Re: Small groups a key to solving the tragedy of the commons?

Lance wrote:
How Cooperation Can Evolve in a Cheater's World

Whether you're a free-loading virus or a meat-stealing monkey,
selfishness pays. So how could cooperators survive in a cheater's
world? Thomas Flatt, a postdoctoral research associate at Brown, was
part of a group that created a theoretical model that neatly solves
this dilemma, which has stumped evolutionary biologists and social
scientists for decades. The trick: Keep the altruists in small groups,
away from the swindling horde, where they multiply and migrate.

Yes, this makes very good sense. In a way (a rather perverse way, I agree) religious communities under a rule (the rules themselves, whether by St.Benedict or the modern community [very fashionable at one time] in Taizé make interesting reading, not for their religious aspect, but because of their attention to the detail of a community getting on together - the researchers might have found them interesting background reading) are anarchic communities. Because the essence of anarchy is individual choice to bond, or not, with a community on terms that are agreed by all.

Smaller groups work best.

I've been lucky for a lot of my working life, to have worked for a Yank company (Hewlett-Packard) that, before the advent of Carly Fiorina, worked on a distributed, local, model. Every work group and, indeed, every individual, was encouraged, within the overall objectives, to deliver its own contribution, based on small group contribution. I'm not suited well to the corporate world - I've just emerged from a five month contract with a big insurance company that has been, to me, very uncongenial, though I have met some delightful, warm, friendly people on the way. The HP model suited me precisely. We worked like a small enterprise, even though we were part of a huge corporate body. Our experience was mirrored throughout the world-wide body so much that, when we visited foreign parts and met other HP people it felt more that we were part of a very big club than that we were employed by a major corporate body. I, like many HP people at the time, regret how Carly destroyed this social structure by incorporating Compaq - a bankrupt residue of a number of far more aggressive, sales-orientated and Stalinist style centralist companies - into its structure, a process that was a reverse take over, characterised by an ant metaphor where the 'red ants' or Compaq, bankrupt and bureaucratic as they were, invaded and overcame the 'blue ants' of the old HP. There's a book there somewhere for somebody to write about the way in which the old HP encouraged people to be themselves and contribute, as they could, to the body corporate - it being a two way contract, if you did well by the company it did well by you. It sounds capitalistically nasty because those who didn't do well aren't mentioned. However, as a manager in HP for five years, and somebody who oversaw the closing down of a group, I can attest that, even in hard circumstances, the company actually did act in a benign way towards even the misfits - some thought, back then, too much.

I'm sad that religious communities that offer so much in terms of an institutional remedy for corporate living and companies like HP that managed for much of the last century to genuinely live up to similar ideals are now defunct.

There is clearly a need for this sort of relationship between an individual (trammelled only by his or her free decision to be part of it) and a collective or collegiate body. I exclude most of academia from this because of the nasty internecine strife that characterises all the instances of it that I've encountered.

The difficulty lies in finding the fine line between various failed models, the hippy commune, the dictatorial cult, the effete academe and the robust capitalist cleverness of the now-defunct HP.


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