English
 
Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT
Add to Basket
  Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released
Journal Article

Eliminating poverty through social mobility promotes cooperation in social dilemmas

Authors

Li,  Wen-Jing
External Organizations;

Chen,  Zhi
External Organizations;

Jin,  Ke-Zhong
External Organizations;

Li,  Lan
External Organizations;

Yuan,  Lin
External Organizations;

Jiang,  Luo-Luo
External Organizations;

Perc,  Matjaž
External Organizations;

/persons/resource/Juergen.Kurths

Kurths,  Jürgen
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research;

External Ressource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (public)
There are no public fulltexts stored in PIKpublic
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Li, W.-J., Chen, Z., Jin, K.-Z., Li, L., Yuan, L., Jiang, L.-L., Perc, M., Kurths, J. (2022): Eliminating poverty through social mobility promotes cooperation in social dilemmas. - Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, 156, 111845.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chaos.2022.111845


Cite as: https://publications.pik-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_27030
Abstract
Numerous social problems can be directly related to poverty, and its elimination is thus often declared a grand challenge in modern human societies. Nevertheless, it is difficult to shake the belief that certain fractions of the population would like to see it maintained to ensure the availability of cheap workforce and its readiness to do the hardest jobs, as well as to keep the prices of natural resources in the afflicted countries as low as possible. Here we show, however, that by allowing low-income individuals to escape poverty, either by means of mobility to pursue potential opportunities in remote areas or by ending dilemmas through social learning in local areas, greatly increases cooperation and thus has the potential to raise the social capital. In particular, we find that mobility of low-income individuals can promote cooperation when the per capita mobility rate is as low as in the order of magnitude as long as network reciprocity is still active. This synergy between network reciprocity and mobility is due to the emergence of large cooperative clusters that are in this size impossible without mobility. Moreover, we find that the mobility of defectors undermines cooperation, but only a few defectors actually move as they are typically well off when surrounded by cooperators. On the contrary, the higher the cooperation level, the greater the proportion of low-income cooperator that move. Our research thus shows that by providing ways out of poverty for individuals can raise whole societies out of economic gridlocks by elevating cooperation levels.