In Fall 2018, I was assigned to teach International Economic Policy (Econ 385) at George Mason University, a trade class for non-economics majors. As a student of Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, and Don Boudreaux, I was excited to teach this class. The miracle of the market was such an eye-opener for me as a high schooler. I could not wait to share my love of economics with students!
My enthusiasm was immediately dampened as I realized I faced many students whose mindset seemed hostile. Extolling the virtues of trade in the standard mutual-gains manner would not fly with this crowd. I had to find another way.
By coincidence, later that same day, Professor Daniel Klein pointed me toward an article in the January 2017 edition of Econ Journal Watch: “Econ 101 Morality: The Amiable, The Mundane, and The Market” by Dwight Lee and JR Clark. Lee and Clark discuss how, as young professors, they faced the same trouble I faced, and how a change of perspective can go a long way in getting people to open their minds to economics.
Lee and Clark explain that there are two modes of morality: (1) amiable morality, which includes the fellow-feeling and gratis things we do for friends and loved ones (virtues like love, charity), and (2) the mundane morality that consists of the rules of mere justice: simply not messing with other people’s stuff and keeping your promises.
Lee and Clark discuss that we come from an ancestral background of “band-man.” When we lived in small bands not much bigger than extended families, we lived always according to the amiable morality of familiars. Indeed, life in the band was enhanced by these virtues.
As our circles of interaction grew with agriculture, settlement, hierarchy, and eventually the expansion of commercial society, the amiable morality was less conducive, and mundane morality was increasingly relied upon. It’s hard to love a merchant whom you see maybe once a year and you cannot expect them to do favors for you. Unfamiliarity and mere justice began to characterize market interactions.
But our genes have not changed that much since 10,000 BC, and the band-man mentality is still natural to us. We are predisposed to see a downplaying of amiable morality as bad. Such instinct is where the student roadblock springs from.
If students see the downplaying of amiable morality as inhumane, then students will have a difficult time accepting the story of markets unless already predisposed to do so. Thus, Lee and Clark propose that we teach the mundane virtues that markets promote alongside the amiable virtues that the market complements.
Telling students about our evolved instincts has a humbling effect. It is a theory of why they are suspicious of markets. We have amiable morality in our bones, because amiable morality worked in the small simple society of familiars. But amiable morality is not sufficient in the modern society, because we live among and depend upon a vast division of labor, of unfamiliars. Amiable morality must be supplement by mundane morality if we are to enjoy prosperity and freedom.
I took Lee and Clark’s advice to heart. My second lecture was on the mundane and the amiable moralities. The students of the class were surprised: what did morality have to do with economics? Isn’t one of our assumptions explicitly that homo economicus is amoral? This discussion allowed a realistic notion of the human being. For the remainder of the semester, as we went over economic concepts, from trade to public choice, we tied it all back to mundane morality and the amiable morality. We discussed how some of the economic issues that arise come from confusing mundane and amiable moralities or treating one kind as superior to the other.
It was a roaring success; the students were engaged, asking great questions, and using the economic way of thinking very instinctually through the lens of the two types of morality. In Spring 2019, when I began teaching Intro to Micro and Macroeconomics at Frederick Community College (MD), I repeated this lesson with similar success. I was able to anticipate many of the standard undergraduate objections to economics and spend time on material. Maybe students were reluctant to seem like they were obstinately “band-man”!
Potentially hostile students were brought in as colleagues in a journey of human understanding. Economics was no longer a war of competing interests and “market power,” but a story of human coordination to achieve amazing things.
At the end of my Fall 2018 Econ 385 class, the student who had been the most suspicious on the first day of class approached me and asked, “what should I read to get more information about what you discussed in class?” I was more than happy to give him Lee and Clark as well as some other liberal writers. To reach out to this one individual and get him interested in engaging in the ideas was, I think, the greatest success.
Jon Murphy is a Ph.D. candidate at George Mason University, where he specializes in Law & Economics and Smithian Political Economy. He previously was an economic consultant in New Hampshire, and he also blogs at www.jonmmurphy.com.
READER COMMENTS
Jason S.
Sep 10 2019 at 9:24am
Brilliant teaching idea, thank you.
