And in such an "altruistic economic" framework -- which by definition seems to ascribe a primary "value" to the quality of human relations -- there is more than the financial cost to consider.  You have to take into consideration the social cost -- and benefit -- of calling back, or not calling back.

Sometimes I call back -- even when I think the other person might be trying to take advantage of me financially -- if I think the social benefit of calling back outweighs the financial cost plus the social cost of refusing to call back.

I think this dynamic might have been at work in Japan's post-WWII life-time employment system, where "unproductive", often older workers, were guaranteed employment -- usually at very high salaries -- until official retirement age.  The system, I think, was valuing loyalty, feelings of membership and security, cooperativeness, harmony, over individualistic, competitive profit-orientation.

In short, while it might have cost companies more financially to keep such workers on the payroll (i.e. to "call them back"), the overall social benefits of such a system outweighed the financial costs.  (Alternatively, you could say the social costs for the companies of laying off such workers would have outweighed the financial benefits of doing so.)

Of course, that system has been changing quite rapidly in recent years.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.

Once upon a time, when I was learning the basics of Operations Research, I was introduced to several different ways to decide among alternative strategies.

This was in a game theory framework, but in decision theory "the other player" is often "nature" and its "strategies" are possible random aoutcomes or "states of nature" [for instance, whether it will rain tomorrow]. A payoff matrix was assumed.

However, in order to analyse the payoff matrix, one could use either the payoffs themselves, or the regret.

The regret was the difference between the best possible payoff given a state of nature (i.e., with hindsight) and the actual payoff.

The strategies that we were introduced to were

• maximize expected payoff
  
• "max-min payoff": for each strategy, find the worst possible payoff, then choose the strategy that maximizes that payoff
  
• minimize expected regret
  
• "min-max regret": for each stragegy, find the worst possible regret, then choose the strategy that minimizes that regret

There is some research  being done at the University of Zürich on so-called "parochial altruism", whereby

Favoring of the own group and indifference with  respect to members of other groups is probably a deeply embedded basic impulse, shaped by evolution, which still continues to play a role in present times.

The scientists examined the extent to which members of various tribes in Papua New Guinea
were prepared to incur costs themselves in order to punish violations of the equity norm.  They found that the subjects were much less willing to punish a norm violation if the victim was a member of a different tribe. The protection of members of other tribes by means of the threat of altruistic punishment was relatively low, regardless of whether the norm violator was from their own or a different tribe. It was also apparent that a norm violator expects to be punished less if the punisher is from his or her own tribe; the equity norm was thus violated particularly often in this case.

(bold in the original)

The Proper Study Of Mankind provides a detailed review of the paper in Nature in which this research was presented, concluding:

Without taking into account the factors that influence the balance of cooperation and conflict between groups, this finding is puzzling. One suggestion for it is that punishing an outgroup member who harms an ingroup member might enhance the security of the ingroup by sending out the message "You mess with one of us, you mess with us all". Just like in gang culture, groups that are known to protect their own with a swift and aggressive response confer a degree of protection on each individual member, as no would-be outgroup aggravator want to bring trouble on their own head.

Although the difference standards to which ingroup and outgroup members were held in this study had no harmful real-world consequences, they are a reminder of how, in one another's eyes, we are not all equal: some -- our ingroup -- are more equal than others. This bias, stoked by religious, political or territorial disputes, can easily lead to a moral distancing of `them', and justify whatever actions are perpetrated in `our' name -- the consequences of which we all too frequently read about. Perhaps being aware of this potentially dangerous proclivity for parochialism in the social and moral realms, we can take steps to resist the urge and develop an expanded, more encompassing, social and moral framework.

I agree.  In addition to embracing the altruistic/cooperative tendencies of our human nature, I think we also need to develop and embrace a broader, "more encompassing, social and moral framework" for humanity across the globe, by which we identify with other humans not primarily and not merely through contingent cultural, physiological and territorial similarities, but through our universal and common predicament as inhabitants of this planet.

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.