There is a lesson here not just for policymakers but also for the rest of us. “It is human nature always to want a little more,” writes the psychologist Timothy Miller in the recent book How to Want What You Have, perhaps the first self-help book based explicitly on evolutionary psychology. “People spend their lives honestly believing that they have almost enough of whatever they want. Just a little more will put them over the top; then they will be contented forever.” This is a built-in illusion, Miller notes, engrained in our minds by natural selection.<\/p>\n
The illusion was designed to keep us constantly striving, adding tiny increments to the chances that our genes would get into the next generation. Yet in a modern environment–which, unlike the ancestral environment, features contraception–our obsession with material gain rarely has that effect. Besides, why should any of us choose to pursue maximum genetic proliferation–or relentless material gain, or anything else–just because that is high on the agenda of the process that designed the human mind? Natural selection, for better or worse, is our creator, but it isn’t God; the impulses it implanted into our minds aren’t necessarily good, and they aren’t wholly beyond resisting.<\/p>\n
Part of Miller’s point is that the instinctive but ultimately fruitless pursuit of More–the 60-hour workweeks, the hour a month spent perusing the Sharper Image catalog–keeps us from indulging what Darwin called “the social instincts.” The pursuit of More can keep us from better knowing our neighbors, better loving our kin-in general, from cultivating the warm, affiliative side of human nature whose roots science is just now starting to fathom.<\/p>\n