We define cooperation as individuals or groups acting together, with collective forethought, to greater effect, so as to make the value of the whole exceed the value of the parts that go into cooperating. For example, alone I make 10 units of something, alone you do also, but we decide to work together because we believe that by doing so, we will make more than 20 units and both enjoy a higher payoff.

An improving material quality of life requires more output per person over time. This cannot be achieved by behavior that just moves resources around. It can only be achieved by behavior that results in the value of the whole somehow ending up greater than the value of the sum of the parts – by cooperating in some way.

An underappreciated attribute of cooperation is that it is consistent with liberty. If we individually make 10, but together we both think we could make 26 and split it, we don’t have to be forced to cooperate. Moreover, the common good is best promoted by having people seek out partners for cooperation that produce the largest cooperative surpluses, which is what rational and free individuals would seek to do.

Another underappreciated attribute of cooperation is that it co-evolved with entrepreneurship. Occasionally an individual would recognize that he or she could produce a better outcome by figuring out a better way to cooperate. This required imagination, creativity, and courage especially, because it carried the risk of wasting everyone’s time and physical resources if things didn’t work out. But if things did work out, our ancestral entrepreneurs benefitted themselves and everyone else, thereby engendering the admiration and gratitude of fellow members of the tribe.

Just as individuals can cooperate, so can groups, organizations, or even entire societies. All that is required is for there to be a cooperative surplus. Cooperation can drive the evolution of culture, institutions, organizations, and societies in the same way that survival drives the evolution of living organisms.

With living organisms the story of how they evolved can be so complicated as to be incomprehensible in all its detail, so it can only be told in broad strokes. But even a broad stroke understanding of how living organisms evolved is a giant intellectual achievement. And so it is for understanding how the civilizations humans went on to build evolved.

From the very first lesson, Cooperation Civics teaches students the logic of cooperation. It then prepares them to understand how the gains from cooperation drove the evolution of our species, our groups, our societies, and civilization itself. But cooperation didn’t stop there. It went on to drive the evolution of America’s free market democracy and constitutional republic.