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The Company of Strangers
« on: 2004-08-12 19:55:30 » |
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The evolution of everyday life
http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3084745
“OUR everyday life is much stranger than we imagine, and rests on fragile foundations.” This is the intriguing first sentence of a very unusual new book about economics, and much else besides: “The Company of Strangers”, by Paul Seabright, a professor of economics at the University of Toulouse. (The book is published by Princeton University Press.) Why is everyday life so strange? Because, explains Mr Seabright, it is so much at odds with what would have seemed, as recently as 10,000 years ago, our evolutionary destiny. It was only then that “one of the most aggressive and elusive bandit species in the entire animal kingdom” decided to settle down. In no more than the blink of an eye, in evolutionary time, these suspicious and untrusting creatures, these “shy, murderous apes”, developed co-operative networks of staggering scope and complexity—networks that rely on trust among strangers.
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