#24 Better than beavers

Or, how social well-being is more than the pursuit of your own interest.

Hi all,

I still have a no-blog period (while working and swimming), so there is no extensive newsletter. However, I want to share an essay I wrote for Vrij Nederland (in Dutch) a few weeks ago. The main message is based on this article from Wilson and Snower on multilevel well-being: optimising well-being is not maximising the sum of each individual’s welfare, but to have a collective well-being, we also need to sacrifice something for the common good. Something we seemed to have forgotten.

Enjoy.

Beavers

The beaver was nearly extinct in Europe due to its popular pelt and reportedly edible meat. However, beavers were missed as they are seen as engineers of waterways necessary for maintaining and altering ecosystems in nature reserves. After being absent for 150 years, beavers were reintroduced in the Netherlands in 1988. While beavers do what beavers do, society benefits from it, at least until their population becomes too large. Then, damage to dikes can occur, too many trees are gnawed, and areas can flood where that is undesirable. In Argentina, they have experience with this. In 1946, Argentine military personnel saw their northern neighbours earning good money from the beaver fur trade. To capitalize on this, they relocated ten pairs of beavers to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of Argentina, aiming to populate the area and start the fur trade. The beaver population became a great success, so much so that they caused significant ecological damage. Now, there is an effort to eradicate them. The lack of natural predators and favourable living conditions led them to ruin their own habitat.

Just Like Humans

Drawing a parallel to the human species from this Argentine example isn't hard. All natural enemies humanity had have been effectively neutralized over the past centuries. Not because we are more vital as a species but because we can collaborate well. Something happened during human evolution that resulted in a quantum leap in cooperation, our evolutionary advantage. This "something" was essentially social control, meaning that group members could reward prosocial behaviour and punish the antisocial behaviour of other members. Our distant ancestors found ways to suppress bullying and other disruptive, selfish behaviour within small groups. Due to our superior ability to collaborate, form communities, adapt in groups to any situation, and and preserve and build upon knowledge, we have effectively colonised this planet. The acceleration in colonization since the Industrial Revolution has transformed this collective success into a story based on individual actions. The collective story is rarely heard anymore.

The individual story has become the dominant economic success narrative. Referring to Adam Smith's famous quote from The Wealth of Nations ("It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their interest."), the success of the human species is told as a story of individual actions. Self-interest, not the collective interest, leads to societal wealth and forms the basis of our society: we are responsible for our success and misfortune. We view this success (or misfortune) primarily based on material values: what is our income, how do we live, and what can we buy? The market is central as a happiness machine; anonymous transactions increase prosperity, where price formation is the objective translation of our preferences. From this worldview, it is only logical that deregulation and market forces still dominate. After all, anything that hinders individual free action is thought to reduce prosperity. Neoliberal worldviews lead to a society where those with the most economic power win. On a personal level, if you feel you can belong to that group, and for the strongest, this is a fantastic idea. The winners of this system are praised for their ingenuity. Billionaires like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are almost idolized: individual intellect makes the difference, and the fruits of success belong to the winner. It doesn't matter that this success is based on collective or public knowledge because many people cooperated with these entrepreneurs from the start. Ownership determines the winner.

Solutions Matching This Idea of Progress

Back to the beavers. From an ecological perspective, we are not much different from those beavers in Patagonia if we only act out of self-interest. But on a global scale. After all, those beavers had a fantastic time: no natural enemies, and what do they care if the ecosystem they swim in is turned upside down; as long as there is enough to eat and gnaw on, there is no problem, right? And that is exactly how we behave, even though we know better. A reproach that cannot be made to the beavers. Few people still deny climate problems or biodiversity loss. We firmly believe in individual solutions to these sustainability problems in line with our worldview. Everything will be fine if we now use less energy or handle resources more efficiently. But we forget the system and the collective. The result is not that we use less energy or resources. The effect is that, although we are more efficient, we use more resources and energy. This phenomenon is known as the “Jevons paradox,” named after the 19th-century scientist who first described this phenomenon. We do so because it becomes cheaper to drive larger cars due to the increased efficiency of the combustion engine. Because the electrification of transport, from e-bikes and electric scooters to fat bikes, becomes affordable for everyone, we end up using more energy. Currently, more than one in two Dutch people ride an electric bike. We see this in everything we do to make energy and resource use more efficient. The entire energy transition has, therefore, not begun. On a global scale, renewable energy is primarily an addition to the energy supply rather than a replacement: addition instead of transition. Innovation, solely from an individual perspective, creates an economy that does not become more sustainable.

