauxite reserves are in countries that often have low industrial capacity and do not use very much aluminum. They are small countries that would not be able to put up much resistance if a country like the USA told them we wanted their bauxite. The largest reserves (7.4 billion metric tons) are in Guinea, a small poor African nation. Brazil has 3.6, Vietnam 2.1, and Jamaica 2.0 billion metric tons. The only significant industrial power with large bauxite deposits is Brazil, with 3.6 billion metric tons. Industrial countries have far less: China has 0.8, Russia has 0.2, and the USA has only 0.04 billion metric tons of bauxite reserves.

Our extravagant use of raw aluminum, while throwing used aluminum into landfills, makes economic sense only because we can get new aluminum from smaller countries. What if these countries decided to charge more money for it, or preferred to sell the bauxite to one of our competitors, such as China? Would we go to war for bauxite rather than to recycle what we already have? I wonder how many Americans are lazy and selfish enough that they would prefer to see an aluminum war rather than to take a few extra moments and a few extra steps to recycle aluminum cans? Half of our federal budget is for the military. How many Americans consider half of our tax money (and the money we borrow from other places), and the lives of our fellow Americans in the military, to be expendable so that we can throw whatever we like in the garbage? Go ahead. Next time you see a soldier, tell her or him that you would rather see them engaged in open conflict than for you to recycle, then tell yourself what a patriot you are.

There are a lot of rare and expensive metals in cell phones. One example is gold. At present, it is cheaper to mine gold from ore than it is to recycle it from electronic equipment. But that is only because, first, we ignore the environmental costs of gold mining, such as at the big mine in Australia shown in the figure, and second, we assume that we will never run out of ore. It is easy (in most places) to recycle old cell phones; electronics stores have receptacles for them, and some will even pay you for them. But Americans prefer to throw them away: ninety percent of them. Would we, perhaps, be willing to go to war for gold rather than to recycle it?

Some of those elements you heard about in high school chemistry actually have some very important uses. Praseodymium, for example, is a component of metal used in aircraft engines. Cerium is used as a catalyst to refine petroleum. Lanthanum is used in carbon arc lights such as those used in projectors. Neodymium is used in welders’ goggles. Samarium is part of the crystals used in optical lasers, and absorbs neutrons in nuclear reactors. Gadolinium is used in color picture tubes and magnetic resonance imaging. These are highly specialized but very important uses.

The reason I chose these particular metals is that Afghanistan has raw ores for these metals—a trillion dollars’ worth.

Though not a chemist, I can imagine that recycling these metals must be difficult, much more so than recycling aluminum. Imagine getting neodymium out of old welder’s goggles. At what point does it become cost-effective to recycle rare metals? The answer depends, of course, on the availability of raw ores for these metals. If Afghanistan will allow American corporations to mine their ores, and let us do so for cheap, then our industrial and political leaders will probably choose to use new, rather than recycled, rare metals.

But Afghanistan seems to be continually at war; America has had a very active and expensive military presence since 2002. When industrial leaders make their calculations for investing in rare metal mining in Afghanistan, they assume that American military presence will be available to protect them for free, that is, at taxpayer expense.

And, of course, our economic competitors such as China want these metals too.

This brings up the uncomfortable possibility that America might be willing to go to war for raw ores of these important rare metals rather than recycling them. We may choose to go ahead and throw away all those metals and, if we start to run out of them, just go to war and take what we need. As any black or Native American can tell you, American history consists largely of the white American government and economic leaders benefiting from the forced labor of, or taking land and all its resources away from, people of color. I am not suggesting that our current Afghan war is motivated by the desire for these metals at this time. One the other hand, maybe it is, or will soon be.

A war for raw mineral ores can be avoided by recycling, which is very easy to do for aluminum, very difficult to do for neodymium, but always possible.

Recycling is the right thing to do for world peace.

Mining the Middens

Wouldn’t you just love to take one of my classes? Oh, the field trips I have taken students on! Not so much anymore, because of liability and financial issues, but in the past. I have taken students to such wonderful places as sewage plants and landfills.

I took an environmental science class from Wheaton College Science Station (almost 13 years ago) to the Rapid City dump. We got to experience it with all our senses. The landfill director told us that there was probably a million dollars’ worth of aluminum in the landfill. Two of my entrepreneurial students instantly began discussing plans to recover it. Of course, they didn’t follow through once they realized what the cost of recovery would be. If you want to get that million dollars, you need to get it before it enters the landfill.

