Free The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life by Uri Gneezy, John List

didn’t allow too many cattle on the land at once, everything was fine. But if one greedy herder brought additional cows to graze, the damage to the pasture increased, eventually depleting the parcel so much that none of the cattle could graze at all. (Remember the discussion of negative externalities when splitting the bill?)
    Think, for example, about coastal fishing rights. In many places, overfishing has so depleted stocks that the future of a number of fish species is in serious question. Given the high demand for fish, each fisherman has an incentive to fish as much as he can; but if everyone does the same, nothing will be left for future generations—at some point the fish population decreases so much that it doesn’t recover.
    One conventional assumption about women is that they tend to care more about public goods, like fish stocks and grasslands, than men do. We set out to investigate this assumption with the Khasi, as well as in a neighboring village of Assamese, a patriarchal tribe, using a standard game from economics called the “public goods game” (so named because it emulates what happens when we contribute money to provide public goods for all, such as well-cared for national parks and clean air).
    We gave each group the same set of instructions: “In this game, you can choose to invest in the community, or to invest in yourself.” We told some of the participants the following: “Every rupee you invest in yourself will yield you a return of one. Every rupee invested in the group exchange will yield a return of one-half for every member of the group, not just the person who invested it.” 2
    Given what you know now about their society, you might guess that the Khasi people were more inclined to spend their rupees to invest in the group. And you would be correct. Khasi men and women invested more in the group than did their Assamese counterparts. Basically, our results found fewer selfish people, regardless of gender, among the Khasi. These results open up a question—would a society “ruled” by women be very different than the one we live in today?
    What Can We Do?
    The edgy television series Mad Men shows us how far gender relations have advanced in American society since the 1960s, when public discourse held that women were supposed to look and act like Marilyn Monroe, and men were supposed to look and act like Rat Pack predators. The series offers an important look at the way society dictated male and female behavior before anyone dreamedof a women’s movement, black power, or gay liberation. People may not have been sure of who they were, but they knew who it wasn’t safe to be.
    Fast-forward to the twenty-first century. Now we know that men and women react differently to competitive incentives; and this difference in reaction to incentives is strongly influenced by culture. Together, such social factors help to explain the gap between men’s and women’s job status and earnings. As the Khasi taught us, once women hold economic power and can express their true preferences without risking public scorn, they can learn how to react to competitive incentives to achieve considerable economic gain, and become true leaders in their societies.
    The implications of our two key findings—(a) that women can be just as competitive, or even more competitive, than men; and (b) that when women have stronger economic influence, the society becomes more consensual and public-spirited—are profound. When we watched women haggle over tomatoes, we thought about American women who don’t apply for competitive jobs or ask for raises. We thought about the structural problems in Western societies that prevent women from achieving everything they can. And when we watched the women’s market operate with less friction, we thought about the US Congress, where bickering and grandstanding are the norm.
    So if we want to encourage women and girls to be more competitive and to increase their earning power, what