"The internet didn’t start the fire, but it’s fostered an atmosphere of pervasive mistrust, corroding institutions & a collective retreat into confirmation bias. Human history is a story about cooperation. Individually, we big-brained, hairless primates are fairly ridiculous creatures. But together we achieve dominion over land and sky. What if we’ve hit the limit of our capacity to get along?" Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom wrote: “humans have a more complex motivational structure & more capability to solve social dilemmas” than rational-choice economists have given us credit for. The key to unlocking these capabilities was building the right institutions. Capitalist markets & nation-states had taken us only so far. Now, we need to imagine new kinds of groups that could improve how humans innovate, learn & adapt together to take on looming environmental challenges."
At www.nytimes.com
