Wintercow's Mooing · Economics Audio

The Crab Pot

A conversation about monkeys, fairness, public-goods experiments, antisocial punishment, crabpotism, mobility, innovation, taxation, and why tiny differences in economic growth compound into very different worlds.

Where this goes

• Capuchin monkeys, unequal pay, and relative outcomes.
• Chimpanzee bargaining and the Ultimatum Game.
• Voluntary contributions, free riding, and punishment.
• Herrmann, Thöni, and Gächter on antisocial punishment across societies, including Oman.
• Crabpotism: what happens when groups punish people for rising above the local norm.
• Queens, education, mobility, belonging, and social capital.
• The political economy of unusually high returns, innovation, investment, and migration.
• Why a few tenths of a percentage point in long-run growth can transform living standards.

The question

The difficult problem is not whether human beings punish. We obviously do. The difficult problem is how to build norms and institutions that punish destructive behavior without turning unusual achievement itself into a punishable offense.