Roger McKinney
Sep 10 2019 at 12:07pm
Hayek had this idea, too. We have been losing the argument for freedom on moral grounds, not on reason, data or any of the arguments that libertarians make. People don’t care if something works better if they think it’s immoral. People see socialism as having the moral high ground even if capitalism makes everyone richer. As Hayek wrote, the morality of the market would destroy a family or tribe. But the morality of the family doesn’t scale and will destroy the nation if we try. Family and tribal morality work because we know everyone well enough to know their needs. We have to give up some of that morality at the tribal level and even more at the national level because we’re dealing with strangers.
walter block
Sep 10 2019 at 12:26pm
magnificent article. there are strong parallels to this:
Levendis, John, Walter E. Block and Robert B. Eckhardt. 2019. “Evolutionary psychology, economic freedom, trade and benevolence.” Review of Economic Perspectives – Národohospodářský obzor; Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 73-92; https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/revecp/19/2/article-p73.xml; 10.2478/revecp-2019-0005; DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/revecp-2019-0005; https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/here-is-one-of-my-best-scholarly-papers-ever/
Jon Murphy
Sep 12 2019 at 2:36pm
Thank you for pointing me toward your article!
nobody.really
Sep 10 2019 at 12:53pm
Very cool. And perhaps you could supplement the lesson with the Ultimatum Game.
For the benefit of the uninitiated: The Ultimatum Game involves two players. The proposer is told that she can receive $X—on the condition that she proposes how to divide the money with a stranger, and the stranger (responder) gets to accept or reject the offer. If the responder accepts, both proposer and responder get the amounts they agreed to. If the responder rejects, then they both get nothing.
This exercise—which can be done in the classroom—typically leads to the following findings.
1: While classical economics suggests that a responder should always accept whatever is offered—‘cuz something is better than nothing—responders in market economies typically reject offers that are substantially less than 50%. That is, responders in market economies seem to have an expectation of equitable treatment, even from total strangers. And responders seem to derive some satisfaction from punishing people who violate this expectation—so much so that they’d willingly sacrifice some financial reward just for the pleasure of spiting a greedy proposer. And this norm is so powerful that proposers in market economies rarely dare to offer a split that differs far from 50/50.
2 (And this one you probably can’t demonstrate in the classroom): In contrast to people who live in market economies, people who live in tribal communities generally offer—and accept—much lower proposals.
What does this tell us about tribal life? Is “band-man” stingy? To the contrary, band-man may willingly surrender almost everything he gains—to his tribe. But he lives in an environment where he rarely interacts with people beyond his tribe, and where strangers are generally to be feared and shunned. Thus, for band-man, to be charitable to a stranger is to betray your tribe. Virtuous behavior entails exploiting strangers for all they’re worth so that you have more to share with your tribe. Thus Band-man gives no quarter to strangers—and expects none in return.
THAT should take a bit of shine off of amiable morality.
In sum: Yup, we have evolved to value amiable morality. And moral leaders have been trying to get us to transcend amiable morality ever since. Roughly 2000 years ago a guy said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies …. If you love only those who love you, what virtue is in that? Doesn’t everybody do as much? And if you greet only your brothers, what virtue is in that? Don’t even your enemies do as much?” It’s worth reflecting upon.
dede
Sep 11 2019 at 10:39pm
It would be interesting if somebody had the chance to conduct this experiment in a class in China and report on the results.
Further to some conversations with people having had negotiations in China, it seems to me that the culture there is so different than in the West that a lot of dissatisfaction (on either/both sides) arises due to “the norm” being different.
OH Anarcho-Capitalist
Sep 12 2019 at 11:40am
Agree- another similar game is The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the solution for which emerged as “Tit for Tat” – treat me well and I’ll treat you well. Fail to do so and I will give you what you gave me.
RE: tribalism – the expectation that the superior hunter/farmer etc should share his bounty with the entire tribe is enforced socially through shaming or accusations of witchcraft against the superior producer. That also explains why primitive tribes existing to this day still exist as they did a thousand years ago. Every attempt to exceed the norm is expected to be shared and NOT kept as a base to build further wealth. Communism in its natural state and outcome…
Mark Brady
Sep 10 2019 at 5:12pm
Your post reminds me of what Voltaire had to say about commerce, an observation that I share with my students.
“Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts.”
Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation [1733], ed. with an introduction by Nicholas Cronk (1994), 30.
Thaomas
Sep 11 2019 at 8:39pm
“Supplemented,” yes but not “supplanted by.” Both are necessary for policy making or as a citizen having an informed opinion on policy.
Jon Murphy
Sep 11 2019 at 9:42pm
Yes. One must resist both the “justice only” society and the “amiable only” society. A mix of both is needed.
OH Anarcho-Capitalist
Sep 12 2019 at 11:33am
I think you did a nice job of explaining the difference in the two approaches and the difference between the 2 settings in which one works while the other doesn’t.
