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Small Groups
Small-group motives sometimes appear in places where
large-group motives would seem more appropriate. For
example, in discussing the structure of the Japanese
corporation, a manager states:
"The most important path to quality is that
employees feel that they are of one family, playing an
important role in the company....In Japan, an employee
tries to work his lifetime with the company he chooses.
So he does not put much importance in his personal
interests....In Japan, they say, 'Job first, family life
comes second.'"1
Nevertheless, the distinction between small group-motives
and large-group motives suggests that it may be difficult to
organize large groups on any other basis than on
self-interest. This distinction tells us that it is not
enough to convert people from selfishness to altruism, but
that the altruism they are converted to must be a
generalized altruism. People must care as much about
strangers as they care about themselves, their families, and
their friends.
The Soviet Union had a hero who illustrates the sort of
change the transformation requires. Pavlik Morozov turned
his father over to authorities in 1932 as an enemy of the
people. According to the story, which may be mostly
propaganda, his father, the mayor of Garasimovka, gave or
sold safe conduct passes to peasants fleeing famine. When
thirteen-year-old Pavlik learned of his father's crimes and
informed the secret police, his father was executed. His
uncle and grandfather then revealed their reactionary
natures when they retaliated by killing him. Pavlik became a
martyr for the glory of the Soviet state and, as a hero,
many schools and youth groups bore his name. For a nation to
be organized not on self-interest but on "selfless" motives,
people must be like Pavlik. They must consider the interests
of anonymous strangers to be at least as important as their
own interests and the interests of their family and
friends.
Economists have been content to take goals as given and
have not tried to develop theories of goal formation. This
attitude reflects the hypothesis that it is impossible on a
large scale to change people so that they act on the basis
of generalized altruism. Not everyone accepts this
hypothesis. Most Marxist governments, governments that
invoked the name of Karl Marx as a justification of their
policies, believed or professed to believe that man could be
transformed so that he no longer pursued his own selfish
interests but strove only for the welfare of the group. Some
of these governments tried to refute the economists'
hypothesis by transforming their citizens. China's Great
Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution and Cambodia's
bloodbath under the Khmer Rouge are dramatic examples of
attempts to make this transformation. Both failed
disastrously. If, in the future, someone does refute this
hypothesis, it will cause a revolution in economics and
greatly diminish the importance of what it has to say.
Religion has often attempted to limit the role of
self-interest. For example, Christianity historically has
been distrustful of self-interest; there are no saints who
exemplify virtuous self-interest. Most of the secular
religions of the last two centuries, such as Marxism,
nationalism, and environmentalism, have also tried to
convert people to be less self-interested. Robert Nelson has
even suggested that economics itself can be seen as a
secular religion that seeks to limit
self-interest.2 For a society to prosper, argues
Nelson, self-interest must be confined to the market and
kept out of other areas of society, especially the
government. When government is dominated by self-interest,
people use it as a way to redistribute wealth to themselves,
and if too much of a society's effort goes into trying to
get ahead by taking from others rather than producing for
others, economic stagnation and poverty result. Nelson
argues that economists have implicitly understood the need
for an elite group of experts (sometimes economists) who can
rise above self-interest if a market system is to function
properly.
1The Wall Street
Journal, April 29, 1983, p. 14.
2 Robert H. Nelson,
Economics
as Religion: from Samuelson to Chicago and
Beyond..
(Pennsylvania University Press, 2001).
Copyright
Robert Schenk
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