The archaeology books all tell us that some of the richest sources of information about ancient and prehistoric human life is garbage heaps, tastefully called kitchen middens. While the great monuments and cave paintings proclaim what people of those times wanted others, including us perhaps, to think about them. Trash heaps tell it like it is. Archaeologist Bill Rathje is already using our landfills to study our recent history. You want to know what people ate? Look for bones and seeds in their trash piles. You want to know what they consider valuable? Look for what they did not throw out. What do you find when you look at our trash piles? You see that we are throwing away the future.

First, even where it is illegal, people still throw thousands of tons of toxic waste into the garbage and then it goes to the landfill. Some of the toxins, such as heavy metals, never decompose. We do not care if seepage contaminates the water sources of other people besides ourselves today, much less people of the future.

Second, we throw away so many things that have value. Recycling is often a more economical source of materials than manufacture from raw materials. The only reason that, in many cases, recycled paper is more expensive than paper from freshly-killed trees is that the trees are either raised in plantations using sometimes ecologically unsound techniques or the National Forest Service is willing to sell them to timber companies dirt cheap. (Actually, soil is valuable. Try replacing it once it has eroded away.) The only reason that rare metals such as germanium may be cheaper to mine and refine than to recycle is that the taxpayers are paying for military operations in Afghanistan, which has immense deposits of rare metals, and one result of this is that we can have access to those metal ores (more on this in the next essay).

So if someone says that recycling isn’t cost effective, ask some questions, such as:

• How did you calculate the cost effectiveness of recycling vs. use of raw materials?
• How did you calculate the cost of depleting supplies and dumping poisons on future generations—or did you do any such calculations?

What will future archaeologists (if any; humans may survive but civilization may not) think when they dig up our trash heaps? Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Machine Age, Electronic Age, Garb-Age. They will marvel out how little value we placed upon our planet, upon our fellow humans, and upon or descendants.

We Can Do It but We Won't

I am talking about lifting the masses of the world’s poor out of desperation and into a decent life. We can do it. It is autocatalytic: once some people have begun to rise, they can assist us in lifting others. This is already happening in some places where it has been encouraged, places in which the rich overlords have not prevented it. Humankind can rise if it is not oppressed. The Old Testament prophets railed against those who would grind the face of the poor into the dust. This is why they are poor: it is not because they are lazy, but because rich people oppress them. (There are, of course, a few lazy ones, but this is not usually the case.)

One of the most pressing needs is to control diseases such as malaria and intestinal diseases. These diseases thrive in, and reinforce, a spiral of poverty. Poor people with diseases cannot afford medical care, not even in America, and this only allows the diseases to spread more. The economic burden is multidimensional.

• First, there is the cost of the medical care itself.
• Second, there is the cost of people not being able to work. This is a cost to all of society, not just to the direct victim.
• Third, the parasites themselves, living in people with chronic diseases, consume a lot of the nutrients in the food that the people eat. If someone is full of worms, like the dissident who escaped from North Korea a couple of weeks ago, the worms are using up calories and nutrients.
• Fourth, and this is one I never thought of until I read about it in something that Lewis Thomas wrote, is that the food that feeds the parasites represents a substantial portion of the agricultural output of any nation that has a lot of poor sick people. Lewis Thomas said that fully twenty percent of the food produced by countries with chronic malaria goes to feed the malaria parasites.

The spiral of sickness in poor societies is reinforced by all four of the above forces. To help poor people escape from sickness, especially the mild chronic sicknesses that do not kill them but keep them torpid all of their lives, will help their lives not only directly, but indirectly by improving the entire economy of their nations.

For nations as for individuals, health is a good investment. Will we help poor countries to achieve this investment?

Lewis Thomas said, “The idea that all men and women are brothers and sisters is not a transient cultural notion, not a slogan made up to make us feel warm and comfortable inside. It is a biological imperative.”

Is Altruism Good for the Economy?

One would think that there is money to be made in the business of altruism. In particular, corporations or local businesses that do things that help the community, so long as they do so in a visible manner, benefit from the goodwill of the community. People are more likely to open accounts at banks or buy items from stores that have a public image of being generous. There are many examples of businesses and corporations that have invested in, and reaped the benefits of, public goodwill. And the explosion of artificial intelligence has included an emphasis on likeability: those robot voices that answer the phones of corporations say “Your call is very important to us” rather than “Wait in line, sucker.” Sometimes the robot voices even tell you your approximate wait time. Someday soon they might be able to identify you by your phone number, consult the list of music you have purchased, and create a tailor-made sound track for your wait time. I will know this has happened if I start getting all-Dvořák sound tracks when I am put on hold.

