ملاحظات
الثقة والذعر: مقدمة الطبعة المنقحة
(1)
Global
Financial Stability Report,
International Monetary Fund. The figure of
nearly $9000 per person comes from
dividing the IMF’s headline figure of
$2.7 trillion of write-downs on
U. S.-originated assets by the current U. S.
population of 306
million.
(2)
See Goode & Ben-Yehuda 1994,
especially the prologue and chapter
10.
(3)
For an excellent overview and
introduction to the literature and other
resources on this episode, see
www.xhosacattlekilling.net
(accessed October 22,
2009).
(4)
The classic study of this is by
Edgar Morin (1971).
(5)
The main phases in human evolution
are discussed accessibly in Klein & Edgar
(2002) and Stronger & Andres (2005), more
technically and comprehensively in Klein (2009).
Many specialists uses the subspecies name
Homo sapiens
sapiens to refer to fully modern
humans (those of whom we have evidence only in
the last fifty thousand years), leaving open
whether earlier humans should also be considered
members of Homo
sapiens. I follow this usage
here.
(6)
See Ridley 1996, especially chapter
2.
(7)
Ants are sisters, but share
three-quarters of their genes, as explained in
Hölldobler & Wilson (1994, pp.
95–106).
(8)
This theory was due originally to
Hamilton (1964), and the classic popular
exposition is given in Dawkins (1976). However,
Hölldobler & Wilson (2008) have suggested
that kin selection may not be enough on its own
to explain the evolution of eusociality, and
propose a contribution from group selection
mechanisms.
(9)
When biologists speak of
individuals “sharing” genes, they are referring
to those genes that vary across members of the
same species. The great majority of human genes
are common to the whole species; indeed, most
are shared with other primates. For the theory
of kin selection, what matters is the
probability that two individuals share a
mutation that first appeared in the genome of
their most recent common ancestor. This
probability is given by the proportion of genes
that have been inherited from their most recent
common ancestor, instead of from other
ancestors—even if the ones inherited from other
ancestors are, at most loci,
identical.
(10)
Recent DNA evidence for chimpanzees
suggests that the degree of relatedness of male
chimpanzees in a typical group may be less close
than had previously been thought (see Lukas et
al. 2005). In particular, relatedness of males
(who typically remain in the group on becoming
adult) may be little greater than that of
females (who come into the group from outside as
adolescents). This evidence needs to be
confirmed more widely, but if correct would
imply that explanations for chimp cooperation
based on kin selection would need supplementing
by other mechanisms.
(11)
See Dawkins (1976) for
sticklebacks, Wilkinson (1990) for vampire bats,
and Pusey & Packer (1983) for lions. The
theory explaining such behavior, known as
“reciprocal altruism,” is due to Trivers
(1971).
(12)
See Bishop 1992, pp. 125,
192.
(13)
Of course, if one counted same-
and
opposite-sex ancestors, potentially doubling the
numbers at each generation, the total would be
vastly greater.
(14)
See Cavalli-Sforza 2000, pp.
45-46.
(15)
Cochrane & Harpending (2009)
make this case forcefully, although as they
admit some of the elements of the case are
conjectural, particularly for genes affecting
complex behavioral traits. In particular, it is
hard to know how fast the spread of advantageous
traits would have been through a population
dispersed across the
globe.
(16)
The evolution of human
consciousness is brilliantly discussed in Mithen
(1996); early development of these ideas was by
Humphrey (1984). Klein & Edgar (2002) and
Klein (2009) give clear accounts of the main
questions and uncertainties surrounding the
evolution of symbolic capacity in man; for a
view placing the key developments later, see
Renfrew (2007). Deacon (1997) is a comprehensive
account of the challenges facing an evolutionary
account of symbolic ability. Tomasello (1999)
links human cultural capacities to an evolved
ability to put ourselves in the position of the
psychological responses of others. This ability
was adaptive because it improved our powers to
predict and it had dramatic consequences for the
cumulative nature of our culture because it
enormously increased our ability to imitate the
behavior of those others. These arguments are
discussed in more detail in chapter
14.
(17)
The last common ancestor through
the maternal line of all human beings alive
today lived around 140000 years ago (see
Cavalli-Sforza 2000, pp. 77–82; Cavalli-Sforza
& Feldman 2003). The last common ancestor
through the paternal line lived more recently,
perhaps 50000 years ago (see Thomson et al.
2000); this reflects the fact that the most
reproductively successful males can have more
children than the most reproductively successful
females, so their genes spread faster through
the population. The last common ancestor whose
inheritance passed through both lines very
probably lived much more recently, possibly even
as recently as 2000–5000 years ago (Rohde et al.
2004). However, because of genetic recombination
the probability that any mutation in that
individual would have been transmitted to all
living descendants is vanishingly small.
Sufficiently adaptive mutations in such an
individual might establish themselves in a large
proportion of living descendants within one or
two thousand years, especially if such an
individual lived in a place that was a center of
commerce and migration (see also Cochrane
& Harpending 2009). This explains the
widespread prevalence of certain alleles such as
those coding for malarial resistance or lactose
tolerance in adults. But it seems unlikely that
those coding for whatever changes enabled human
symbolic capacity were of such recent origin
given their widespread
prevalence.
(18)
The puzzle of multiple discoveries
of agriculture is discussed in Richerson et al.
(2001). See also the prologue to part
IV.
(19)
Blackmore (1999) emphasizes that we
cannot conclude that the evolution of human
institutions (which are one form of the behavior
patterns she calls, following Dawkins (1976),
“memes”) is beneficial for human beings, or even
for their genes. She argues that “what makes us
different [from other animals] is our ability to
imitate” and stresses that once behavior
patterns are imitated, “something is passed on.
This ‘something’ can then be passed on again,
and again, and so take on a life of its own.”
Memes evolve, in other words, for the good of
the memes and not for the good of anyone or
anything else. Nevertheless, we can investigate
whether human psychology, as shaped by natural
selection, makes it easier for certain memes to
spread than for others; the extent to which meme
evolution is thus constrained by psychology is
an empirical question.
(20)
See Sterelny
2003.
(21)
This is well expressed in Cowen
(2009).
(22)
See Cosmides & Tooby (1992)
and other contributions to the same volume. Buss
(2008) is a textbook treatment. Buller (2005)
challenges the main claims of evolutionary
psychology on a number of grounds, including its
neglect of the diversity of psychological traits
in human populations and of the extent to which
even apparently uniform and stable adult traits
may be learned rather than inherited. The
arguments developed in this book are not subject
to the criticisms leveled by Buller, as I
discuss in more detail in part
II.
