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 | Moral Markets: |
Like nature itself, modern economic life is driven by relentless competition and unbridled selfishness. Or is it? Drawing on converging evidence from neuroscience, social science, biology, law, and philosophy, Moral Markets makes the case that modern market exchange works only because most people, most of the time, act virtuously. Competition and greed are certainly part of economics, but Moral Markets shows how the rules of market exchange have evolved to promote moral behavior and how exchange itself may make us more virtuous. Examining the biological basis of economic morality, tracing the connections between morality and markets, and exploring the profound implications of both, Moral Markets provides a surprising and fundamentally new view of economics--one that also reconnects the field to Adam Smith's position that morality has a biological basis. Moral Markets, the result of an extensive collaboration between leading social and natural scientists, includes contributions by neuroeconomist Paul Zak; economists Robert H. Frank, Herbert Gintis, Vernon Smith (winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics), and Bart Wilson; law professors Oliver Goodenough, Erin O'Hara, and Lynn Stout; philosophers William Casebeer and Robert Solomon; primatologists Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal; biologists Carl Bergstrom, Ben Kerr, and Peter Richerson; anthropologists Robert Boyd and Michael Lachmann; political scientists Elinor Ostrom and David Schwab; management professor Rakesh Khurana; computational science and informatics doctoral candidate Erik Kimbrough; and business writer Charles Handy. Paul J. Zak is founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and professor of economics at Claremont Graduate University. Zak also serves as professor of neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center and senior researcher at UCLA. "Most people are fundamentally honest, trustworthy, and fair. Why? Because they have a capacity for empathy and trust that is just as innate as their capacity for selfishness. It evolved in order to enable people to capture social benefits through exchange. Markets not only need that instinct; they also nurture it. This simple and beautiful idea has been disinterred by the authors of this book from beneath the cynical sophistries of the twentieth century."--Matt Ridley, author of The Origins of Virtue "Before he became famous as the father of free-market capitalism through The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a long-forgotten and still little-known treatise about the role of values and virtues in economic and social life. At last, science has caught up with Smith, and now Paul Zak has gathered leading scholars and scientists in a definitive volume on why markets are moral. This paradigm-shifting book is required reading not only for economists, but for all behavioral scientists."--Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic, columnist for Scientific American, and author of The Mind of the Market Link: Subject Areas:
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