Is Equality Passe? Homo Recipro cans and the Future of Egalitarian Politics Samuel Bowles and Herb ert Gintis Department of Economics University of Massachusetts Amherst, Massachusetts, 01003 Octob er 19, 1998 A man ought to b e a friend to his friend and repay gift with gift. People should meet smiles with smiles and lies with treachery. From The Edda, a 13th century collection of Norse epic verse. 1 Is Equality Passe? We think not. The welfare state is in trouble not b ecause sel shness is ram- pant (it is not), but b ecause many egalitarian programs no longer evoke, and sometimes now o end, deeply held notions of fairness, encompassing b oth recipro city and generosity, but stopping far short of unconditional altruism towards the less well o . Recasting egalitarianism to tap these sentiments should b e high on the agenda of those who worry ab out the human toll b eing taken bypoverty, inequality, and insecurity in the United States and in the world. The United States public remains deeply committed to helping those in need. In 1991 and ABC/WP p oll found that twice as many were \willing to pay higher taxes" to \reduce poverty" as were opp osed. In 1995 61% expressed willingness to pay more taxes to \provide job training and public service jobs for p eople on welfare so that they can get o welfare." (Weaver, Shapiro and Jacobs 1995). Almost three quarters of those surveyed by Time To b e the basis of a symp osium in the Boston Review,Fall 1998. Our Recasting Egal- itarianism: New Rules for Markets, States, and Communities (London: Verso, 1998) de- velops these ideas in greater depth. Wewould like to thank Chris Bo ehm, Rob Boyd, Josh Cohen, SteveFarkas, Ernst Fehr, Christina Fong, Nancy Folbre, Kristin Hawkes, Martin Gilens, Rob ert Shapiro, Elisab eth Wo o d and Erik Wright for help, and the MacArthur foundation for nancial supp ort. 1 Is EqualityPasse? 2 Magazine in 1991 agreed (more than half of them \completely") with the statement: \The government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep." Many however think that p olicies to pursue these ob jectives are either ine ective or unfair. In a 1995 CBS/NYT survey, for example, 89% sup- p orted a mandated work requirement for those on welfare. It is thus not surprising that egalitarian programs have b een cut even as increases in mea- sured inequality of b efore tax and transfer income have taken place. For the most part voters have resp onded with approval rather than resistance. Egalitarians now defend their programs on moral and empirical grounds that many,even among the less well o , nd uncomp elling. In the face of a hostile public, many egalitarians have b ecome soured on what they consider to b e a sel sh electorate that identi es with materialistic middle-class values and is indi erent to the plight of the less fortunate. We b elieve this p essimism is fundamentally misdirected. It misunder- stands not only the reasons for opp osition to egalitarian programs, but the powerful sentiments supp orting them. It is not self interest that opp oses the welfare state, nor is it unconditional generosity that supp orts it. We will show that there is a solid foundation for co op eration and sharing in two basic human motives which we term strong reciprocity and basic needs generos- ity, that hostility to contemp orary forms of egalitarianism is not evidence against that deep foundation, but evidence for it, and that new egalitarian initiatives are fully compatible with that foundation. Understanding the predicament of egalitarian p olitics to daythus requires a reconsideration of Homo economicus, the unremittingly sel sh prototyp e whose aso cial prop ensities have provided the starting p oint for delib erations on constitutions and p olicies from Thomas Hobb es to the current debate on welfare reform. We do not wish to replace the textb o ok Homo, however, with a cardb oard-cutout altruist, an equally one-dimensional actor uncon- ditionally willing to make p ersonally costly contributions to others. While these motives are much admired by many advo cates of the welfare state, we doubt that unconditional altruism explains its success, nor do es its ab- sence explain our current malaise. In exp eriments and surveys p eople are not stingy, but their generosity is conditional. Moreover, they distinguish among the go o ds and services to b e distributed, favoring those which meet basic needs, and among the recipients themselves, favoring those thought to be \deserving." Strong recipro city, along with basic needs generosity, not unconditional altruism, b etter explains the motivations that undergird egalitarian p olitics. By strong recipro citywe mean a prop ensity to cooper- ate and share with others similarly disp osed, even at p ersonal cost, and a Octob er 19, 1998 Is EqualityPasse? 