الجزء الأول: الرؤية الضيقة
الفصل الأول: من المسئول؟
(1)
The startling character of
cooperative exchange involved in the production
of even simple objects is not a new observation;
see, for example, the discussion of pencils in
Friedman & Friedman (1990, pp. 11–13). In
2009 an artist named Thomas Thwaites decided to
try producing a toaster “from scratch—beginning
by mining the raw materials and ending with a
product that Argos sells for £3.99.” See
www.thetoasterproject.org
(accessed October 22, 2009)—interestingly, the
way the artist found to smelt the iron ore into
steel was to use a microwave, so this was hardly
an example of economic self-sufficiency. Stephen
Dubner has drawn attention to the following
passage in the Babylonian Talmud (Tractate
Berachot 58a) that predates Adam Smith’s famous
tale of the Babylonian pin factory by some 1500
years:
Ben Zoma once saw a crowd on
one of the steps of the Temple Mount. He
said, Blessed is He that discerneth secrets,
and blessed is He who has created all these
to serve me. [For] he used to say: What
labours Adam had to carry out before he
obtained bread to eat! He ploughed, he
sowed, he reaped, he bound [the sheaves], he
threshed and winnowed and selected the ears,
he ground [them], and sifted [the flour], he
kneaded and baked, and then at last he ate;
whereas I get up, and find all these things
done for me.
And how many labours Adam had
to carry out before he obtained a garment to
wear! He had to shear, wash [the wool], comb
it, spin it, and weave it, and then at last
he obtained a garment to wear; whereas I get
up andfind all these things done for me. All
kinds of craftsmen come early to the door of
my house, and I rise in the morning and find
all these before me.
(2)
Terkel 1974.
(3)
Hamermesh (2005) has studied
routine as a characteristic of different kinds
of work and documents its links to income and
education levels. He describes these links as
“yet another avenue by which standard measures
of income inequality understate total economic
inequality.”
(4)
Hacking (1990) is a fascinating
account of the rise of statistics as a
discipline and the wonder provoked in its
practitioners by the apparent regularity of
human behavior in large
numbers.
(5)
The proportion of jobs in rich
countries lost through international competition
is by most estimates smaller than the proportion
lost through technical change. See Bourguignon
et al. (2002) for a summary of these issues.
Nevertheless, the spectacular recent growth of
China and India, as well as the growing
importance of service jobs outsourced compared
to manufacturing jobs, makes the potential
structural effects of international competition
somewhat larger than they appeared at the time
of the first edition. See Coe
(2008).
(6)
See the discussion in Sivéry 2000,
especially pp. 44–47, and also De Vries 1976,
especially chapter 2 and pp. 159–64. I am
grateful to Sheilagh Ogilvie for these
references.
(7)
Packard
1957.
(8)
Klein 2001—Naomi, not
Richard.
(9)
Cited in Jones 1988, p.
151.
(10)
Tolstoy 1971, p.
1188.
مقدمة إلى الجزء الثاني
(1)
See Wrangham & Peterson (1996),
Bowles (2009), and the more detailed discussion of this
evidence in chapter 3.
(2)
Though not quite indistinguishable: human
brain size has fallen since around fifty thousand years
ago, and some of this fall may have taken place in the
last twelve thousand years. One theory (see Wrangham
2003; Cochrane & Harpending 2009) suggests this
may have been due to a process like the domestication of
animals, in which particularly violent or antisocial
individuals had their breeding possibilities reduced
through ostracism. Domesticated animals typically have
brains smaller than their wild relatives. It is too
early yet to say whether this theory will prove
persuasive, but we can be confident that it will not
remove the need to explain how human institutions have
managed to tame the violence of which our species is
still capable.
الجزء الثاني: من قردة عُليا سفَّاكة للدماء إلى أصدقاء اعتباريِّين: كيف صار التعاون الإنساني مُمكنًا؟
الفصل الثاني: الإنسان ومخاطر الطبيعة
(1)
In the first edition I phrased the
second point slightly differently, as
“grand-children have been, again on average,
very slightly more intelligent than their
grandparents.” However, Professor Kimmo Eriksson
of Mälardalen University in Sweden has kindly
pointed out that this is not strictly true. As
he explains, “since intelligence has de facto
increased, the positive effect of natural
selection must more than cancel the negative
average effect of mutations. However, from
grandparents to grandchildren there are two
rounds of mutation and only one round of natural
selection, so the negative effect will probably
still dominate” (personal communication). This
explains the sadly less elegant formulation to
which I have resorted for this edition. I am
grateful to Professor Eriksson for this
clarification.
(2)
Suppose that of a population of 200
million, 20 million have a certain condition.
Then a test with 99 per cent reliability,
applied to the whole population, will generate
19.8 million true positives and 1.8 million
false positives. This means that if you test
positive, you have a probability of just over 90
per cent of having the condition. If the
condition is much rarer, affecting only 20000 in
the population, then the test will generate
19800 true positives and 1.98 million false
positives. This means that even if you test
positive, the probability you have the condition
is still only a little over 1 per cent, namely,
19800 as a proportion of 1.98 million plus
19800. This idea is embodied in the statistical
theorem known as Bayes
Law.
(3)
See Hacking
1990.
(4)
Dunbar 1992.
(5)
Ricardo
1817.
(6)
See Perrin (1979) for an account of
how Japan gave up guns in the mid sixteenth
century and reverted to the
sword.
(7)
Klein & Edgar
2002.
(8)
Ridley 1996, pp.
197ff.
(9)
Originally by Peltzman (1975). See
also Evans & Graham (1991). Peterson et
al. (1994) make a similar investigation of
airbags. Walker (2006) reports that drivers
drive more closely to cyclists who wear safety
helmets. However, Sen & Mizzen (2007)
have provided some reasons to be skeptical about
the size of the effects measured in other
studies. They point out that sometimes seat-belt
use or the purchase of cars with airbags may be
prompted by drivers’ recognition of preexisting
dangers, so the measured association may mean
that high risk causes the adoption of safety
measures, rather than vice versa. Overall, it
seems reasonable to expect that there is some
offsetting effect of riskier behavior when
protective equipment is used, though not enough
to neutralize entirely the protective effect of
the equipment.
(10)
Adams (1995), who writes accessibly
about the theory of risk compensation in
general.
(11)
For the evolution of European
economies away from peasant self-sufficiency,
see De Vries (1974) for the Netherlands, De
Vries (1976, especially chapter 2) for Europe
more generally, Britnell (1997) for England, and
Ogilvie (2000, especially pp. 94–108) for an
overview. I am grateful to Sheilagh Ogilvie and
Leigh Shaw-Taylor for these references. Leigh
Shaw-Taylor has also shown me unpublished
evidence from English poll tax records
suggesting that as early as 1381, peasants
numbered a quarter or less of the population in
many villages and were typically outnumbered by
craftsmen and traders. For more anecdotal
information about North America, used to support
a theory of historical changes in
self-sufficiency, see Locay
(1990).
(12)
Anderson 2000, pp.
326–28.