I believe that left to its own devices, any given society will “discover” those two truths: communal living works fine in a family setting, but not much beyond that setting…
Bob Murphy
Sep 11 2019 at 10:50pm
Jon,
Nice to see you have a perch here now (?), but if you do a follow-up, can you give one or two specific examples? I’m saying, you tried to explain comparative advantage (or whatever), the students objected, and then by bringing in the evolutionary story about morals, their criticisms melted away?
I understand the distinction you’re making, but I just don’t see how it would disarm the critic.
Going the other way, when you say this: “Economics was no longer a war of competing interests and “market power,” but a story of human coordination to achieve amazing things.”
…I don’t see what that has to do with different types of morality. That seems like it’s giving someone positive economic analysis, and then–with that superior understanding of cause and effect–the person’s original moral framework will indicate to him that markets are a good thing.
Jon Murphy
Sep 12 2019 at 2:34pm
Hello Bob,
The way to think about this is with something along the lines of tariffs. The question posed was “are tariffs a good thing”? So, we worked through the standard model. Then I asked “But what if domestic citizens lose their jobs and foreigners gain jobs? Does this mean globalization is bad and we should do tariffs?”
This lead to a question (which one of the students asked but I would have prompted): what does one owe to other citizens? Do we owe love, benevolence, etc (the amiable virtues)? Or do we owe merely not to interfere with his stuff (the mundane virtues)? After a fun conversation, we ultimately landed on mundane, though with the concession that a person may sympathize more with the citizen’s job loss than a foreigner’s misfortune because they are part of our “band.”
Then I prompted the question: “Ok, now what to we owe to the foreigner?” This was pretty quick: merely the mundane virtue of justice. We expect the same of them: keep our word, do not do harm, but nothing else. The foreigner does not owe us a favor nor vice versa. Thus, tying it back to tariffs, I pointed out that the tariff, by disrupting freely consented and justly conducted trade, it is a violation of what we owe to the foreigner (I know some folks will not like my collective use of “we” here, but for the purposes of the discussion, it doesn’t matter a lot). Further, while the sovereign has the right to violate justice (this point was merely asserted by me; I hadn’t gone deep into a liberal theory of government a la Smith), that right should not be used callously.
So, we now had two questions to ask to justify tariffs: 1) Does this make economic sense and 2) does this make moral sense? For the students who were pre-disposed to see econ as only cold and calculating, this second question really made them think and reconsider the econ side of things in a different light. We now had multiple trade-offs to consider: both the trade-off of protecting jobs at the expense of national wellbeing and the job of trading off justice. Further, since they agreed we only owe to other citizens and foreigners justice, we now had to work to justify not providing what we owe.
Does this answer your question?
Bob Murphy
Sep 19 2019 at 11:09am
Thanks Jon, now I have a better idea of what you are saying.
Bob Murphy
Sep 11 2019 at 10:54pm
Jon, let me try to get my point across better. Suppose a student goes to an environmental resources class, and the professor says, “To fight climate change, we should consider eating human corpses.”
The student is horrified at the proposal. But the professor explains, “Oh, the revulsion you feel is understandable, because 10,000 years ago, people with a proclivity for cannibalism wouldn’t have reproduced very well. But now in modern society, we can avoid the specific problems of eating human flesh. So dig in!”
Do you think that would work?
OH Anarcho-Capitalist
Sep 12 2019 at 11:29am
You seem to be positing that “approach A” is superior to “approach B” in general.
That’s not the lesson I take from the author’s piece. Rather, approach A is appropriate in setting #1, but not in setting #2 where approach B was adopted by social humans as a more logical means of generating mutually acceptable outcomes in general.
The author seems to explicitly point out that approach B is not superior to, nor did it displace approach A, rather people discovered which approach worked best in which social setting…
Jon Murphy
Sep 12 2019 at 2:35pm
No. The professor doesn’t explain why that revulsion doesn’t apply here.
Alice L. Temnick
Sep 12 2019 at 6:47am
Thank you Jon! This is timely. I dig into International Econ with my second year students next week. Of course I’ll tie Adam Smith readings in.
OH Anarcho-Capitalist
Sep 12 2019 at 11:22am
What a great and uplifting story. Kudos to the author. Here’s hoping his dual-moralities approach is mirrored throughout academia and that economic understanding becomes a standard part of every student’s education and not just some…
Jon Murphy
Sep 12 2019 at 2:20pm
Thank you very much
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