A Snippet from Max Weber

The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalistic development, measured according to Occidental standards, has remained backward. As every employer knows, the lack of coscienziosita of the labourers of such countries, for instance Italy as compared with Germany, has been, and to a certain extent still is, one of the principal obstacles to their capitalistic development. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905 (pub 1920). ,p57


This probably has something to do with defector / cheater finding and the bonds of trust required for reciprocity and a stable system. The question is as the scale increases, do the controlling effects of trust and consistency still hold? Is the kind of dog-eat-dog self-destructive caricature of crass exploitation an inevitable end-state? Marx thinks and Schumpeter fears that it is.