الفصل الثالث: العنف عبر التاريخ الإنساني
(1)
Dostoyevsky
1865.
(2)
For the evidence that men are, on
average, more violent than women, see Daly
& Wilson (1988), Wrangham &
Peterson (1996), Barash & Lipton (2002),
and Ghiglieri (1999); Barash (2002) provides a
summary. Needless to say, all such comparisons
are based on averages of behavior patterns in
the populations in question and do not imply
biological determinism in any individual
case.
(3)
So, of course, does killing a
related member of the same sex and species, but
the rivalry is less intense because of the
shared genes.
(4)
Act 4, scene
3.
(5)
Evidence from a preindustrial
society (specifically, the Yanomamo of
Venezuela) that men who kill others have more
children is found in Chagnon (1988), though it
is also a plausible inference from other
ethnographic studies, such as Meggitt (1977).
Robarchek & Robarchek (1997, p. 133) cite
data that appear to support this inference,
though they themselves have doubts about its
validity.
(6)
Andersson (1994) discusses the
theory of sexual selection at length. It is
discussed specifically in relation to violence
in Ghiglieri (1999). Sexual selection was
central to Charles Darwin’s vision of human
society, as I discuss in Seabright (2009b) and
as documented by Desmond & Moore (2009).
The role of sexual selection in generating
conflict, both between the sexes and among
members of the same sex, has generated a good
deal of recent research, summarized in Arnqvist
& Rowe (2005). This research has been
criticized by Roughgarden (2004, 2009). Her
criticism wrongly interprets the notion of
sexual conflict as implying that the interests
of the sexes are opposed; in fact, they have
many interests in common and only some that
diverge. Nevertheless, she provides much
fascinating empirical material showing how
varied are the traits that have evolved under
sexual selection—a point, incidentally, with
which I believe Darwin would have been in much
fuller agreement than she
concedes.
(7)
Evidence about infanticide in
primates is set out in De Waal (2001, especially
at pp. 27, 30, 60-61, and 88-89). It is also
discussed, in relation to primate and human
violence more generally, in Ghiglieri (1999,
especially pp. 129–33), though Ghiglieri
overlooks the evidence that bonobos are
strikingly less violent than chimpanzees.
Diamond (1993, pp. 290–94) discusses the
relevance for humans of intraspecies violence in
nonhuman species and gives a graphic description
of the violence witnessed by Jane Goodall and
her team. This violence is also described by
Ghiglieri (1999, pp. 172–77), who points out
that in the chimpanzee groups he observed,
recorded violence was lower than in the Goodall
groups, apparently because the former had
reached a more stable accommodation between
groups: each group had enough males to make
defense possible without making attack
attractive. The best (and best-written) overview
of great-ape violence is certainly Wrangham
& Peterson (1996), which is more balanced
and less sensationalist than its title (“Demonic
Males”) might lead one to
expect.
(8)
Lorenz 1963.
(9)
The evidence about human violence
in general is controversial, and questions about
causality (such as whether there is an
“instinct” for violence) are even more
controversial than questions about the incidence
of violence at particular times and places. For
the argument I advance in this chapter it is
enough to show that human societies have usually
been violent in the absence of institutions for
deterring violent behavior. Gat (2006) is far
the best overall treatment. Bowles (2009) is a
careful summary of evidence about violence among
foragers. Ember (1978) is an early survey of
warfare (inter alia) among hunter-gatherers, and
Gat (2000a,b) among preindustrial societies more
generally. Ferguson & Gat (2000) debate
the reliability of this evidence. Gat (1999,
2006) also contain evidence about the nature and
purposes of such violence. A sobering overview
of the human species’ capacity for murderous
violence is Diamond (1993, chapter 16).
Robarchek & Robarchek (1997) compare two
societies that, at the time of observation, had
very different violence levels, though the more
peaceful community (the Semai Senoi of Malaysia)
had in previous years been successfully
recruited into the anticommunist armies used by
the British colonial administration, where they
became ruthless and efficient killers (Ghiglieri
1999, p. 185).
(10)
See Gat 1999 and Knauft
1990.
(11)
See Kent 1989 and Baker et al.
2006.
(12)
See Edgerton 1992 and Leblanc
2003.
(13)
Ember 1978.
(14)
Leblanc
1999.
(15)
Meggitt
1977.
(16)
Zollikofer et al.
2002.
(17)
Keeley 1996, appendix, table
6.2.
(18)
Bowles 2009.
(19)
World Health Organization,
Mortality Database.
(20)
Eisner 2001.
(21)
Levy 1983.
(22)
Matthew White, Historical Atlas of
the Twentieth Century, published on line at
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/war-1900.htm.
Although not a refereed source this is carefully
assembled and seems to have the right orders of
magnitude.
الفصل الرابع: كيف روَّضنا غرائز العنف؟
(1)
See Seabright 1993 for a
survey.
(2)
Summarized in Fehr & Gächter
2000a.
(3)
Fehr et al.
1993.
(4)
Fehr & Gächter
2000b.
(5)
Ibid.
(6)
Gintis et al. 2003; Henrich et al.
2006.
(7)
de Quervain et al.
2004.
(8)
Basu 1984.
(9)
Durant 1926, p. 307. I am grateful
to Stanley Engerman for pointing this out to
me.
(10)
However, the strength of the
reciprocity motivation may have important
implications for the ways in which cooperative
behavior can be encouraged in practice. For
instance, there is evidence that increasing
penalties for tax evasion may sometimes result
in reduced tax compliance, because it is
interpreted by previously honest taxpayers as a
signal that many others are dishonest, thereby
prompting them to reduce their own compliance;
see Kahan 2003.
(11)
Elias 1969. This was the first
volume; the second is Elias
1982.
(12)
Duerr 2000.
(13)
Clark 2007, p. 10. For a vigorous
critique of Clark’s argument, see Bowles
2007.
(14)
Gat 2006.
(15)
Binmore 1998, p.
87.
(16)
Gintis 2006.
(17)
Cosmides & Tooby 1992. I
discuss in chapter 5 some controversies
surrounding the interpretation of these
findings.
(18)
This argument is due originally to
Frank (1988).
(19)
Owren & Bachorowski
2001.
(20)
But see Chevalier-Skolnikoff (1973)
and Preuschoft (1992). Preuschoft & van
Hooff (1997) discuss in detail the relations
between human smiling and laughter and other
similar primate expressions such as the “play
face.”
(21)
Ekman et al. 1988; Frank et al.
1993. Mehu et al. (2007) show that smiles in
general are associated with cooperative
dispositions and are found frequently in
situations involving
sharing.
(22)
Krumhuber et al.
2007.
(23)
There are other theories of the
evolution of laughter, not necessarily
incompatible with the one outlined here. For
instance, Ramachandran & Blakeslee (1999)
propose that laughter evolved to signal to other
members of a social group that a feared threat
(from a predator, for instance) is in fact not
serious. This makes sense of the resemblance to
the “play face” and could explain why we laugh
in relief. This could in turn account for the
use of laughter to signal to a listener that the
person laughing is not himself a
threat.
