photo credit: shoehorn99
A basic tenet of economics is that people always behave selfishly, or as the 18th century philosopher economist David Hume put it, “every man ought to be supposed to be a knave.”

But what if some people aren’t always knaves?

Sam Bowles argues in Science June 20 that economics will get it wrong then, sometimes badly so. He points to new experimental evidence that people do often act against their own personal self-interest in favor of the common good, and they do so in predictable, understandable ways. Poorly-designed economic institutions fail to take advantage of intrinsic moral behavior and often undermine it.

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