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 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 can not be achieved by one person acting alone. In fact, civilization itself is largely the product of people finding ways to cooperate at ever greater scales. Science is achieved cumulatively through the peer-review system and citation, where each work builds on many others. Companies require people to coordinate. Healthcare depends on enormous networks of researchers, doctors, manufacturers, and patients. Markets depend on strangers trusting one another enough to exchange goods and services.

If we want to make the world better, we should want more successful cooperation. However, cooperation is fragile.

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.

At the opposite extreme 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. It results in trust disappearing, relationships becoming transactional or adversarial, and everyone ends up spending resources to protect themselves from others.

The answer to our problem lies in a dominant strategy in game theory. Start by cooperating. 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.

We often imagine goodness as unconditional kindness. But unconditional kindness can make bad behavior profitable.

If someone learns that they can exploit others without consequence, exploitation becomes a successful strategy. A person who tolerates everything may therefore unintentionally help create an environment in which predatory behavior spreads.

At the same time, permanent retaliation creates its own failure mode. 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.

A functional cooperative system needs both boundaries and forgiveness.

To make the world a better place, play a dominant strategy in game-theory, where trust is easier to begin with, harder to exploit, and easier to restore after it breaks down.