The idea that if everyone takes care of themselves and acts in their own parochial best interest, then everyone will be magically better off sounds commonsensical but is fallacious.
Biological evolution, as Dawkins has put it, is an example of a local optimisation process that “can drive a population to extinction while constantly favouring, to the bitter end, those competitive genes destined to be the last to go extinct.”
Parochial self-interest is indirectly self-defeating, but I keep getting presented with the same commonsense-sounding and magical argument that it is somehow :waves-hands: a panacea.
Local Optimisation Leads to Global Optimisation
The idea that if everyone takes care of themselves and acts in their own parochial best interest, then everyone will be magically better off sounds commonsensical but is fallacious.
Biological evolution, as Dawkins has put it, is an example of a local optimisation process that “can drive a population to extinction while constantly favouring, to the bitter end, those competitive genes destined to be the last to go extinct.”
Parochial self-interest is indirectly self-defeating, but I keep getting presented with the same commonsense-sounding and magical argument that it is somehow :waves-hands: a panacea.