![]() The sexual and political liberation of women in the 1960s followed directly their domestic liberation from the kitchen by labour-saving electrical machinery. Those of libertarian bent often prove more generous than those of a socialist persuasion: where the socialist feels that it is government’s job to look after the poor using taxes, libertarians think it is their duty. The internet reverberates with people sharing tips for free. ![]() Charitable giving has been growing faster than the economy as a whole in recent decades. Random violence makes the news precisely because it is so rare routine kindness does not make the news precisely because it is so commonplace. So – as animal experiments have suggested – oxytocin does not affect reciprocity, just the tendency to take a social risk, to go out on a limb.Īs a broad generalisation, the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is, and trust growth seems to precede income growth. As a highly ‘groupish’ species ourselves, still given to mutual aid within groups and mutual violence between groups, it is an extraordinary thing that people can overcome their instincts enough to have social commerce with strangers. How inconceivable it would be for an orderly queue of stranger chimpanzees to board an aeroplane, or sit down in a restaurant, without turning violently on each other.Īnd generally speaking the more cooperative a species is within groups, the more hostility there is between groups. The argument is not that exchange teaches people to be kind it is that exchange teaches people to recognise their enlightened self-interest lies in seeking cooperation. Isolation – self-sufficiency – caused the shrivelling of their technology. There was nothing wrong with individual Tasmanian brains there was something wrong with their collective brains. Human beings learn skills from each other by copying prestigious individuals, and they innovate by making mistakes that are very occasionally improvements Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. Without trade, innovation just does not happen. They have found that even when hunter-gatherer women do not face a hard choice between child care and hunting, they still seek out different kinds of food from their menfolk.Īfrican-origin Homo sapiens had a sexual division of labour and Neanderthals did not, and that this was the former’s crucial ecological advantage over the latter when they came head-to-head in Eurasia 40,000 years ago.Įither the Neanderthal women sat around doing nothing, or, since they were as butch as most modern men, they went out hunting with the men. The two sexes move ‘through the same habitat, making strikingly different decisions about how to obtain resources within that habitat, and often returning to a central location with the results of their labour.’Īs one anthropologist put it after living with the Khoisan, ‘Women demand meat as their social right, and they get it – otherwise they leave their husbands, marry elsewhere or make love to other men.’Īn evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects the fire from thieves and bullies in exchange for help rearing the children, the woman brings veg and does much of the cooking. It is an iron rule documented in virtually all foraging people that ‘men hunt, women and children gather’. The first and deepest division of labour is the sexual one. In other words, cooking encourages specialisation by sex. Fundamentally, other animals do not do barter. Most species do not change their habits during their few million years on earth or alter their lifestyle much in different parts of their range.įire and cooking in turn then released the brain to grow bigger still by making food more digestible with an even smaller gut – once cooked, starch gelatinises and protein denatures, releasing far more calories for less input of energy.Īm saying that barter – the simultaneous exchange of different objects – was itself a human breakthrough, perhaps even the chief thing that led to the ecological dominance and burgeoning material prosperity of the species. ![]() ![]() The earlier study simply had samples too small to find significant differences.īizarre as this may sound, in evolutionary terms it is quite normal. Rich people are happier than poor people rich countries have happier people than poor countries and people get happier as they get richer. Had I only known it, experiments in laboratories by the economist Vernon Smith and his colleagues have long confirmed that markets in goods and services for immediate consumption – haircuts and hamburgers – work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to deliver efficiency and innovation while markets in assets are so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all. ![]()
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