Why do free-market societies have higher social capital? How can this be fit into a larger picture in which horizontal transmission structures / few-shot interactions incentivize less cooperative strategies?
You mentioned that in small-town culture, there’s a lot of iterated interaction, but people are slow to trust outsiders. That seems to suggest that there’s high social capital within a small group, but low social capital with outsiders. As small-towners will prefer to only interact with people who are known to be trustworthy, they will not have the opportunity to come to trust outsiders in general.
In contrast, if you live in a large market economy where your social environment incentivizes few-shot interaction and most people turn out to cooperate even in few-shot interactions (possibly because their brains are still running strategies that were evolved for iterated interaction), then you will learn that most people are generally reliable. While you might never develop the level of extreme high trust with a few select people that you’d get in a small town, you will have much more trust for random strangers than the small-towners would. That might translate to higher social capital overall.
You mentioned that in small-town culture, there’s a lot of iterated interaction, but people are slow to trust outsiders. That seems to suggest that there’s high social capital within a small group, but low social capital with outsiders.
Yeah, I feel like I generally ended up steam-rolling over distinctions like this in the OP.
Social capital within a group as average trust between individuals in that group.
Social capital as trust extended to strangers, IE, default mutual trust in essentially one-shot interactions.
I was using an implicit model in which iteration within a group leads to high social capital of both types. But the small town example seems to pretty directly speak against this.
You mentioned that in small-town culture, there’s a lot of iterated interaction, but people are slow to trust outsiders. That seems to suggest that there’s high social capital within a small group, but low social capital with outsiders. As small-towners will prefer to only interact with people who are known to be trustworthy, they will not have the opportunity to come to trust outsiders in general.
In contrast, if you live in a large market economy where your social environment incentivizes few-shot interaction and most people turn out to cooperate even in few-shot interactions (possibly because their brains are still running strategies that were evolved for iterated interaction), then you will learn that most people are generally reliable. While you might never develop the level of extreme high trust with a few select people that you’d get in a small town, you will have much more trust for random strangers than the small-towners would. That might translate to higher social capital overall.
Yeah, I feel like I generally ended up steam-rolling over distinctions like this in the OP.
Social capital within a group as average trust between individuals in that group.
Social capital as trust extended to strangers, IE, default mutual trust in essentially one-shot interactions.
I was using an implicit model in which iteration within a group leads to high social capital of both types. But the small town example seems to pretty directly speak against this.