SELFISH COOPERATION How Interactions Build, Share, and Erode Our Capabilities

Selfish Cooperation develops the Productive Value–Productive Power (PV-PP) framework, an account of how people interact, what they become capable of afterward, and how that capability is built, shared, and lost. Productive Value is what is transferred, delivered, realized, or otherwise conveyed through an interaction: care, labor, information, teaching, money, protection, goods, and services. Productive Power is the actual capacity, under stated conditions, to generate, preserve, protect, recover, or otherwise produce Productive Value. Harms are recorded by what they do to the people affected, not as negative value, and money, relationships, and institutions can enable capability without being capability themselves. The book's central claim is that any action worth taking seriously has to be assessed for viability: it requires information adequate to the stakes, the capacity to carry it out, attention to its consequences, a realistic way to recover if it fails, and respect for constraints that capacity alone cannot override. The book applies the framework from perception and choice through childhood development, family care, trust, technology, conflict, markets, insurance, institutions, and public authority, and to autonomous artificial agents acting on people's behalf. The framework does not treat Productive Power as a measure of human worth, reduce value to price, or collapse capacity into a single score, and it does not replace the disciplines it draws on. This Edition 2.3 is aligned with Version 2.3 of the framework, whose formal specifications are published separately. The two artificial-agent case studies in Chapter 18 were carried out on Version 2.1. Open questions are collected in a closing section, and Appendix A describes the role of AI systems in the work.