Increasingly, however, I have noticed that corporations and businesses are doing just the opposite. In many cases, corporations will do things that demean and frustrate their customers even if it costs them money to do so. They frequently entrap their customers or clients into making little errors for which they can be penalized. We can all think of personal experiences in which this has happened to us or to someone we know. This seems to be puzzling, both from an economic and an evolutionary viewpoint. Why would they do something that is not only bad but also decreases their profits?

Probably because it does not decrease their profits. Corporations know that if they keep us frustrated, one of our responses will be to buy more stuff, from junk food to vacations, in an attempt to make ourselves happy or to help us forget our frustrations. Banks, for example, know that if they keep us frustrated, we will spend money on shallow pleasures and stay in debt to them, for which they can charge high interest rates. A client who has an optimistic plan for the future will find actual pleasure in trying to become debt-free. The banks want to keep us depressed so that we will not try. And corporations that sell us stuff want us to buy everything now, because the item or service might not be available later; to wait is to lose. In short, many large corporations want us to be dissatisfied, even desperate, servants rather than happy customers.

Manipulating the lives of customers is not what evolutionary scientists call an “evolutionary stable strategy.” That is, this way of doing things is “invasible”: a business or corporation that people liked would soon displace the ones that people do not like, all other things being equal. However, all other things are not equal. The corporations that invest heavily in entrapping and demeaning customers are so large that they dominate the market. To convince yourself of this, just try starting a friendly corporation. I genuinely hope you succeed. Good luck! And remember, my call is very important to you.

Summer Travel: A Brief Warning

Summer travel season is upon us. When I travel, I am going to avoid Super 8. My worst experience ever, out of at least a hundred nights on the road, was at a Super 8 in 2014 where they gave me a smoking room despite my reserving a nonsmoking room; the linens were dirty; the manager's wife walked in on me in the shower; the A/C didn't work. All at the same time. I have had similar, but not as bad, experiences at other Super 8 motels. The worst was that Wyndham Rewards took the manager's side and told me that I had no right to complain to them.

Wyndham Rewards manages not only Super 8 but also

• Days Inn
• Hawthorn
• HoJo (Howard Johnson)
• Knight's Inn
• Microtel
• Ramada
• Travelodge
• Wingate
• Wyndham

At Super 8, and perhaps the others, the customer is always wrong. Too bad, because most of my Super 8 stays were OK. But the only ones that are OK are the ones whose managers take it upon themselves to aspire to high quality; neither the Super 8 corporation nor Wyndham Rewards appear to require any standards of quality from them.

In many cases, natural selection favors those animals (including humans) who practice reciprocity. This results in win-win situations, with (in an economic system) both the customer and manager are happy. But when a corporation is very big, it can treat consumers like dirt and get away with it. We all know of major financial institutions that have done this. It appears that Super 8 and related motel chains are another example. They have made the form of natural selection known as consumer opinion useless.

All one can do is to publish one’s experiences and hope that the market will gradually change. I published a review of this Super 8 on the Consumer Affairs website last year. It has had 71668 views and 29 helpful votes. In today’s online world, consumers might be able to get back a little bit of their power.

Have an altruistic new year!

Oh, no! Not another essay about altruism! But I have a couple of ideas to share with you about what might be the most important evolutionary adaptation of the human species.

The first regards radio interview I heard recently. The interviewee was a man who had published a major article about how our economic system saps the middle class and oppresses the poor while making the rich richer. He made specific reference to raising the minimum wage. Almost all recent economic growth has gone to the now famous top one percent; if that growth had, instead, gone to the average worker in the form of a higher minimum wage, each worker would earn $20,000 a year more—and this would bring back a healthy middle class.

A caller then made a point about altruism (he didn’t use the term) as a resource. He said that for him to pay his workers higher wages than other companies was a good investment: he gets the better workers, who are more productive, and keeps them longer, lowering the costs of training, etc. But then he said he was opposed to raising the minimum wage because then employers would be forced to treat their employees right—something that he saw as his special niche.

Leave it to an American businessman (who sounds like he is nicer than most) to turn altruism into something entirely selfish, the purpose of which is to make him rich. But this is better than no altruism at all.

The second point is that you can’t legislate altruism.

In recent years in Oklahoma, new road signs have appeared. When there are lane closures on turnpikes and interstates, orange signs proclaim “State law merge now” almost a half mile back from the place where the lanes merge. The reason it became necessary for such a state law is that some altruistic and courteous drivers would merge early, while the demonic and selfish ones would wait until the last few meters and crowd in, not only gaining them a direct advantage but pushing the courteous drivers even further back. Simple common-sense courtesy would have made such a law unnecessary.

