From Darwinian Markets: Economist Paul Seabright on how homo sapiens evolved into homo economicus:
It’s precisely because tunnel vision can have dangerous consequences — environmental degradation, spiraling military expenditures — that it’s clearly desirable that people should be thinking out of the box a bit, or at least out of the tunnel. It doesn’t follow from this that all kinds of non-tunnel thinking are constructive. I’m struck by the work of some of the anti-globalization protesters, which I think has been admirably out-of-the-tunnel in terms of motivation, but naively ill-informed about how the world economy works in many other respects. You get people campaigning against investment by multinational companies in some poor countries on the gorunds that they’re only paying $5 a day, when the people they’re employing would otherwise be working at between $1 and $2 a day. Now, you may say “we wish the multinationals paid them $10 a day,” but to say that the multinationals have no business to be there unless they’re paying people $10 a day is a spectacularly stupid and self-defeating campaign platform. You really damage an awful lot of people. There has been evidence that some NGO campaigns against child labor, for instance, have led to children being laid off and left in much worse situations.
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I have friends in the anti-globalization movement who get thrilled when a big demonstration imposes humiliation on some multinational or Starbucks windows get smashed. It’s the thrill of the chase, the thrill of the battle. They’d be completely incapable of explaining why this particular result advances the interests of anybody that they care about. Yes, the fact that it’s hard for us to engage in political activism without the emotional highs and lows of the tribal experience is a big problem.