(24)
Gray & McNaughton 2000,
chapter 4.
(25)
It’s true that drinks tend to be
served after agreements are signed, but trust is
as important after the agreement as before: each
party still needs to decide whether it can trust
the other to stick to the
agreement.
(26)
Mark Greenberg points out that what
biologists call the handicap principle (see
Zahavi 1975) may also be at work; by drinking
alcohol in your company, I am signaling that I
am so confident in my skill at discerning your
trustworthiness that I am willing to disable it
with a powerful depressant drug. This can work
both to reassure you that I intend to trust you
(by behaving in a trustworthy manner myself)
and to
warn you how quickly you will be discovered if
you betray that trust.
(27)
Kosfeld et al.
2005.
(28)
Damasio (1995) argues that the
emotions are even central to intellectual
reasoning on the part of the
individuals.
(29)
Zimbardo 2007, pp. 219,
301.
الفصل الخامس: كيف تطوَّرت العواطف الاجتماعية؟
(1)
Lerner et al. (2007) have shown
that cortisol responses to stressful situations
vary crucially according to whether fear or
indignation components are most important in the
emotional characterization of the situation,
with cortisol elevated by fear and lowered by
indignation.
(2)
Marmot (2004). It was widely
believed until recently that in nonhuman primate
groups exactly the same thing was true, but when
it was first possible to measure cortisol levels
of primate groups in the wild, some slightly
surprising results emerged. An interesting paper
by Muller & Wrangham (2004) showed that
cortisol levels were positively correlated with
dominance among chimpanzees in the wild. The
authors suggest that this is because dominant
chimpanzees in the wild spend a great deal of
energy maintaining their dominance— more so,
certainly, than senior civil servants have to
do.
(3)
See “Comfort Food, For Monkeys” by
John Tierney, The New
York Times, May 20,
2008.
(4)
A fascinating early contribution to
this literature is Axelrod (1984). Smail (2008)
is an intriguing recent approach to the study of
human history in the very long run, viewing it
as an account of the way we have learned to
manipulate our own endocrine systems and those
of people we know.
(5)
See “The Misfits,” The Economist, June
12, 2008.
(6)
Tooby & Cosmides 1997; Price
2008.
(7)
Opportunists might or might not be
calculators. Alternatively, they could be those
in whom reciprocity was triggered by evidence
that they would encounter the person concerned
in the future and inhibited by evidence that
they would not, without the process being under
conscious control.
(8)
See Fehr & Henrich
2003.
(9)
Fehr & Gächter
2000a.
(10)
Hrdy 2009.
(11)
Wilson & Sober 1994; Gintis
2000. Hölldobler & Wilson (2008) have
even suggested that group selection is a more
plausible mechanism for the evolution of
eusociality than kin
selection.
(12)
Jones 1994, p.
231.
(13)
See Eshel & Cavalli-Sforza
1982.
(14)
Wrangham
2003.
(15)
Gintis 2000; Gintis et al.
2003.
(16)
Bowles 2009.
(17)
De Waal
1982.
(18)
Schaffer & Seabright
2009.
(19)
See Buller 2005, especially pp.
163–90.
(20)
Gambetta 1993. The theory of the
Mafia as an organized response to problems of
establishing trust has been applied to Russian
conditions by Varese (1994,
2001).
(21)
Bowles 1991.
(22)
Granovetter 1972. Barabási (2002)
is a very good introduction to this and other
work on the properties of networks: how they
form and grow, and what makes them effective,
stable, and resistant to external
threats.
(23)
See Wirth 1938, for example.
Biggart (2002) is a collection of essays in
which the elegiac strain is clearly
heard.
(24)
This view is most famously
associated with Douglass North and Robert Paul
Thomas (see North & Thomas 1973; North
1990).
(25)
See epilogue to parts I and II,
note 14, below.
(26)
The passages from Jacobs [1961]
1992 are on pp. 32 and 40. Jacobs’s ideas about
cities are explored in more detail in chapter
10.
الفصل السادس: المال والعلاقات الإنسانية
(1)
This discussion, including many of
the examples cited, draws from the introduction
to Seabright (2000) and from Ledeneva &
Seabright (2000).
(2)
Ferguson
2008.
(3)
Buchan 1997, p.
24.
(4)
This point is central
to the theory of money developed by
Banerjee & Maskin
(1996).
(5)
Monnerie 1996, pp.
47–69.
(6)
Ibid., p.
63.
(7)
This theory is due to Marin et al.
(2000).
(8)
See “Have a Car? Need Briefs? In
Russia, Barter Is Back”, New York Times, February 7,
2009.
(9)
I’m grateful to Charles Goodhart
for drawing my attention to the work of Randall
Wray, on which I draw here and which has
significantly modified my view of the historical
development of money since the first edition of
this book.
(10)
Radford
1945.
(11)
See Naples
Daily News, March 27, 2003,
http://web.naplesnews.com/03/03/naples/d920972a.htm
(accessed October 19,
2009).
(12)
Wall Street
Journal, October 2,
2008.
(13)
Samuelson 1973, pp.
274–76.
(14)
Wray 1998, p.
42.
(15)
Ibid., p.
64.
(16)
Furness 1910, p. 100,
quoted in Wray 1998, p.
58.
(17)
See the LETSYSTEMS web page at
www.gmlets.u-net.com
(accessed October 22,
2009).
(18)
The
Economist, December 18,
2008.
(19)
Buchan 1997, p.
281.
(20)
Wiener 1982. For Athens, see Hall
1998, p. 58, and chapter 10
below.
(21)
See Polanyi (1944) for a very
influential expression of this point of
view.
(22)
Tourneur 1607, act I, scene
1.
(23)
Buchan 1997, p.
20.
(24)
Balzac
1988.
(25)
Amis 1984.
الفصل السابع: الشرف بين اللصوص: الاكتناز والسرقة
(1)
Davies (2003) shows that the first
documented banks were in
Mesopotamia and did indeed serve as storehouses
for grain. the first documented private banks
appear in Athens, in the late fifth century
B. C. E. (Cohen 1992, p.
42).
(2)
Sheilagh Ogilvie tells me this
certainly occurred in sixteenth-century
Bohemia.
(3)
Similar behavior tends to be
observed when there are rumors of a gasoline
shortage.
(4)
Cornett & Saunders 1998, pp.
329–33. Joseph Mollicone, the bank president who
sparked the crisis, was convicted in 1993 of
embezzlement and sentenced to thirty years in
prison; he was released in July 2002 (Financial Times,
July 24, 2002).
الفصل الثامن: الشرف بين المصرفيين
(1)
Professor Mark Perry of the
University of Michigan (see
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2008/01/history-of-us-bank-failures.html).
