Why do human beings prosper?
Bart Wilson’s research uses experimental economics to explore the origins of property and the human propensity to truck, barter, and exchange. He also studies how Adam Smith’s ideas in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations can inform the modern study of economics and our interpretation of economic experiments. Another of his research programs compares social decision making in humans, apes, and monkeys. He is the author of Meaningful Economics (forthcoming) and The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind, both published by Oxford University Press, and co-author of Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century, published by Cambridge University Press.
Research
Property
As Adam Ferguson describes many human institutions, property is “indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” Bart designs economic experiments to explore how property emerges in the Wild Wild West of a virtual world. By randomly assigning participants to different treatments and replicating the same ecological and institutional conditions within a treatment, we can begin to trace out how the rules and order of property form, or fail to form, in human communities.
Adam Smithian Moral and Economic Science
The ubiquitous modern use of behavior—the manner in which a thing acts in relation to other things—would have been foreign to Adam Smith when talking about what human beings do. The words behavior and conduct in the 18th century always connoted an evaluation of doing something good or bad, ranging from everyday manners to morally hefty deeds. Bart investigates how Adam Smith’s first great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, informs and is informed by modern economic experiments on human conduct. He is also currently working on a semantic analysis of the economic principles in the Wealth of Nations.
Political Economy in the Laboratory
Humans are the only species to compete group on group, and humans are the only species to routinely exchange one thing for another thing. Humans are also the only species to convert enemy aliens into honorary friends through exchange. Using virtual world experiments, Bart studies how people build networks of exchange and specialization, and how communities mitigate, or fail to mitigate, conflict that would destroy prosperity.
Nonhuman and Human Primates
Working with primatologists, Bart tests whether humans, chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys, and rhesus macaques share basic decision-making strategies in simple games when the implementation is designed to be as identical as possible between species. He also uses virtual world models of humans to test socioecological theories of wild primates that cannot be practically or ethically conducted in the field.
Books
The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind
Oxford University Press, 2020
Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century
Cambridge University Press, 2019