The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

In a recent blog economic historian Brad de Long, summarised some key features of human evolution that have led us to where we find ourselves today. Here are a few nuggets from his summary:

• The Human Brain is an expensive organ consuming over 20% of the body’s energy - its primary function is not solitary reasoning, but social navigation and cultural learning.
• Homo sapiens evolutionary success is not the product of individual genius, but the ability to form shared goals, coordinate action, and enforce social norms.
• Language is a technology for the coordination of minds, the transmission of norms, and the creation of shared fictions.
• The “jump” to human intelligence was not a single leap, but a protracted coevolution of brain, sociality, language, and culture.
• The true driver of human progress is not individual intelligence, but the size and connectivity of the network of minds linked by social learning.
• The evolution of cumulative culture renders possible the exponential growth dynamics that define the modern era.
• Listening and speaking was the primary medium of economic coordination. The market, the firm, the state depend on the evolved capacities for communication, empathy, and normativity.
• The division of labor, the emergence of markets, the rise of cities all depend on the capacity for trust, coordination, and norm enforcement.

The crucial role of communication (speaking and listening), trust and empathy in our evolution will come as no surprise to mediators. In many respects our ability to learn from each other, work together and cooperate is our superpower as a species.

Economist Mariana Mazzucato builds on this in her new book ‘The Common Good Economy’. She proposes “a new economics of collective action around the common good”, in which governments and businesses to develop purposeful economic relationships, creating value and building spaces where human flourishing can happen.

This approach is less about public policy patching up the social and economic problems caused by the ‘failure’ of markets (resulting from oligopolies, externalities, public goods, information asymmetries etc.) and more about “aligning goals, incentivising collaboration, fostering collective intelligence, and ensuring that all participants share knowledge, risks and rewards”.

This is very much the language of the positive sum game and broadening it beyond small groups and ‘tribes’ where the shared interest can be more easily identified. Much of a common good approach will be focussed at the level of regions and nations where more coherent political institutions can be identified. Although, as Rana Dasgupta points out in a recent book ‘After Nations’, the room for manoeuvre of individual nations states is increasingly constrained by international agreements, multinational organisations, investment treaties and the mobility of capital etc.

Ideally a common good approach should also be possible on a global scale where issues such as climate change and international socioeconomic justice are concerned. This is the subject of a recently published and extremely ambitious report ('The Global Justice Report'), which argues it is possible to reconcile planetary habitability and high well-being for all, but this will require fast decarbonisation, a greater focus on sufficiency (including changing patterns of consumption) and a drastic reduction in inequality of income, wealth and power, both between countries and within them.

The bigger the group and the more diverse the interests the harder it becomes to achieve effective collaboration to achieve ambitious macro objectives. This is particularly the case when some of the greatest cooperation drivers at a micro level are a perceived external threat and fear of others, which can engender more of a zero sum mindset. In this environment the skills of mediators, in helping build understanding, identify shared interests and explore options for achieving them, will be so important.