I do not mean to suggest Professor Perry was
less well-informed than most other experts; his
view was the mainstream view for the reasons I
have discussed.
(2)
Gorton 2009.
(3)
British building societies are
rather like American savings-and-loan
institutions, with a strong concentration of
their loans in the form of housing
mortgages.
(4)
See Cecchetti
2007.
(5)
Friedman & Schwartz 1963;
Gorton 2009, p. 21. See Calomiris
2007.
(6)
See Gorton
2009.
(7)
Ibid.
(8)
Recorded in the documents of the
hearing on the role of credit rating agencies in
the financial crisis, held on October 22, 2008
by House Committee on Oversight and Government
Reform:
http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20081022112325.pdf. See the
New York
Times report at
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/rating-agencies-draw-fire-capitol-hill.
(9)
An excellent guide to the economics
of structured products is Coval et al.
(2009).
(10)
Mackenzie (2009) has an excellent
discussion of this
problem.
(11)
Johnson
2009.
(12)
Blakemore et al.
2000.
(13)
As measured by the Case-Shiller
composite-10 index, published by Standard
& Poor’s.
(14)
See Gorton 2008 and Shiller
2008.
(15)
This point is well made by Cowen
(2009).
(16)
Kübler-Ross
1973.
(17)
See Shiller
2000.
(18)
See Gorton
2009.
(19)
O’Rourke
2008.
(20)
Tett (2009) provides a compellingly
written account of the unfolding of the
financial crisis centered around the complex
derivative products developed at
JPMorgan.
(21)
Akerlof & Shiller
2009.
الفصل التاسع: الاحترافية والإنجاز في ساحات العمل وساحات الحروب
(1)
Calvino 1991, pp.
20–23.
(2)
Quotations from the proceedings are
from Marrus (1997, especially pp. 182, 206,
217). The English version is given as in Marrus,
even where the translation is evidently slightly
faulty (as in “pity with” instead of “pity
for”). Overy (2001) is a fascinating account of
the interrogation of Nazi leaders before the
trial, reproducing many original
transcripts.
(3)
Brendon 2000, p. 404. Nevertheless,
though the Nuremberg trials brought out these
tensions explicitly and in a starker form than
ever before or since, the sense that the life of
a complex society encourages a single-mindedness
essential to our success, while simultaneously
provoking deep unease at the effects of this
single-mindedness on the quality of our lives,
has been with us for many
centuries.
(4)
The evolution of human mental
capacities, especially for broad, abstract
reasoning, is the subject of Mithen (1996),
whose main focus is the development of
consciousness; on Mithen’s view many of these
mental capacities are byproducts of skills that
evolved for ecological adaptation and social
interaction. Miller (2000) proposes sexual
selection as an explanation: far from being a
byproduct, human mental abilities were actively
selected by females. In fact, the two theories
are less starkly opposed than they may appear:
the particular forms of mental capacity that
were sexually selected were not necessarily the
ones we see today, and sexual interaction was
surely one of the most important forms of social
interaction driving the evolutionary
process.
(5)
Hall 1998, pp. 48,
58.
(6)
An intriguing account of this
process in the U. S. Navy is given in Hutchins
(1995, especially pp.
6–26).
(7)
Dumont 1981.
(8)
Donne 1997, pp.
126-27.
(9)
Durkheim’s theory of suicide is set
out in Durkheim (1897). He proposed four types
of suicide, distinguishing notably between
egoistic suicide, which was driven by lack of
social integration in modern society, and anomic
suicide, which was driven by lack of social
regulation. A sense of some of the empirical and
conceptual controversy still surrounding these
ideas can be gained from the readings in Lester
(1994), though the discussions of the empirical
material are neither very clear nor (to my mind)
very convincing.
(10)
Wrosch & Miller
2009.
(11)
Furedi 2002.
(12)
Terkel 1974, pp.
203-4.
(13)
De Botton (2009) is one of the rare
books to look in detail at how a range of
occupations shape the way in which their
participants conceive of their lives. Amélie
Nothomb’s novel Fear and
Trembling is a superb evocation
of emotions on an almost epic scale, but set in
a very ordinary office in Tokyo (Nothomb
2002).
(14)
This is documented in Hamermesh
(2005), which shows from surveys of labor market
behavior that variety in one’s work and life is
valuable to people and is one of the fruits of
education.
(15)
Perec 1979, pp. 94-95 (my
translation).
(16)
Amnesty International
2001.
(17)
Gusterson
1996.
(18)
Terkel 1986.
(19)
Richerson & Boyd
1998.
(20)
A recent instance is the U. S.-led
invasion of Iraq in March-April 2003. The
photographer Laurent van der Stockt, interviewed
by Michel Guerrin in Le
Monde (April 13/14), describes
the killing by U. S. Marines of civilians,
including women and children, who evidently
posed no threat to the troops but were in some
sense simply in the way.
خاتمة الجزأين الأول والثاني
(1)
See Perloff (2001, chapter 10) for a
textbook discussion and Mas-Colell et al. (1995, chapter
10) for a rigorous but difficult technical treatment.
For excellent and enjoyable nontechnical introductions
to economic thinking, see Coyle (2002) and Harford
(2005).
(2)
A very readable tour of the many different
kinds of market in real economies is McMillan
(2002).
(3)
These points are given an excellent and
reasonably simple textbook treatment in Milgrom &
Roberts (1992, especially chapter 4). Aoki (2001) is a
fuller and more detailed textbook covering these
themes.
(4)
See Rodrik (1997) for a skeptical view of
globalization and Bourguignon et al. (2002) for a more
general overview.
(5)
See McCulloch et al. (2001) and Bourguignon
et al. (2002, especially chapter 4) for summaries of the
evidence on trade, globalization, and world poverty and
inequality.
(6)
Smith 1759, 1776.
(7)
Dougherty 2002. See also Rothschild
2001.
(8)
See Riley (2001) for a survey and Perloff
(2001, chapter 19) for a textbook
treatment.
(9)
Akerlof 1970.
(10)
See the summary in Seabright
(1993).
(11)
Kreps & Wilson
1982.
(12)
See Hörner (2002) for a model of
self-regulation via competition for reputation building.
A textbook treatment of the economics of regulation is
given in Viscusi et al. (2000).
(13)
See Tirole 1996 and Seabright
1997.
(14)
The classic work in this literature is
Putnam (1993); Putnam (2000) applies the ideas to
contemporary American society. Dasgupta &
Serageldin (1999) provides a comprehensive overview of
the issues.
(15)
This work is reviewed in Fehr &
Gächter (2000a).
(16)
Case et al. 2000 and Cox 2001, for example.
