Passions within Reason:

...Mira-bile dictu: Love in marriage is more binding and more satisfying than is calculation of the costs and benefits of a spouse...

...For example, attempts to induce efficiency in government by introducing incentives based on the assumption of self-interested behavior are in vogue today (such things as resorting to competitive private suppliers, attaching aprice to public services, taxing polluters, making welfare less remunerative than work, etc...

...Thus incentive pay can result in destructive mutual suspicion among workers...

...Their out has been to say that self-interestedness need not be selfishness...

...That won't do, for the most celebrated and influential hypotheses of the economic discipline emerge from the assumption that firms maximize profits and consumers are narrowly self-concerned...

...John Brandl The most elegantly developed and successfully predictive theories in the social sciences rest on the assump-HIH tion that people act out of self-interest...

...As our emotional commitments are incorporated into the social sciences not only will the explanatory power of academic disciplines grow, but we might become a more decent people...

...JOHN BRANDL is professor of public affairs at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota...

...In explaining relationships involving recurring interactions, some social scientists theorize that partners, out of self-interest, resort to tit-f or-tat responses until each learns that cooperation is more beneficial than is cheating...

...He concludes that the attempts are inadequate-farfetched, as with the hostage example, or requiring either repeated interactions with the partner or biological loyalty to kin...

...Across broad reaches of the academy it is axiomatic that rational actors look out for themselves...

...Lessons for the design of many public and private institutions can be drawn from Frank's book...

...A lighthouse, army, zoo, police force, public radio station, church or municipal band yields what economists call a public good...

...While acknowledging the strength of self-interest, government (Continued on page 349) (Continued from page 347) would do well to carry out its work through public and private institutions designed to nurture and depend upon our loftier sentiments...

...Still, emotional attachments to others continue to play a role in all the organizations within which we work out our lives...

...Frank catalogues these attempts by social scientists to square their assumptions concerning self-interested motivation with why so many people keep their promises...

...Frank's approach is to show that when people find themselves in certain kinds of situations common in everyday life, self-interested behavior is less satisfying in the long run than are actions driven by other human emotions...

...Of course some of those services must be provided by government (which can then require payment in the form of taxes...

...One can find fault with this book: Frank demonstrates the importance of "emotions" but never either defines them or even presents us with a complete list...

...JANE REDMONT, the former social justice minister of Boston's Paulist Center, is writing a book on American Catholic women...

...Frank thinks of such emotions as empathy, anger, desire for vengeance, guilt, and love as commitment devices, constraints that keep us to our word...

...Frank's intellectually fruitful and socially hopeful central argument prevails...

...rather they will wait and let George do it, then take a free ride...

...LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...

...He wants to do this without rejecting mainstream social science...

...If neither reneges on the agreement both are better off, but each knows that holding to the commitment invites one's own suffering if the partner breaks the promise...

...And sometimes in the end, even in terms of self-interest alone, we are better off...

...GREGORY BAUM is professor of religious studies at McGill University in Canada...

...He is also a member of the Minnesota Senate...

...Nor do we know whether he believes we choose or are pawns of our sentiments...

...These have the quality that when they are used by one person they remain available to all without diminution...

...Whatever one desires qualifies as self-interest-Hitler and Mother Teresa just have different preferences...

...Presuming that every social interaction is solely a material exchange erodes productive and supportive loyalties...

...For years social scientists have patched together explanations for why welshing on agreements is not universal...

...Theories of self-interest simply don't explain why so many promises are kept in this world...

...Theories that understand rational behavior as the pursuit of self-interest conclude and predict that the rational course of action is to cheat...

...In the past that suggestion has been all but ignored by economists...

...Still, this is an important work...

...Persons contemplating wronging us recognize that we would avenge a wrong even if it were very costly for us to do so...

...Furthermore, in over a thousand experiments people have been confronted with a version of this problem and "the only group for which the strong free-rider hypothesis receives even minimal support...turns out to be a group of economics graduate students...

...But some public goods are produced privately and generously...

...Standard economics predicts flatly that people will not come forward to pay for such services...

...Partners in business or marriage or friendship or acquaintanceship agree to a cooperative arrangement, but each party has opportunities to cheat on the other and to benefit thereby...

...That, of course, is disconcerting to those who are at once impressed with the growing usefulness of social science and convinced that much of what is distinctive and noble about humans cannot be encompassed by the notion of economic man...

...Specifically, he describes what he calls "commitment problems"-cases where it seems to be in one's interest to break a commitment...

...We retain the benefits of lasting friendship and thwart potential attacks because, motivated by love or empathy or justice or vengeance, we are prepared to go beyond what self-interest would dictate...

...Frank wants us to be more altruistic but he also is intent on convincing his fellow social scientists that embellishing self-interest theory with systematic consideration of the role of the emotions will permit explanation and prediction of more of human behavior...

...One such imaginative attempt that Frank mentions is the case of the hostage who, desperate to be released, promises not to divulge her captor's identity, and even gives him compromising information on herself so that if he were to free her she would be restrained from identifying him...

...And we cheat right and left...

...The so-called "free-rider" problem is illustrative...

...But the Achilles' heel of self-interest theories is the honest businessman, the faithful spouse, the generous neighbor, the valiant soldier, the good Samaritan...

...So bound, we remain loyal to friends through thick and thin...

...Similarly, although today some economists seek to explain not only markets but all manner of human interaction-from bureaucracy to marriage-as commercial transactions, empirical study finds that "exchange-orientation [is] significantly negatively correlated with marital satisfaction for both men and women...

...Robert Frank, a professor of economics at Cornell, is cognizant and appreciative of the accomplishments of his discipline but determined to civilize the dismal science...

...Most other people want to do their part...

...There is also the matter of deterring aggressors...

...the Minnesota Senate...

...He is intent on demonstrating that recognizing the influence on our actions of what he calls "emotions" broadens the explanatory power of economics as well as of psychology...