Oklahoma does not have big mountains, but Idaho does. When I drove through Idaho last summer, I saw road signs on steep portions of two-lane highways: “State law slow vehicles pull over when three vehicles following.” For most drivers this is common sense, but a few selfish drivers will hold up huge lines of traffic as they chug slowly along the mountain roads. This is a new twist on the old “Keep right except to pass” policy for four-lane highways. Hundreds of times during my travels I have had to put on my brakes uphill as a truck going 51 miles per hour pulls out immediately and dangerously in front of me to pass another truck going 50 in a 75 mile per hour zone. Many truckers consider the interstate highways to be theirs, not the property of the American people.

It is impossible to translate all the common sense principles of courtesy and altruism into laws. Altruism is an instinct. We all know its subconscious dictates. But it is impossible to codify them into laws that cover every detail. And it is not merely a matter of writing laws. Selfish people can ignore a law that dictates some minor component of altruism unless the penalty is sufficiently steep.

Trusting altruism in society seems hopelessly naïve but there is no realistic alternative.

Frugality and the Market

I just returned from a long and wonderful journey through ten states. I saw a lot of ecology and evolution and I want to tell you all about it in upcoming essays. Meanwhile I will post this general essay until I can get the new ones written. On this long journey, I ate out a lot. I was more frugal than most travelers but less frugal than I am when at home. Which leads to the topic of this essay.

I am almost off the charts for being frugal in my use of energy and my consumption of processed materials. I am not a Scrooge; I actually enjoy frugality—I greatly enjoy the few things I spend money on, as well as the free things like taking a walk with my wife.

For example, I just do not eat out very often. Sometimes, as I noted in a recent blog essay, my frugality has made me a target for people who, perhaps with religious motivations, want to disrespect me for the carefulness with which I treat what they consider to be God’s creation.

But when I do eat out, I like having variety to choose from. I will admit that I have a hard time telling Cheesecake Factory apart from Applebee’s, but I wouldn’t want my only choice to be sushi—even though I love the new sushi restaurant in Tulsa (Sushi House, on Lewis near 71^st) very much.

If everyone lived like me, however, the bottom would drop out of the restaurant business. Tulsa would have a couple of sushi places, a Japanese steakhouse, Marley’s Pizzeria, India Palace, and that’s about it. The very diversity of market experiences that I enjoy depends on people living the way I think they shouldn’t.

I’m not too worried. If America goes frugal (which is about as likely as the sun going supernova next year), the loss of market diversity would be a small price to pay for the promotion of a healthy local economy full of farmer’s markets, ecological sustainability, and personal financial responsibility. I find fast food establishments to be useful on rare occasions, but if they all closed up I wouldn’t be too upset. Meanwhile I will continue to enjoy, on rare but memorable occasions, the diversity of restaurant food that is made possible by people who are too busy eating out to read this blog.

Natural Selection of Economic Models

We are now closing the year 2011, which has been remarkably like 2010. Continued global warming, continued opposition to the teaching of evolution and global warming, continued economic uncertainty, and another year with a Congress that considers its sole function to be partisan strife.

But one of these years, enormous changes will have to come. As economist Kenneth Boulding pointed out decades ago, and as environmental entrepreneur Paul Gilding has pointed out in his 2011 book The Great Disruption, growth cannot continue forever in a finite world. Gilding says that our current economic system will collapse, since it depends totally on economic growth. It will have to be replaced by an equilibrium economy. Gilding points out that this inevitable transition will not occur smoothly or gradually. At some point, a critical mass of people will realize that, in a finite world in which global warming will disrupt our lives, we have to change. Many of us realize this already; and we are a rapidly growing minority. The change will be disruptive, since entire industries (such as coal and oil) have refused to admit that we are about to collide with natural ecological limits; they will fight to keep people not just using but wasting natural resources. Big corporations will continue to demand government bailouts for their own business mistakes. They preach capitalism but demand socialism. The resulting chaos, in a world with natural disasters and scarce food, will not be pretty. One of these years—it might be 2012—will make 2011 seem like a very uneventful year.

Gilding says that we will emerge from the chaos with a new and sustainable economic system. He says that it is the next stage of human evolution. When I first read this, I assumed that he simply did not know what evolution was. But after I had read more of his book, I could see that he may be right. He did not mean biological evolution. He meant cultural evolution—some memes are propagated more than others. I have written about this process in books. But after reading Gilding’s book, I found a new example of cultural evolution: the economy.

