Marxist Gorillas and Chimpanzee Capitalists?
Caught my eye today: The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans and other Tales From Evolutionary Economics by Michael Shermer. A premise that intuitively makes sense to me ( and therefore, I’ll have to read it with a critical eye).
Going to have to pick this one up.
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Interesting!
My guess is that you have a species-general Orientation capacity, which may vary in what specifically it wants but has a "psychic unity" when it comes to rapidly processing complex situations… And a limited Decision-making ability, which is capable of making logical judgments, is strictly limited by working memory, and varies substantially between and within groups.
Applied to economics, presumably we all make "irrational" decisions the same way, and the ability to consistently make "rational" decisions would be rare & frail, indeed.
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Hi Dan,
"Applied to economics, presumably we all make "irrational" decisions the same way, and the ability to consistently make "rational" decisions would be rare & frail, indeed."
We cannot make rational decisions consistently . Rationality is an epistemological strategy – a process – but having that process yield objectively rational outcomes is heavily dependent on the quality of information available and understood (i.e. Coase etc.) plus in many cases, no small measure of the ability to execute our rational concepts. Often times, our reach exceeds our grasp and this renders our rationality a relative state.
Frail and imperfect, rationality is nevertheless an exceedingly powerful tool. Only a few of us have to be able to be rational some of the time for all of us to make longitudinal gains. Markets, of course, are supremely efficient feedback loops for transmitting information and distributing the fruits of our infrequent "rational moments".
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Having just watched a marathon of all five "Planet of the Apes" movies on AMC this past NYEve/NYDay (OK, 3/5ths of them — I got close to the end of "Escape From …" before dozing off), this strikes me as a very "timely" title!
January 2nd, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Mark,
The Mises blog had a write-up about this book (actually an excerpt from a Scientific American article.) The Mises link: http://blog.mises.org/archives/007603.asp and the SciAm link: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=evonomics-skeptic-january-2008
Sounds like an interesting book.
Regards,
TDL
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:25 pm
Ha! I have my copy in hand gentlemen.
Hi Shane,
Ahem…" Get your paws off me you damn dirty ape!"
Hi TDL,
Much thanks – both links were interesting and a nice preview.
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:52 am
Having asked three times to my wife before she married, she once inquired why I insisted three times, why didn’t I turned away after she turned me down the first time and then how, after she turned me down a second time, I still pushed my luck a third time. She knows I don’t like to beg to get the things I want. I couldn’t tell why, but perhaps I was only bargaining, or maybe I was simply trying to make another sale, being as how I am a salesman, except this time it was the sale of my life, and when you are in sales, you have to insist a lot of times. I guess I don’t know, but in sales, just like in the market, you knock a door here today to offer a product and they don’t buy, but that doesn’t mean they won’t buy the same product tomorrow, the circumstances and factors are endless and today is a totally different day from yesterday.I guess it is hard to understand the nature of markets, but I believe there is indeed a "nature" to it, and so much so that I believe it resembles our own very human nature in more ways than we can imagine.I never regret asking my wife three times to marry me, I am happy and I know she is also happy, after 12 years and a son. Yet, I often wonder whether that which we call "the market", encompasses far more than goods to trade, than stocks and currencies to exchange, I wonder whether it encompasses our hearts and minds and ultimately our lives too.