Where do pro-social institutions come from?

Pseudoerasmus has a long and complex post on that topic. Here's the conclusion:

So to answer the question at the head of this post, “where do pro-social institutions come from?” — if ‘bad’ institutions represent coordination failures, then intelligence and patience must be a big part of the answer. This need not have the same relevance for social evolution from 100,000 BCE to 1500 CE. But for the emergence of ‘modern’, advanced societies, intelligence and patience matter.

It’s not that people’s norms and values don’t or can’t change. They do. But that does not seem enough. Solving the most complex coordination failures and collective action problems requires a lot more than just ‘good’ culture.

I am not saying intelligence and patience explain ‘everything‘, just that they seem to be an important part of how ‘good’ institutions happen. Nor am I saying that intelligence and patience are immutable quantities. Pinker argued in The Better Angels of Our Nature that the long-run secular decline in violence may be due to the Flynn Effect, the long-run secular rise in measured intelligence documented across the world:

…the pacifying effects of reason, and the Flynn Effect. We have several grounds for supposing that enhanced powers of reason—specifically, the ability to set aside immediate experience, detach oneself from a parochial vantage point, and frame one’s ideas in abstract, universal terms—would lead to better moral commitments, including an avoidance of violence.

What is the above describing, other than the increasing ability of people to empathise with a wider group of people than friends and family ? Intelligence and patience allow you to understand, and weigh, the intuitive risks and the counterintuitive benefits from collaborating with perfect strangers. With less intelligence and less patience you stick to what you know — intuit the benefits from relationships cultivated over a long time through blood ties or other intimate affiliations.

Your “moral circle” is wider with intelligence and patience than without.

In the 1990s, in the middle of free market triumphalism, it was widely assumed that if you let markets rip, the institutions necessary to their proper functioning would ‘naturally’ follow. Those with a vested interested in protecting their property rights would demand them, politically. That assumption went up in flames in the former communist countries and the developing countries under economic restructuring.

To paraphrase Garett Jones, one of the co-authors of the stag hunt study: smart, patient people are more Coasian; they find a way to cooperate and build good institutions.

H/t Tyler Cowen.