Bergstrom (1996) discusses the significance of kin
selection for the economics of the family, and Robson
(2001) surveys what evolutionary biology has to say
about economic preferences and the nature of economic
rationality. Cronk et al. (2000) consists of essays
exploring adaptive explanations for phenomena documented
by anthropologists; Dunbar et al. (1999) also contains
much interesting material. Hirshleifer (1977) is an
early and still very readable discussion of the links
between biology and economics, and Ghiselin (2001)
provides a large bibliography.
(17)
See Henrich et al. (2001) for a fascinating
cross-cultural experiment and Francois & van
Ypersele (2009) for a cross-country econometric study
suggesting that competitive markets tend to foster
interpersonal trust.
(18)
That the character of societies can be far
removed from the intentions of individuals is something
of a truism in sociology; see Barnes (1995) for a survey
of the main sociological approaches to understanding
social interaction. This concept was central to the work
of Durkheim, especially his book On the Division of Labor in Society,
first published in 1893 (1998). Kaufmann (1995)
describes the general insights of complex systems theory
into the nature of self-organizing
structures.
(19)
Beinhocker 2006; Bernstein 2004; Findlay
& O’Rourke 2007.
مقدمة الجزء الثالث
(1)
Hölldobler & Wilson
2008.
(2)
Beckerts et al. 1994, p. 181. See
also Hölldobler & Wilson (1994, pp.
107–22) for similar observations about ants.
Explicit analogies between ants and markets are
explored in Kirman
(1993).
(3)
Smith 1776, p. 473. Hirschman
(1977) is an account of how various writers saw
the importance of harnessing, rather than
repressing, human
self-interest.
(4)
Rothschild 2001, p.
119.
الجزء الثالث: نتائج غير مقصودة: من الجماعات الأُسَرية إلى المدن الصناعية
الفصل العاشر: المدينة من أثينا القديمة إلى مانهاتن الحديثة
(1)
Some have attributed this painting
to Piero della Francesca and in the first
edition I followed the attribution. This remains
disputed, however, and many consider it more
likely to have been painted by another, possibly
Leon Battista Alberti or Luciano
Laurana.
(2)
An interesting account (and
critique) of the thinking behind planned cities
is in Scott (1998, chapter
4).
(3)
Bosker et al.
2008.
(4)
Hall 1998, p.
68.
(5)
Ibid., p.
234.
(6)
Ibid., p.
235.
(7)
Ibid., p.
238.
(8)
Hughes 1992, p. 155. This
book should be read by everyone
interested in cities, even those who
have never been to
Barcelona.
(9)
Jacobs 1961, pp.
50-51.
(10)
Ibid., p.
56.
(11)
Hall 1998, chapter
3.
(12)
Dr. Snow’s cholera map is
reproduced in Tufte (1997a, p. 24, 1997b, pp.
30-31). The latter has an excellent discussion
on pp. 27–37 of Snow’s inferences from the map
and whether these were in fact responsible for
the end of the epidemic. Such issues are also
brought out on the John Snow website maintained
by Ralph R. Frerichs at the UCLA Department of
Epidemiology at
www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.html
(accessed October 20,
2009).
(13)
Borges 1951, p. 423. I have not
been able to find the original in Gibbon, and
knowing Borges’s taste for whimsy am skeptical
that I ever shall.
(14)
Corbin 1982.
(15)
Süskind 1988, pp.
3-4.
(16)
In any one place the children of
the rich, being better fed, were somewhat less
vulnerable to disease than those of the poor
(though not much less so). But the rich were
more likely to live in cities, where mortality
rates were higher than in the
country.
(17)
McGranahan 1993, p.
105.
(18)
Mayhew 1861,
2: 136.
(19)
Ibid.,
2: 142–44.
(20)
Diamond 1997, especially chapter
11. See also Cochrane & Harpending
2009.
(21)
Libecap & Hansen
2001.
(22)
Chandler [1950]
2002.
الفصل الحادي عشر: الماء: سلعة أم منظومة اجتماعية؟
(1)
European Commission
1992.
(2)
See Ward 2002. Homer-Dixon (1999)
presents a more systematic analysis of the
various kinds of violent conflict to which
environmental crises can give rise. Other
interesting cases are discussed in “Streams of
Blood, or Streams of Peace,” The Economist, May
1, 2008.
(3)
Robbins
1936.
(4)
Palaniappan & Gleick 2009,
p. 1.
(5)
Schama 1987, pp.
22–25.
(6)
Hanson 1988.
(7)
World Health Organization
(available at
www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/diseases/burden/en/index.html,
accessed October 22, 2009).
(8)
World Health Organization
(available at
www.who.int/pmnch/topics/add_publications/2008_worldmalariarep/en/,
accessed October 22,
2009).
(9)
World Health Statistics 2009, table
3.1,
www.who.int/whosis/whostat/2009/en/index.html
(accessed October 22,
2009).
(10)
Begg et al. 1993, p. 146, and Malle
1996.
(11)
U. S. Geological Survey, Pesticides in the Nation’s
Streams and Groundwater, 1992–2001: A
Summary,
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2006/3028
(accessed October 22,
2009).
(12)
The focal role of inland seas was a
central theme of Braudel (1972), Ascherson
(1995), and Horden & Purcell
(2000).
(13)
Dumont 1981.
(14)
Baumann
1969.
(15)
Auden 1979, pp.
184–87.
(16)
Opinion poll evidence comparing
perceptions of general environmental issues
across countries is given in Worcester (1995,
especially pp. 20–24). Evidence for the high
ranking of water within general environmental
issues in Britain appears in Corrado &
Ross (1990, table 6). The Lima opinion poll is
cited in Worcester & Corrado (1991, p.
11). I am most grateful to Robert Worcester and
Michele Corrado, both of MORI, for making these
sources available to me.
(17)
See Ward 2002 and Gleick
2009.
(18)
The water rights systems in the
United States are discussed in Rogers (1993) and
Clyde (1989).
(19)
Wittfogel
1957.
(20)
Wade 1987.
(21)
Landes 1983, pp. 22-23. An obvious
difficulty with this argument is that the
mechanical clock and the culture he describes
may both have been effects of some other
cause.
(22)
For lighthouses, see Coase (1974);
for the Coase theorem, see Coase
(1960).
(23)
See, for instance, Shleifer
& Vishny 1993.
(24)
Herman et al.
1988.
الفصل الثاني عشر: هل كل شيء خاضع للتسعير؟
(1)
The prices of Cigna Corporation,
Aetna Inc., and United Health Group Inc. rose by
between 5% and 10% of their previous days’
closing prices before noon on July 28, 2009, the
day of the announcement.
(3)
This is not just the simple median
of all the different traders’ estimates but the
median weighted by the number of contracts each
trader holds.
(4)
www.newsfutures.com.
(5)
www.intrade.com.
(6)
www.hsx.com.
(7)
Gibbon 1776, chapter 5,
entitled “The Sale of the Empire by the
Praetorians.”
(8)
Klemperer 1999, note
21.
