The main problem is that Bregman vacillates between two different claims — whether humankind is basically good, and whether humankind is basically collectivist — and sometimes even treats them as the same, more or less identifying being good with being collectivist. In many ways what he wants to prove is the second, because, as a socialist, he wants to show that free-market economic theories are based on false assumptions about how people would behave. But that has nothing to do with what, for example, the Milgram experiment is meant to show, which is how easily our own moral compass can be swayed by the desire to be co-operative. So, I find the sections where Bregman discusses social psychology experiments of this kind to be paradoxically the strongest and at the same time the weakest in the book, admiring the trouble Bregman has gone to to research the source material, but at the same time concerned that he is chasing a red herring.

Does Bregman actually prove that people do not behave as homo economicus? Not really. At best he proves that nomadic tribes do not behave like this. In fact, he actually seems to concede that in agricultural and post-agricultural societies they DO behave like this, laying the blame on that great socialist bug-bear “private property”. At the same time he seems to concede that actually things are much better than we might believe if we looked at the news. Somehow our social and economic arrangements do not get any credit for this. But then he also introduces the ‘nocebo’ effect to explain why things seem worse than they really are. But the ‘nocebo’ effect does NOT explain this. If it explains anything, it explains why they are worse than they might be. The ‘nocebo’ effect, like its opposite the placebo effect, is a REAL effect. It basically says that people DO behave in these ways, but that it is not due to their inherent nature. At the end of the day, he actually seems to give contradictory answers to whether the human behaviour that we see is actually good or bad. At best, he says that when it is bad it is not due to ‘human nature’. This kind of reasoning is on shaky ground, as it only really needs one example, which for Bregman is mainly that of nomadic tribes, to show that it is not ‘human nature’ to behave in these ways. It is the old Marxist idea of “primitive communism” resurrected.

Great! Thanks for your comment.

Thanks for dropping by and for your very kind comment! Looking forward to further exchanges.