Saturday, March 15, 2008

De donde viene la satanización del mercado...

y el comercio? Parece que los psicologos evolutivos tienen una teoría al respecto:

"small-scale tribal societies were zero-sum economies. Everything that was owned by one person was something that someone else could not enjoy. Some psychologists argue that the zero-sum nature of the Pleistocene gives us a psychology that has a lot of trouble grasping concepts of borrowing, interest and economic growth......

The Pleistocene mentality tends to regard anyone who gets rich as having done so at the expense of someone else. When it comes to the benefits of free trade, for instance, this kind of thinking makes us hard-wired protectionists. Our intuitions favour basic Pleistocene-style exchanges, but modern economies involve much more than that, with processes such as interest and investment that we don't always understand."

Este tipo de teorías me recuerda algo que solía decir Hayek, que el socialismo era ante todo nostalgía por la sociedad arcaica, de la solidaridad tribal.En este sentido, el socialismo y en general el igualitarismo es mas conservador de los que muchos creen.