The Power of Markets: Cooperation, Wealth, and Real-World Behavior

A Discussion of Brennan’s “Do Markets Corrupt?” Part 2

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

While it is common to hear people denigrate capitalism as a system that makes people greedy and selfish, in Part 1 last time, I looked at Jason Brennan’s hypothesis that market-centered systems create more virtue than vice.

Capitalism Cultivates Virtue, Not Vice

To the contrary, Brennan says the people offering such critiques have no data to support that thesis, but he offers a lot of data to suggest the opposite is true.

Specifically, Brennan asserts these points.

• Markets discourage selfishness;
• markets encourage good behavior because your reputation matters;
• markets encourage cooperation among diverse people; and,
• markets produce the most wealth so we can afford better quality of life.

I covered his evidence for the first point in Part 1, and now we can look at his other three points.