Debunking Greed

I'm a graduate of a Christian college where professors were strong on altruism. In economics I learned Adam Smith's philosophy based on what we understood as greed. Being a rebel, I bought the idea. I used to enjoy debunking altruism in college bull sessions.

"Even that toasted black hen," I used say to a dedicated self-giving friend, "really was preserving her own genetic code in her chicks when she sat still in the face of a fast approaching prairie fire, and died instead of flying away." I was referring to the famous story of the farmer who kicked a lump of ashes, the burned body of a mother hen, and uncovered a nest of peeping unsinged baby chicks. Her singed wings were enough protection to save her young. They were her resurrected life. She really was following a self-serving motivation to give her life, so I argued.

So in college I agreed greed is good. It's still dominant 50 years later in our culture and business practices. But now, in the last ten years, this conventional understanding from Adam Smith's 1776 book, Wealth of Nations, is no longer accepted by many research minded economists. There has been an awesome change in economic philosophy at the most scholarly levels. This debunking of greed needs to trickle down.

My son told me to search on line for a ten-minute video entitled "What Motivates Us." It's easy to find. Using researched documentation, the cute animated cartoon convincingly demonstrates we aren't motivated as much by greed or even self interest as by factors such as purposeful mission, autonomy, preservation of our human family and community, and complex challenges.

Tasks involving these factors aren't enhanced by incentive pay or exorbitant CEO compensation. Inserting the greed incentive into the mix usually lowers accomplishment. Surprising, isn't it? When tasks are cognitively challenging, requiring teamwork and a sense of mission for the benefit of others, incentive pay actually reduces work quality and output. "Whoa," I thought when I first saw this short video, "I'm catching a case of cognitive dissonance."

Well, self-interest does have a place. I see it all over this back 40, our Greenwood Farm. Weeds compete with my Garrison grass and alfalfa for germination and root room. Goose couples compete with each other for prime nesting habitat. And everyone gains with the competition, except the weeds.

But we human managers of this ground have decided greed and self-interest, while clearly credible and powerful, are not our prime motivators. If we were interested in maximizing profit per acre, we would have been much better off buying a parcel of more productive soil. The ground itself cries out for another motivation. How can we resurrect the sterile soil here to best sustain life for human benefit again after years of declining production in conventional farming? Our thinking is not just for next year's profit, but sustainable benefits for the next 10 or 100 or more years. And for this, we are in step with others in Big Horn County.

So the best question is what to do with land that cannot facilitate a greed motivation. Will altruism work here? Who would work here with this motivation?

There are lots of such folks around. For example, check out the Wellknown Buffalo Center at Garryowen. Like us, this summer they are having a group of college students volunteering to get their hands dirty working to make idealism become reality. They are doing summer school with Crow language immersion, gardening, and traditional skills of the Apsaalooke. Ours are coming to learn from our small steps toward sustainable living here on the back 40. This summer will see them working on experimental "earthship" building construction, using discarded tires and rammed earth, helping with farming, learning with folks in Big Horn County.

Like the mother hen, our motivation is preservation and life for our family, the human family. We want our farming practices to look forward to the best ways of not just feeding human beings for survival, but living productive lives in respectful coexistence with others of our kind, with the land and with all creatures great and small. Our tasks are small and not a significant challenge to our economic culture of greed. But new economic research supports our efforts. Together we can chart a better way toward a stronger and more sustainable future for our nation and humankind.

Use this link for the video "what motivates us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&playnext_from=TL&videos=qOyhHX6kxN4

A scholarly review of research on a similar vein:

Vailancourt Rosenau, Pauline (2006) "Is Economic Theory Wrong About Human Nature?," Journal of Economic and Social Policy: Vol.10: Iss. 2, Article 4.

Available at: http://epubs.scu.edu.au/jesp/vol10/iss2/4

This website is good on down-to-earth research-based information debunking popular politically correct ideas, this one on the myth that greed is good:

http://makethemaccountable.com/myth/GreedIsGood.htm

Here's some writing from the above website:

The two books by Adam Smith upon which our modern cultural value of greed is supposedly based:

Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations, 1776

Smith, Ibid: Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1790

A scholarly book on the subject, in reality it demonstrates that Adam Smith was not definitive regarding his analysis of self interest in economics as a contributor to democracy:

Kenneth Lux, Adam Smith's Mistake: How a Moral Philosopher Invented Economics and Ended Morality (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1990)

Scientific studies are proving that cooperation is a built-in human trait

Brain scans show why we love cooperating MakeThemAccountable.com

Last Updated: 2002-07-17 13:09:43 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Alison McCook

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New research reveals why people often cooperate with each other, even when it is not necessarily to their advantage to do so.

A group of researchers based at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, found that when a woman is involved in a situation where she is cooperating with someone else, she experiences activation in brain areas that are also activated by "rewards" such as food, money and drugs.

This indicates that our bodies may have been somehow programmed to "tag cooperation as rewarding," study author Dr. Gregory S. Berns told Reuters Health.

"Which is good, because it probably keeps the social fabric of society together," he added…

[The truth is, when you get past all the hate rhetoric, that millions of years of evolution have made us social beings. We lived in tribes for millions of years, and I assure you that members of a tribe didn't have a greed-is-good mentality. I'm no expert, but what I've read suggests that in a tribal environment generosity was admired and rewarded. And one didn't become a chief simply by being the strongest. An aspirant for chiefdom had to build coalitions of supporters, had to be willing to listen to the wisdom of the elders, and was most likely to become and remain chief if he was known as a brave hunter and warrior, but also as a generous person.]

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David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org