the problem is not that
people do not understand the benefits of
cooperation, the problem is that people do
not understand how to
generate behaviors that
eliminate opportunism,
that’s the complicated
part. How do I punish
individuals? How do I
make them responsible for what they have
done?
In a society of strangers
this is complicated. It
requires a lot of coordination at the civic level,
in the group or society.
What does money do
today? Money bypasses
all this because the punishment for not cooperating, so to speak, in
a monetary exchange
is that I don’t give you
anything. You do not
give me what I need; I
do not give you money.
So it simplifies tremendously the large degree
of coordination that as
social groups we have
to undertake in order
to support these norms
of mutual support. So
that’s really the benefit
of money, it bypasses
all these problems of
coordinating, of thinking about what you’ve
done in the past, how
to punish. It’s very simple: you give me nothing, I give you nothing. That’s why money
works, and that’s why
it can support these
types of interactions.
The negative effect, the
one that you notice, is
that once we decide to
coordinate on this type
of exchange – I’ll give
you something only if
you give me something
35
else – then it becomes
problematic because as
it happens these days
in Spain, in Italy and in
certain parts of the US
for sure, when I have
nothing to give you in
exchange for what I
need, then what do I do?
Well, under the norms
of monetary exchange I
can give you nothing so
I’m stuck. That’s really
the bad component of
this arrangement. It is
simple and it is intuitive, quid pro quo as
the Latins would put it,
but it has this negative
component that it displaces norms of mutual
support.