(9)
Hendricks & Porter
1988.
(10)
Mauss 1950.
(11)
Davis 2000.
(12)
McCloskey
1976.
(13)
De Soto
2000.
(14)
Gann
2001.
(15)
The comparative study of British
and American blood transfusion systems—one
relying on donations, the other to a much
greater extent on sales—was the subject of a
classic study by Titmuss (1970), who claimed
that paying people to give blood was inefficient
as well as unethical, because it resulted in
higher levels of infected blood and less
willingness to provide blood among people who
would otherwise have been willing to do so for
free (this last phenomenon is known as
“crowding-out” of altruism byfinancial
incentives). See also the review essays by Solow
(1971) and Arrow (1972). Surprisingly, Titmuss’s
hypothesis was not subjected to an experimental
test in the realm of blood donation until the
work of Mellström & Johannesson (2008);
they found no statistically significant
crowding-out on average but didfind it among
women subjects. Bénabou & Tirole (2006)
and Seabright (2009a) discuss ways of
understanding crowding-out phenomena as a form
of social signaling. Anderson (1995) is a
careful (though in my view largely unconvincing)
statement of the case for refusing to trade in
many of the controversial areas listed in the
text.
(16)
Larissa McFarquhar, “The
Kindest Cut,” The New Yorker, July 27,
2009, p. 43.
الفصل الثالث عشر: العائلات والشركات
(1)
The classic source for this
question about the boundaries of firms is Coase
(1937). One of the collections in which it is
republished (Putterman & Kroszner 1996)
contains many useful essays dealing with this
and related questions. Hart (1995, especially
part 1) is a good undergraduate-level overview,
Williamson (1985) a less formal one, and a
classic reference for what has come to be known
as “transactions cost economics.” Aoki (2001) is
a comprehensive monograph reviewing
contributions to the economics of institutions
in the transactions cost tradition. Mokyr (2002,
particularly chapter 4) provides an excellent
historical perspective on the impact of
technical change on the size and character
offirms since the industrial
revolution.
(2)
On output, see Bourguignon &
Morrison (2002, table 1); on energy and
freshwater, see McNeill (2000, tables 1.5 and
5.1).
(3)
The exceptions include, not just
plantation agriculture in the Americas, but also
the great European feudal estates; it is also
true that even family farms have often been
active in labor markets, hiring in or hiring out
labor according to the rhythms of the
agricultural year.
(4)
The material on Henry Ford in this
chapter is drawn from Hall (1998, chapter
13).
(5)
A remarkable exception is reported
by Jones (1988): “before the birth of Christ an
ironmaster in Szechuan was employing 1000 men” (p. 74).
(6)
On the economic and social
foundations of European military efficiency, see
Hanson, who studies Athenian infantry prowess
(1989) and undertakes a longer historical
comparison (2001).
(7)
Hutchins 1995, pp.
6-7.
(8)
Ibid., p. 6.
(9)
See Buder
1970.
(10)
Jones (1988, p. 23): “the silk
industry in Italy was carried out in fourand
six-storey mills as early as the sixteenth
century.”
(11)
Hall 1998, pp.
330-31.
(12)
Ibid., p.
414.
(13)
Ibid., p.
409.
(14)
Ibid., p.
411
(15)
Aoki 2001, p.
108.
(16)
Hall 1998, p.
409.
(17)
Ibid., p.
405.
(18)
Landes 1998, p. 306. See also Hall
1998, pp. 404-5. Jones (1988, p. 72) has used
the converse argument to point to the absence of
mass demand as a reason why a number of episodes
of striking economic growth in the premodern
world were not sustained: “concentration on
products for which there could be no mass demand
and from which there were few spin-offs slowed
an economic advance that was technically within
the reach of some organized
society.”
(19)
Lamoreaux et al. (2002) gives an
interesting account of the evolution of the
textile and other light industries in early
nineteenth-century New England, from a structure
based on families and family control to a more
centralized factory system. For example, owners
of the new large mills built in the second and
third decades of the century “needed many more
workers than could be obtained from local farm
households [;] they had to convince young,
unmarried women from all over New England to
come work temporarily in the mills. In order to
make factory employment more attractive to this
group, they invested in boarding houses and
educational
institutions.”
(20)
Statistics about the size of U. S.
businesses from the U. S. Census
Bureau.
(21)
Chandler 1990. See also the review
essay by Teece (1993).
(22)
Fukuyama 1995, particularly in
application to China at pp.
69–82.
(23)
There exist categories of nonvoting
shares, though the law prevents the firm’s
directors from treating these differently as far
as dividend payments are
concerned.
(24)
For an analysis of this episode and
its aftermath, see Berglof & Burckardt
(2003).
(25)
Even McDonald’s relies on
franchising to combine standardization with some
of the flexibility that is one of the virtues of
the small.
(26)
Teece (1993, especially footnote
52) emphasizes thatfirms facing identical
technological conditions could have quite
different capacities for coordinating their
production, differences that could persist over
many decades.
(27)
Chandler
1977.
(28)
Lamoreaux et al. (2002) provides an
overview of these developments and an outline of
an alternative synthesis.
(29)
Hutchins (1995) describes in detail
how the different cognitive tasks involved in
the navigation of a large naval vessel are not
concentrated in the mind of a single individual
but are distributed throughout the members of
the ship’s crew, and analyzes the coordinating
mechanisms that turn this distributed process
into a recognizably coherent response to a
cognitive problem.
(30)
See Baker & Hubbard
2004.
(31)
Anthony (2007) has fascinating
evidence on horses, wheels, and chariots and on
their impact on warfare, migration, and the
development of civilization. Among the
intriguing details (p). 196: “at least
seventy-seven ancestral mares … are required to
account for the genetic variety in modern
populations around the globe. Wild mares must
have been taken into domesticated horse herds in
many different places at different times.
Meanwhile, the male aspect of modern horse DNA …
shows remarkable homogeneity. It is possible
that just a single wild stallion was
domesticated.”
(32)
See Cooper
1998.
(33)
Mowery & Ziedonis
2004.
(34)
John Sutton’s theories aboutfirm
size are set out in Sutton (1998); an
application to questions of globalization was
given in his Royal Economic Society public
lecture, the text of which is not available but
is loosely based on a British Academy lecture
(Sutton 2001).
الفصل الرابع عشر: المعرفة والرمزية
(1)
The story of the Chauvet cave,
along with pictures of the artworks and a
discussion of the archeological and geological
context, can be found online at
www.culture.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/fr/
(accessed October 22,
2009).
(2)
Mithen (1996) cites Glyn Isaac as
describing how “for almost a million years,
toolkits tended to involve the same essential
ingredients seemingly being shuffled in
restless, minor, directionless changes” (p.
19).