3 willingness to punish those who violate co op erative and other so cial norms, even when punishing is p ersonally costly. We call a p erson acting this way Homo reciprocans. Homo reciprocans cares ab out the well-b eing of others and ab out the pro cesses determining outcomes|whether they are fair, for example, or violate a so cial norm. He di ers in this from the self-regarding and outcome oriented Homo economicus. We see Homo reciprocans at work in Chicago's neighb orho o ds, in a recent study (Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls 1997) that do cumented a widespread willingness to intervene with co- residents to discourage truancy, public disorders and antiso cial b ehaviors, as well as the dramatic impact of this \collective ecacy" on community safety and amenities. Homo reciprocans is not committed to the abstract goal of equal out- comes, but rather to a rough balancing out of burdens and rewards. In earlier times|when, for example, an individual's conventional claim on material resources was conditioned by noble birth or divine origin|what counted as \balancing out" might entail highly unequal comfort and wealth. But, as we will see, in the absence of sp eci c counter-claims, mo dern forms of recipro city often take equal division as a reference p oint. We do not wish to banish Homo economicus,however. The evidence we intro duce shows that a substantial fraction of individuals consistently follow self-regarding precepts. Moreover most individuals app ear to draw up on a rep ertoire of contrasting b ehaviors: whether one acts sel shly or generously dep ends as much on the situation as the p erson. The fact that Homo eco- nomicus is alive and well (if often in the minority) is good news, not bad, as p eople often rely on aso cial individualism to undermine so cially harm- ful forms of collusion ranging from price- xing to ethnic violence. Pure altruists also doubtless exist and make imp ortant contributions to so cial life. In short, egalitarian p olicy-making, no less than the grand pro jects of constitutional design, risk irrelevance if they ignore the irreducible hetero- geneity of human motivations. The problem of institutional design is not, as the classical economists thought, that sel sh individuals be induced to interact in ways pro ducing desirable aggregate outcomes, but rather that a mix of motives|sel sh, recipro cal, altruistic and spiteful|interact in ways that prevent the sel sh from exploiting the generous and hence unraveling co op eration when it is b ene cial. The strong recipro city of Homo reciprocans go es considerably beyond those co op erative b ehaviors that can b e fully accounted for in terms of the self-regarding, outcome oriented motives that are the de ning characteris- tics of Homo economicus. We call these self-interested forms of co op era- tion `weak recipro city.' Examples include market exchange and co op eration Octob er 19, 1998 Is EqualityPasse? 4 enforced by tit-for-tat b ehavior|what biologists call `recipro cal altruism.' Such actions are costly to the giver but in fact are self-interested b ecause they involve future repayment. Strong recipro city, like the biologists' con- cept of altruism, imp oses costs on Homo reciprocans without prosp ect of repayment. Yet unlike the vernacular usage of altruism, it is neither uncon- ditional nor necessarily motivated by go o d will towards the recipient. Students of cultural and biological evolution have long wondered how individually costly but so cially b ene cial traits, such as altruism, might evolve in comp etition with genetically and economically rewarded sel sh traits. Like altruism toward strangers, strong recipro citythus represents an evolutionary puzzle, one that we will seek to unravel. But rst we will show that Homo reciprocans is indeed among the dramatis personae in to day's p olitical arena, and most likely has b een for the last hundred thousand years. 2 The Legacy of a Hundred Thousand Years of Sharing Other than unconditional altruism, there are two distinct reasons why p eo- ple might supp ort egalitarian p olicies. First, many egalitarian programs are forms of so cial insurance that will b e supp orted even by those who b elieve they will probably pay in more than their exp ected claims over a lifetime. Included among these are unemployment and health insurance, and more broadly, the various so cial programs that soften the blows during the ro cky p erio ds that p eople exp erience in the course of their lives. Even the se- curely rich supp ort amelioration of the conditions of the p o or on prudential grounds.