People are more generous than you may think

Are human beings fundamentally good or fundamentally bad? Are people mostly generous, or are they mostly selfish?

Over the centuries, many of our leading lights have taken the view that people are basically selfish. Machiavelli argued that people are deceitful, ungrateful and covetous. Classical economics is based on the idea that people relentlessly pursue their self-interest. “The average human being is about 95 per cent selfish in the narrow meaning of the term,” economist Gordon Tullock once wrote. In his book The Selfish Gene, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argued: “We are born selfish.” In the public at large, only 30 per cent of Americans say they can trust the people around them, suggesting quite a grim view of human nature.