User:Nick Gardner /Sandbox

Social capital then emerges in the form of expectations that others will reciprocate in response to co-operative initiatives; and it can spread through the community as more and more people become aware of the advantages of cooperation.

whether or not co-operation takes root will depend on the pre-existing set of social and political relations in the community and on the degree of inequality and polarization suffered by society

The topic of the creation of social capital has since been explored at several levels. At the empirical level there have been a number of statistical analyses of the recently-collected data. One such study identified the factors affecting the development of trust as income per person, income distribution, government effectiveness, social cohesion and education .

A standard optimal investment model can be used to analyse an individual’s decision to accumulate social capital. We analyse six facts that support the predictions of this individualbased approach: (1) social capital first rises and then falls with age, (2) social capital declines with expected mobility, (3) social capital rises in occupations with greater returns to social skills, (4) social capital is higher among homeowners, (5) social connections fall sharply with physical distance, (6) people who invest in human capital also invest in social capital. We fail to find robust evidence that social capital investments fall with the value of time or that geographic/ religious groups generate social capital complementarities.

At a more abstract level, explanations of the development of mutual trust have been developed from game theory by means of experiments in the iterative application of the prisoners dilemma game. A one-shot prisoners development game is unlikely to lead to cooperation because it pays each player to defect, but computer simulations of  iterated prisoners dilemma games have demonstrated that simple tactics can be devised that lead to a cooperative outcome to the benefit of both players (although when played between humans, cooperation often fails to develop because players succumb to envy).

Such an outcome is similar to what biologists term an evolutionary stable strategy because once it becomes a community's established strategy, attempts to depart from it are unlikely to succeed ). At a purely theoretical level a study by economic modeling has produced results that suggest that the development of mutual trust is a slow process that is best pursued gradually, and that it can be hampered by some otherwise productivity-enhancing changes of production methods (providing a possible explanation of the difficulty of successfully transferring developed countries' production methods to developing countries).

. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

Humans are prone to cooperate, even with strangers. Thus many people cooperate in anonymous one-shot PD games

http://econ.ucsd.edu/~jandreon/Econ264/papers/Marwell%20Ames%20JPubE%201981.pdf(Marwell and Ames, 1981), Gerald Marwell, and Ruth . Ames 1981 Economist Free Ride: Does Anyone Else? Journal of Public Economics

and often vote altruistically

(http://www.issr.ucla.edu/sears/pubs/A090.pdf Sears and Funk, 1990)Sears, D.O. and C.L. Funk 1990 Self Interest in Americans' Political Opinions. In Beyond Self-Interest, edited by J.J. Mansbridge, pp. 147-170. Chicago: University of Chicago Press..

People begin contributing substantially to public goods sectors in economic experiments (Falk, et al., this volume; Kopelman, et al., this volume; (Ostrom, 1998). The experimental results accord with common experience. Most of us have travel in foreign cities, even poor foreign cities filled with strange people for whom our possessions and spending money are worth a small fortune, and found risk of robbery and commercial chicanery to be small. • Cooperation is contingent on many things. Not everyone cooperates. Aid to distressed victims increases substantially if a potential altruist’s empathy is engaged (Batson, 1991). Being able to discuss a game beforehand, and to make promises to cooperate affects success (Dawes, et al., 1990). The size of the resource, technology for exclusion and exploitation of the resource and similar gritty details affect whether cooperation in commons management arises (Ostrom, 1990: 202-204). Ostrom, E. 1990 Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. — 1998 A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action. American Political Science Review 92: 1-22. Scientific findings again correspond well to personal experience. Sometimes we cooperate enthusiastically, sometimes reluctantly, and sometimes not at all. People vary considerably in their willingness to cooperate even under the same environmental conditions. • Institutions matter. People from different societies behave differently because their habits have

http://www.nopecjournal.org/NOPEC_1996_a10.pdfFehr, E. and J.-R. Tyran 1996 Institutions and Reciprocal Fairness. Nordic Journal of Political Economy (punishment)

Social Capital: Explaining Its Origins and Effects on Government Performance CARLES BOIX AND DANIEL N. POSNER British Journal of Political Science (1998)

Ostrom, Elinor, 1990, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press).

Darwin (1874:178- 179)Darwin, C. 1874 The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2nd ed. 2 vols. New York: American Home Library.

A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage,and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection

thought, competed tribe against tribe as well as individually, and that the “social and moral faculties” evolved under the influence of group competition: It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the tribe, yet that an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.