Cooperation in the Air
When the Kyoto Protocol took effect in 141 other nations this month, it had no effect whatsoever on the United States, much to the glee of business interests. That frees up the U.S. to go on being the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world while it sells clean-air technologies to countries that are forced to comply. It’s a win-win for the American economy.
Except that, surprisingly, some cities are teaming up to do the right thing even though it’s not in their best economic interest. This month, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels began traveling across the country to get cities to adopt the terms of the Kyoto treaty. Even though it isn’t clear how much legal authority cities have to regulate pollution, mayors of 10 cities, including Portland, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and, of course, Santa Monica, have signed up.
It’s easy to mock such campaigns as naive. After all, as Detroit automakers recently pointed out in a federal court challenge to a California law seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, even if every automobile in the state were eliminated, California acting alone would have no effect on global climate change. Further, these cities could be placing themselves at an economic disadvantage to cities that take no action. Social science, however, suggests that such homespun efforts are not pointless.
Conventional wisdom holds that natural selection has over billions of years mostly rewarded creatures that acted out of narrowly defined self-interest. However, since the 1980s, game theorists and evolutionary biologists have shown that cooperation can be crucial to success for many species, which do better by allying in colonies and acting in the joint interest of the group.
The payoff from opportunism, many researchers now say, tends to diminish dramatically over the long term. As Robert Axelrod of the University of Michigan has shown, for instance, small cadres of “cooperators” often can increase their numbers and take over a larger population that is practicing entirely self-interested strategies. In other words, your kindergarten teacher was right: Cooperation really is better than selfishness.
