There is a good "economics" website that I stumbled upon a few months ago called Evonomics. I think I found it on a link at Naked Capitalism. One article I found on Evonomics that I really like is: We’re Not as Selfish as Economists Think We Are. Here’s the Proof.

It is common to read about the problems with our current Socio-Economic system, but it seems that real dialogue towards changes are rare and, then, there is little agreement on what the changes should be. Evonomics occasionally provides articles discussing the "evolution of economics". If I was 18 and could start over, I suspect I would have been an economist, but alas that is not the case.

"We’re Not as Selfish as Economists Think We Are. Here’s the Proof." cites a few studies including:
1. A Common Cause Foundation study: Perceptions Matter: The Common Cause UK Values Survey
2. An Infancy journal article: A New Look at Children's Prosocial Motivation
3. A Frontiers in Psychology article: The emergence of human prosociality: aligning with others through feelings, concerns, and norms

From the abstract of A New Look at Children's Prosocial Motivation

"Young children routinely behave prosocially, but what is their motivation for doing so? Here, we review three studies which show that young children (1) are intrinsically motivated rather than motivated by extrinsic rewards; (2) are more inclined to help those for whom they feel sympathy; and (3) are not so much motivated to provide help themselves as to see the person helped (as can be seen in changes of their sympathetic arousal, as measured by pupil dilation, in different circumstances). Young children’s prosocial behavior is thus intrinsically motivated by a concern for others’ welfare, which has its evolutionary roots in a concern for the well-being of those with whom one is interdependent."

From the Common Cause Foundation study:

- 74% of respondents place greater importance on compassionate values than selfish values. We find this to be the case irrespective of age, gender, region, or political persuasion. We can be confident that this result doesn’t arise from respondents seeking to cast themselves in a better light by downplaying the importance they attach to selfish values. We were able to test for such bias.
- 77% of respondents believe that their fellow citizens hold selfish values to be more important, and compassionate values to be less important, than is actually the case.
- People who hold this inaccurate belief about other people’s values feel significantly less positive about getting involved – joining meetings, voting, volunteering. These people also report greater social alienation. They report feeling less responsible for their communities, and they are less likely to feel that they fit in with wider society – relative to citizens who hold more accurate perceptions of a typical British person’s values.

These findings lend credence to the idea that we should move away from "self-interest" as the core driver of our economic system. Promoting selfishness is just dumb. You are encouraging people to be mean and selfish, and creating cognitive dissonance, where people live a "me first, screw everybody else" life at work, and then hopefully become a more caring person at home. Just think if we could move away from the me-first concept.

Some economists seem to treat "self-interest" as factually equivalent to Einstein and Newton. But this is most certainly not the case, infants care about others intrinsically and this extends to those with whom they are interdependent. So why don't we have an economic system that encourages caring for those whom we are interdependent upon, caring for children and the elderly, and caring for the planet (that we are dependent on).

Then you look at politics, world leaders, corporations, and the media and think, "what the hell", if people can be this corrupt, and children are inclined to be intrinsically motivated to care for others, then what happened. I don't know, perhaps, positions of power corrupt absolutely as the statement goes, or maybe positions of power draw those who are flawed (narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths). Maybe our current socio-economic system turns those altruistic infants into selfish adult ass holes.

These findings imply that we should be nurturing these "intrinsic concern for others" in our education system, colleges, and corporations. Some of our schools do this to an extent, but we seem to be moving away from this.

I hope that there are currently sociologists, economists, psychologists, educators, evolutionary biologists, etc. who are currently studying issues related to those discussed in the Common Cause Foundation, Infancy, and Frontiers in Psychology studies. And hopefully a critical mass of evidence would arise to affect our decision-makers. It would give me hope for the future. Maybe we can reorient away from "self-interest" to something better like "cooperation", "community interest", and/or "interdependence."

We’re Not as Selfish as Economists Think We Are. Here’s the Proof was originally written by George Monibot at the Guardian.

From the Evonomics About page is the following statement,

"The long-dominant paradigm of efficient markets, rational actors, the invisible hand...(and the one-axis socialism vs. capitalism debate) is being questioned...from every side...Evonomics is devoted to celebrating, embracing, and exploring that Next Evolution of Economics."