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Comment by m12k | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to hear what you mean when you say the entire market works in cooperation? I mean, strategic partnerships happen, and companies work as suppliers for other companies. But that's not the market - the market is where someone wanting to buy something goes and evaluates competing products and picks the one they want to buy. It's pretty comparable to natural selection, where the fittest animals survive and the fittest companies get bigger marketshare while the least fit companies go bankrupt, and the least fit species go extinct. So I guess you could say that the market functions as an ecosystem - maybe the word you were looking for was 'symbiosis' rather than cooperation? Cheetah's aren't cooperating with lions, they are competing - but relative to the rest of the ecosystem, they exist in a form of symbiosis.

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There are various forms of cooperation too. Lions merge with cheetahs to hopefully starve the leopards out, then they domesticate emus and antelopes so that they can survive scorching the rest of the savannah so they don't have to deal with those pesky wild dogs. Then they see tigers doing the same in India and say “hey let's agree that you can run rampant through Africa if we can run rampant through India, but we agree on these shared limits so that we are not in conflict.”

A favorite example is that us legislation to ban advertisements for smoking was sponsored by the tobacco industry. They were spending a lot on ads just to keep up with the Joneses; if Camel voluntarily stopped and Marlboro continued, then Camel would go the way of Lucky Strike. They would rather agree to cut their expenditures! But they needed to make sure no other young tobacco whippersnappers came in and started showing a couple ads which they would have to both best, reigniting the war.

Open source is interesting because it seems to be a marvelous unexpected outcome from the existence of the corporation. Individual people start to work at corporations and are aware that whatever they produce at that corporation is mortal, it will die with that corporation if that corporation decides to stop maintaining it or if that corporation itself folds. The individual wants his or her labor to survive longer, to become immortal. This company could go out of business and I will still have these tools at my next job. So in some sense layered self-interests create a push towards corporate cooperation.

Trade and money are just tools to facilitate cooperation. They incentivize agents to cooperate by sharing the value of that cooperation.

'Survival of the fittest' when applied to groups implies cooperation as an essential skill between individuals. It's not all competition. The fittest group is not the one made of the most individually fit members, they also need to function well together.

"selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary."

-David Sloan & E. O. Wilson

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