cooperation beats competition (except in narrow circumstances)

Minnesotans are familiar with hunkering down during long, cold winters. Our winter snow finally melted away this month, then I woke this morning to see a fresh dusting of snow on the ground again. Our forecast still includes below-freezing days during the next week. I think I might put seeds into flats anyway. I'll keep them indoors instead of on the front patio where they would get better sunlight.

I'm disappointed in my fellow Minnesotans, though. When I visited the grocery store on Friday to restock my supplies, I found the paper goods (paper towels, toilet paper) completely obliterated again. Not a single one anywhere down an entire row of the store. I've got plenty for myself, but it just adds to other people's alarm to see products simply gone.

A new article published this week talks about the virtues of cooperation.  It's old news for anyone who has read "The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness" by Oren Harman.  That book was about the strange life of the man who created the Price equation, the mathematical discovery that explains the evolution of altruism in a world that conservatives keep telling us is ruled entirely by brutal selfishness.  It's another title that I recommend for reading during this emergency, although it's an uneven read.

From the article:

"This isn’t an isolated result. In a comprehensive analysis of 28 studies, the most successful negotiators cared as much about the other party’s success as their own. They refused to see negotiations as win-lose or the world as zero-sum. They understood that before you could claim value, you needed to create value. They didn’t declare victory until they could help everyone win.

This isn’t limited to negotiation. Economists find that the higher that Americans score on intelligence tests, the more they give to charity — even after adjusting for their wealth, income, education, age and health. Psychologists demonstrate that the smarter people are, the less likely they are to take resources for themselves — and the more likely they are to give to a group. I’ve discovered in my own research that when success is a sprint, givers may well finish last. But if it’s a marathon, the takers tend to fall behind and the givers often finish first."
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/smarter-living/negotiation-tips-giver-taker.html (archive)

This event is a long, slow crisis.  Cooperate.  Be generous.  Stuff is replaceable, but people are not.  I'll make this comparison again because it's important: This COVID-19 experience is like Y2K, because with sustained effort (and cost), we can get through this problem with minimal damage.

#FlattenTheCurve