The Difference Between Individual and Collective Interest

We still pursue our interests without real attention to the collective. Although self-interest stimulates innovation and prosperity, selfishness cannibalizes the collective. Economist Dennis Snower and biologist David Sloan Wilson argue in a recent article that we must change the entire economic foundation. They suggest we need to move away from thinking only from the individual. Optimizing prosperity in a country by analyzing it as an anonymized process of people acting rationally as atoms is inherently insufficient. Humans are social beings; most transactions are not anonymous but embedded in social relationships and shaped by social norms and values. We deal with different levels in an economy where different optimal behaviours apply, varying by species. From beehives and ant colonies functioning in extreme interdependence to solitary species like otters, pandas, and sea turtles. At the lowest level, the level from which economic science abstracts everything, pursuing self-interest is still the most logical strategy. But to advance as a collective, something must be sacrificed: prosocial behavior because the collective interest is seen, or sanctions imposed by the collective to discipline the individual, that is what is needed. The stronger the group code, the stronger the collective. Naturally, we understand that as humans: that’s why we have laws and regulations. But something is lacking in our behaviour.

Boundaries

The question we must always ask ourselves is not only whether we individually do the right thing but whether we collectively contribute to the well-being of our communities and the planet. This turns out to be a difficult question. Much of that 'doing good' starts and ends with the individual. Take the moral ambition from Rutger Bregman's latest book, with the best intentions, but from a limited individual perspective, challenging an individual's moral ambition and translating that only to the work someone does. Of course, that's good, but not good enough. Some people don't have that choice (because they need a job to make ends meet), but we can contribute to the collective in many more ways. In all our roles – consumer, family, educator, employee, voter, friend – we can choose our role. For example, we can align our voting behaviour not with what benefits us but with what benefits the collective. We can think better about the consequences of what we buy and whether we need to buy something. We can help others, stimulate, and organize outside the market and government, just for all of us. The collective interest is ultimately something we shape ourselves. In these examples, we give up nothing. It's an open-ended doing good for a cause, like climate change or saving biodiversity. The problem is that these goals have limits: we know we still have the budget for greenhouse gas emissions, and we see the state of biodiversity loss. This is the next task for the collective: to contribute to setting boundaries and organizing from there. That is also the most significant challenge because it is difficult in many Western countries. While we have known the main contribution to the nitrogen crisis for years, we collectively fail to solve it correctly because we have defined individual interests so that no one should be worse off.

Organizing Collective Interests

The big question now is: if we already recognize this collective interest in boundaries, how can we organize it? Unfortunately, there is no ready-made solution. However, it is crystal clear that there need to be institutions that guard these boundaries.

We can look again at Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, who developed several core design principles to shape cooperation (in her case, around common or shared natural resources like water, forests, or fisheries). This starts with clearly defining the group involved, clarifying agreements about balancing collective and individual interests and ensuring good relationships with other groups. We can still use these principles, but the problems begin here. Often, we lack a clear group in the decision-making process; even a nation-state is sometimes not the right group of stakeholders, such as in tackling climate change. The interests of subgroups (like farmers) are magnified by individual loss aversion, while the interests of others, such as future generations, are almost absent. At various levels, subgroups emerge that do not have the same power and influence. Better organizing is not strictly a political task but a social participation task. It can be shaped by citizens' councils and other forms of more active citizen and resident participation.

We rarely make explicit agreements about the collective versus individual interest, which Ostrom argues is necessary for successful governance. That would certainly help. For example, if we could adopt Rawls' principles of justice in advance to set guidelines for handling distribution issues, it would be easier to enforce prosocial behaviour. This would mean that we decide the rules on how to (distributional) policy choices, where we do not know our positions in advance. The question of fairness is then in the policy debate separated from special interests (and lobbies) particular policy questions. Currently, we often cannot rely on general agreements about who should give up what and when.

But lastly, and probably most importantly, is rediscovering human success in cooperation for the collective good. That is the task for all of us: how can we contribute to that collective good in everything we do and are? What is the prosocial goal that elevates us above mere survival?

An Embedded Economy: Better Beavers

In addition to "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith wrote "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." This lesser-read work is more relevant in our time. Smith discusses rules of life that arise from the human capacity for empathy. He argues that people should strive for their happiness and well-being, but this must be balanced with the interests of others. Social interactions and the norms and values of society shape moral actions. It is not about unbridled self-interest but virtues like benevolence, justice, and self-control. Only then can individual actions be embedded correctly in society within the limits of nature. As Snower and Wilson propose, the pursuit of self-interest is limited by the collective interest. People are not atoms making decisions in isolation. We are embedded in social relationships.

Just as with the beavers in Tierra del Fuego, it ends for humans if we only pursue our own or small group's interests. True cooperation, according to the principles of Elinor Ostrom, can lead to an economy that promotes restoration and collectivity: an economy where social relationships within the boundaries of nature determine our actions. This is a collective challenge and, for some, even a collective desire.

It is not about what we do right or wrong as individuals but about acting rightly together. Or, to quote Adam Smith from "The Theory of Moral Sentiments": "Man naturally desires not only to be loved but to be lovely." This can only happen if we sometimes subordinate our self-interest, and this starts with those who now have the luxury of more than enough.

And that is us.