The economy consists of many memes, which include: We have to keep growing to avoid collapse; we have to acquire ever more stuff in order to be happy; since the economy will always grow, we can put ourselves deeply into debt; ecological issues are something that we can take care of someday when we are all rich. These are the old, destructive memes that have brought our economy to the brink of disaster. But there are other economic memes: Our economy can be sustainable; happiness does not require lots of stuff; we can live within our means; we need to fit our economy into ecological limits now. There are millions of people (not enough millions) who believe this second set of memes; and there are hundreds of companies that abide by them. That is, in the world of economic memes, there is diversity.

And then along comes catastrophic natural selection: an economic collapse. If we were all hypnotized by consumerism, then this collapse would mean extinction. However, natural selection will in this case favor the sustainability memes, which already constitute a significant minority of the memetic variation in our population. Yes, there will be an enormous collapse; but many individuals and corporations are at least partly ready for it. There are, for example, hundreds of alternative energy companies ready to fill the void that will be left by the downfall of the petroleum industry.

This sounds like good news. I wish I could believe it, but I believe that political conservatives will prevent us from making enough changes to survive the coming collapse; they will suppress the solutions. The CEOs of financial corporations, for example, want to keep us in debt rather than to let us live without owing them money. Like a bunch of walnut trees suppressing other plant species by poisoning the forest with juglones (a process known as allelopathy), these CEOs are suppressing the sustainability memes. But they cannot wipe them out. At some point, a sustainable world may emerge, by the process of cultural evolution.

On this last day of the year, we sigh in relief that we have not yet fallen into disaster. We look forward to a new year in which, if we are lucky, the memes of sustainability will have a chance to make progress, and in which the collapse will not yet occur. If we are lucky.

Altruism: The Third Alternative for Ecology and Evolution

Consider the following to be my holiday message to you. It is adapted from an essay I wrote for my website.

I recently read a book entitled The Penguin and the Leviathan, by Yochai Benkler, a leading scholar in business research. I have read many books about altruism, many of them by scientists such as Frans deWaal (The Age of Empathy), Dacher Keltner (Born to Be Good), and Martin Nowak (Super Cooperators). These books repeatedly make the point that individuals within animal species, individual humans, and businesses can profit from being nice and generous to others. Altruism, rather than violent competition, is the most important component of “the law of the jungle.” Just ask any of the chimps that deWaal has studied. The way to the top is primarily through cooperation, not violent competition. Even apes understand this. Benkler’s book is published by Crown Business, a division of a major New York publisher. Its intended audience is not science buffs but business leaders. In the title, the Penguin is Tux, the icon of Linux, whose business model is cooperation rather than top-down command, and the Leviathan is the cynical view of life presented centuries ago by Thomas Hobbes.

Benkler, though not a scientist, has done a very good job of summarizing the evolutionary science of altruism. But the thing that opened my eyes the most was that Benkler presented altruism as a third alternative for how a society could operate. The other two ways are state control and free market. We usually think that these are our only two choices. But, as Benkler explains, this is not true.

Both state control (as exemplified by dictators on the political right or the political left) and free market economics operate from the assumption that humans are fundamentally selfish. State control attempts to force people to not be selfish. The free market tries to capitalize upon those utterly selfish economic machines known as humans. But Benkler points out that altruism is a fundamental instinct of the human mind. As Michael Shermer said, it feels good to be good; humans enjoy being altruistic. Altruism motivates much of what we do.

Our only hope, from Benkler’s viewpoint, is to build our society and economic system in a way that facilitates altruism. Governments should not try to solve all social and economic problems by law and by creating big agencies; governments should be (in my words) conduits of the altruism that already exists in people’s minds. Governments should be altruism enablers. Similarly businesses should embrace altruism, appealing to their customers’ instincts to want to create a better world for everybody. Customers are selfish, but also altruistic. Customers are increasingly offended by corporations that display conspicuous selfishness; that assume the customers are merely selfish; or that use little greenwashing gimmicks to make themselves look environmentally friendly or socially altruistic. We customers are not stupid, nor are we totally selfish. We are (some of us more than others) partly altruistic and we expect our governments and businesses to also be altruistic.

Benkler makes the point that right now, when dictatorships are falling and the free market has proven ineffective enough that it has shaken the very faith of Alan Greenspan himself, is the time when altruism has a chance to influence the very structure of the economy and government. Governments and business CEOs have been good only at spending money, with disastrous consequences that nobody can ignore any longer.

Altruism, perhaps the greatest gift of evolution, is also the only way to solve our environmental problems. Neither of the other alternatives, government fiat or the profit motive by itself, have significantly deflected our worldwide momentum toward ecological disaster.

Joy to the world? Altruism? Maybe.