I have published almost 3 dozen books, just over 700 refereed journal articles and essays in law reviews, and maybe several thousand op eds (I don’t keep track of the numbers of those). But this is the publication that I think makes the most important contribution:
Levendis, John, Walter E. Block and Robert B. Eckhardt. 2019. “Evolutionary psychology, economic freedom, trade and benevolence.” Review of Economic Perspectives - Národohospodářský obzor; Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 73-92; https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/revecp/19/2/article-p73.xml; 10.2478/revecp-2019-0005; DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/revecp-2019-0005; https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/here-is-one-of-my-best-scholarly-papers-ever/; https://pennstate.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/evolutionary-psychology-economic-freedom-trade-and-benevolence; https://www.growkudos.com/publications/10.2478%252Frevecp-2019-0005/reade; file:///C:/Users/WBlock/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/Content.Outlook/18LCUGME/18041663%20-%20Review%20of%20Economic%20Perspectives%20Evolutionary%20psychology%20economic%20freedom%20trade%20and%20benevolence.pdf
It attempts to explain why there are so few libertarians. The explanation? Our human biology! Trigger warning: don’t read this if you are easily offended.
Dear Vincent; Thanks for yet another very thoughtful comment on my substack entry. Best wishes Walter
Man's pre-civilized evolution may have favored explicit cooperation, but that only means that humans are more inclined to work together in long-lasting, frequent face-to-face interactions with each other than to rely on impersonal interactions or on infrequent or transitory relationships. Having a huge tribe utterly dominated by a remote chief is no more typical of primitive conditions of hunter/gatherers than is the market-based exchanges among lots of independent people in capitalist economies.
Contrary to socialist myths, individual liberty doesn't favor "atomization" over explicit cooperation; rather, free economies strike a balance between the decentralizing tendencies of market exchanges (taking advantage of a division of labor and knowledge among independent firms and generating the price information needed for rational calculation and accounting) versus the centralizing tendencies of voluntary associations which enable coordination of specialized labor, better promote trustworthy relationships among participants, and generally reduce transaction/overhead costs in other ways.
One should think of capitalistic commerce as a network of impersonal social interactions that overlays a foundation of numerous clusters of personal interactions--families, business firms, voluntary charities and mutual aid groups, etc.--each of which functions much more like how primitive social groupings functioned as being based upon explicit cooperation. The difference is that under modern capitalism an individual can simultaneously be a member of several _ersatz_ families as well as one's biological family; far from us being more "atomized" than in pre-capitalist times, we now participate in a richer array of more specialized social clusters that renders our explicit cooperation more productive and more customized to each of our personal needs.
In contrast to this, the explicit "cooperation" of socialism is devoid of many of the actual benefits of leaders having to interact personally with the people they are leading, of groups talking things out and coming together to form a consensus when differences of opinion emerge among clashing strong-willed members, etc. Perhaps the political success of socialists consists of hiding the evolutionary realities that central planning undermines the trust and responsible leadership that human nature requires as well as the economic realities that central planning doesn't deliver the goods and that what it actually does deliver is tyrannical regimentation.