The Penguin and the Leviathan
How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest
The case that cooperation, not self-interest, explains much of how people actually behave — and what that means for how systems should be built.
Benkler argues against the assumption that people are reliably selfish, assembling evidence from biology, psychology, economics and the open-source projects he has studied. Systems built on the assumption of cooperation, he shows, often outperform those built on incentives and monitoring.
Recommended by 2 People
Anne-Marie Slaughter
In this book Yochai Benkler tells us how human beings can cooperate. He looks at research in many different disciplines – neuroscience, biology, sociology and computer science – to show how we can encourage self-organised cooperative behaviour.
Interview · May 2018
Bruce Schneier
I write from the perspective of security – how society induces cooperation. Benkler takes the opposite perspective – how does this cooperation work and what is its value? More specifically, what is its value in the 21st century information-age economy? He challenges the pervasive economic view that people are inherently selfish creatures, and shows that actually we are naturally cooperative.
Interview · February 2012
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