How to make the world a better place

In San Francisco, we hear about “making the world a better place” so much that it has become a cliché, parodied in the likes of Silicon Valley the TV show.

But what does that even mean? At the most basic level, I think making the world better for us means increasing human flourishing. People should be able to pursue lives they consider worth living, whether that means being healthier, safer, freer, more prosperous, or more connected to one another.

Societal progress is generally pointed in that direction. Better healthcare allows people to live longer and suffer less. Technology expands what people can do. Strong financial systems allow capital to move toward productive uses. Good institutions create stability. And equally important, individual lives become better when healthy relationships are possible.

All of these things are underpinned by one thing - cooperation - because modern life, progress and acceleration can not be achieved by one person alone. Civilization itself is largely the product of people finding ways to cooperate at ever greater scales.

If we want to make the world better, we should want more successful cooperation, though it is a fragile endeavour.

Two people who interact repeatedly may choose to cooperate, always being kind regardless of how the other person behaves. That sounds morally attractive, but defectors can exploit it. If one person continues to cooperate while the other continually takes advantage of them, the exploiter receives the benefits of cooperation without paying its costs. In an environment where exploitation is rewarded, and cooperation is punished, unconditional cooperators eventually lose.

A person who tolerates everything creates an environment in which predatory behavior spreads.

At the opposite end of the scale is the person who always defects, taking what they can, cheating when it benefits, never trusting anyone, and exploiting weakness whenever they find it. This strategy protects the individual from being the naive cooperator, but two defectors cannot capture the benefits of cooperation. If every mistake or betrayal is answered forever, cooperation can never recover. One defection produces another, which produces another, until both sides are worse off. It results in relationships becoming transactional or adversarial, and everyone ends up spending resources to protect themselves from others.

Therefore, a functional cooperative system needs both boundaries and forgiveness.

Robert Axelrod is an American political scientist known for his work on game theory and cooperation. His tournaments point toward a robust strategy for repeated cooperation. Start with default trust. If the other person cooperates, continue cooperating. If they exploit you, respond. But if they return to cooperation, allow cooperation to resume. This is the intuition behind strategies such as forgiving tit-for-tat.

I love this game, "The Evolution of Trust" by Nicky Case, which lets you test your natural inclinations in a simulation. In a perfect environment, tit-for-tat wins. But the real world is not perfect. Mistakes and miscommunications happen.

To make the world a better place, we should act in a way in which trust is easy to begin, exploitation carries consequences, and cooperation can recover after it breaks down.