An article in the February Southern Cone edition of the leftist monthly Le Monde Diplomatique drew my attention to an article by Hazel Henderson and to a surprising piece of information: The so-called "Nobel Prize" in economics is not a Nobel Prize at all, but rather a distinction conferred by the Royal Bank of Sweden, evidently named in honor of the authentic prize’s namesake but otherwise unrelated to that prize. A group of researchers in the hard sciences who feel that the highest distinction in their own field own is devalued not only by the association of the Nobel name with what is not really a science but a profession, but also by the ideological bias that seems to govern the selection of the prize’s recipients, have called upon the Royal Bank to renounce use of the name, or to effect fundamental changes in the manner in which the prize is granted.

Far from being subjected to the rigors of scientific inquiry, they claim, neoclassical economics is "comparable with religious belief, epsecially in its faith in the [benevolent] ‘invisible hand’ of markets." The heir to the prize’s founder, Peter Nobel, takes a perhaps more ideological tack:

There is no mention in the letters of Alfred Nobel that he would appreciate a prize for economics. The Swedish Riksbank, like a cuckoo, has placed its egg in another very decent bird’s nest. What the Bank did was akin to trademark infringement–unacceptably robbing the real Nobel Prizes. Two thirds of these prizes in economics have gone to US economists, particularly of the Chicago School–to people speculating in stock markets and options. These have nothing to do with Alfred Nobel’s goal of improving the human condition and our survival–indeed they are the exact opposite.

Indeed, one of the assumptions upon which classical economics is founded–the notion that humans are fundamentally "rational economic agents" whose overriding concern is maximizing their own selfish interests–is currently under attack by researchers in the disciplines of neuroscience, biochemistry and behavioral science. Paul Zak, a neuroscientist at the University of Claremont, has discovered a link between trust, which brings humans together for cooperation, and a reproductive hormone called oxitocine. Another scientist, David Loye, is reexamining Darwin’s writings, which have long been caricatured as describing a world governed by the maxim "survival of the fittest," and finding that where humans are concerned, Darwin was more interested in examining how people form links of sharing and trust, and in atruism as a factor in the collective success of the species.

Perhaps not coincidentally, The Economist has just published an article on "The economics of sharing," which takes as its point of departure the spectacular success of Open Source software to examine "why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources." Their answer, not expectedly, attempts to reduce the matter to the old categories of selfishness:

Co-operation, especially when repeated, can breed reciprocity and trust, to the benefit of all. In the context of open source, much has been written about why people would share technical talent, giving away something that they also sell by holding a job in the information-technology industry. The reason often seems to be that writing open-source software increases the authors’ prestige among their peers or gains them experience that might help them in the job market, not to mention that they also find it fun.

On the other hand, the article does contain some useful observations about the nature of information itself, even if they’re the same observations Free Software advocates have been making for decades:

The characteristics of information–be it software, text or even biotech research–make it an economically obvious thing to share. It is a "non-rival" good: ie, your use of it does not interfere with my use. Better still, there are network effects: ie, the more people who use it, the more useful it is to any individual user. Best of all, the existence of the internet means that the costs of sharing are remarkably low. The cost of distribution is negligible, and co-ordination is easy because people can easily find others with similar goals and can contribute when convenient.

Citing a paper written by Yale professor of law Yochai Benkler, the article goes on to describe how "non-rival" goods are extending into more tangible space, like computer hardware itself, because of the existence of so much excess capacity. The authors cite the now-classic example of the SETI@home project harnessing the unused cycles of PCs connected to the Internet to process radio telescope data. The broader conclusion:

"Social sharing," [Benkler] asserts, represents "a third mode of organising economic production, alongside markets and the state." However, with the exception of carpooling, he acknowledges he is hard-pressed to find instances where sustained sharing of valuable things is prevalent in the world outside information technology.