(3)
The evolution of human culture is a
central theme of Klein & Edgar (2001) and
Klein (2009, especially chapter 8); the authors
support the hypothesis of African origins but
favor the hypothesis of a relatively sudden
transformation. McBrearty & Brooks (2000)
argue strongly in favor of a more gradual
African evolution. Mithen (1996) has an
excellent account of the challenge of explaining
the development of human cultural and cognitive
capacities, as well as an intriguing hypothesis
about how it might have
happened.
(4)
This remains a speculation, though,
and it is hard to see what evidence could,
realistically, confirm or refute
it.
(5)
Not all specialists would accept
this characterization: Sue Blackmore, for
instance, tells me, in a personal communication,
that she doesn’t see why symbolic representation
is necessary for imitation. My own view is that
imitation as such had been a feature of human
behavior long before the developments we can
describe as culture (all those unchanging stone
tools), but it was the fluidity of symbolic
recombination that gave imitation the explosive
potential so grippingly described in Blackmore
(1999).
(6)
And the brain itself uses symbols
which are not necessarily images to represent
external objects (see Ramachandran &
Blakeslee (1999, chapter 4) for a particularly
clear and intuitive account of this point of
view). So a more general reliance on symbols
rather than more specifically on images for
communication is a natural extension of our
biological capacities from the perceptual sphere
to the sphere of
communication.
(7)
Mithen 1996, pp. 160-61. One of the
key pieces of evidence is the structure and
position of the larynx, which in humans carries
a much greater risk of choking than in apes.
This risk implies that there must already have
been adaptive benefits from the greater capacity
of the human larynx to produce sounds suitable
for language; otherwise there would have been
strong selective pressures against its
evolution.
(8)
Whiten et al. 1999; Whiten &
Boesch 2001.
(9)
Diamond 1992, pp. 133–35. It is
likely that the increased life span coevolved
with increased brain size, since larger brains
do not instantly increase fitness but, rather,
raise the returns to learning, which is a type
of investment. This would therefore have
increased the overall adaptive value of longer
life expectancy, since it gave a longer period
in which learning investments would be
productive. See KaplanHurtado et al. (2000) and
Robson & Kaplan
(2003).
(10)
The citations about the impact of
printing are from Eisenstein (1982), which was
reissued in abridged form as Eisenstein (1993).
Afine social history of printing is Febvre
& Martin (1997), while Martin (1994)
connects the history of printing with that of
writing and literacy more
generally.
(11)
This is compatible with a large
increase in absolute rewards for those whose
talents appeal to a geographically dispersed
audience who can be brought together by the
cheap reproduction and diffusion of information
goods. I recall reading somewhere that Joseph
Losey’s movie version of Don Giovanni has been seen by
more people than have seen the live opera in the
more than two centuries since Mozart wrote
it.
(12)
Frank 1999, p. 38. A
previous book by the same author (Frank
1996) was devoted entirely to such
markets and their effects on society.
The underlying idea wasfirst developed
by Rosen (1981).
(13)
See Boldrin & Levine 2008,
chapter 1.
(14)
Jaffe & Lerner
2004.
(15)
Acemoglu & Linn
2004.
(16)
Moser 2005.
(17)
See Carlton & Waldman 2002
and Bernheim & Whinston
1998.
(18)
Boldrin & Levine
2008.
(19)
I’m not, of course, the first to
have this idea. Most days my email inbox
contains advertisements for products purporting
to do at least some of these things—yet somehow
I’m still a frog.
(20)
Kremer & Snyder (2003) have
argued that a similar problem explains why
private-sector pharmaceutical companies invest
less in vaccines than in curative
drugs.
(21)
Stokes 1965, p. 30. The analogy is
interesting even if one does not accept his
psychoanalytic, and specifically Kleinian,
framework (Melanie Klein this time, not Richard,
nor even Naomi).
(22)
Gray et al. 1991. The ability to
screen out irrelevant information is known as
“latent inhibition.”
(23)
Cognitive psychologist Colin
Martindale has advanced the theory that the
changing characteristics of all artistic
movements can be explained by pressure for
novelty generated by the habituation of artistic
audiences to familiar stimuli (Martindale 1990);
such a theory seems naturally suited to
explaining an increasing shrillness of artistic
movements as they struggle to compete in a
symbolically overpopulated space of public
attention. An interesting comparison is with
David Galenson’s book about two different styles
of artistic creativity, the experimental and the
conceptually innovative (Galenson
2001).
(24)
Jones 1988, especially pp. 176ff,
and Landes 1998. For a skeptical view, see
Pomeranz 2000.
(25)
Landes 1998, pp. 94,
96.
الفصل الخامس عشر: الإقصاء: البطالة والفقر والمرض
(1)
Brendon 2000, pp.
79–81.
(2)
A discussion of Walker Evans’s
relation to the Farm Security Administration is
at
http://xroads.virginia.edu/˜ug97/fsa/welcome.html.
(3)
“Manipuram” and “Kovilur”
arefictitious names for real villages where I
lived for nearly a year in 1985 and which I
revisited in 1990 and 1992. Research findings
from these villages have resulted in several
publications, one of which is Seabright (1997).
Bliss & Stern (1983) is a detailed and
fascinating case study of the north Indian
village of Palanpur, revisited in Lanjouw
& Stern (1998). The best general-purpose
textbook on economic development is Ray (1998),
though Basu (1998) has some excellent chapters,
particularly the early ones. Bardhan &
Udry (1999) is a good advanced undergraduate
textbook on institutional aspects of economic
development.
(4)
Venkatesh
2006.
(5)
Assortative matching is discussed
nontechnically in chapter 5 of Cohen (1998) and
technically in Shimer & Smith (2000). It
has been applied to understanding a wide range
of phenomena, including growing inequality in
household income (Deaton 1995; Lerman 1996),
poverty traps in developing economies (Kremer
1993), peer-group lending in poor countries
(Ghatak 1999), rising divorce rates (Weiss
1997), transmission rates of HIV infection (Dow
& Philipson 1996), racial and class
segregation in the schooling system (Bénabou
1994), and the changing employment structure of
U. S. firms (Kremer & Maskin 1996;
Acemoglu 1999; Mailath et al.
2000).
(6)
One piece of evidence suggesting
this may be an important phenomenon is presented
in Hamermesh (2001), who argues that measures of
job satisfaction—which are likely to be very
sensitive to the quality of a person’s
coworkers—have become more unequal in both the
United States and Germany in recent
years.
(7)
Kremer 1993.
(8)
Depression and mental health
statistics for the United States are available
at
www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml
(accessed October 22, 2009). Suicide and other
mortality statistics for the United States are
at
http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_sy.html
(accessed October 22, 2009). Statistics on
suicide and other causes of mortality for the
world as a whole are available at
www.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/bodgbddeathdalyestimates.xls
(accessed October 22,
2009).
(9)
An introduction to the theory of
principal-agent relationships is in James
Mirrlees’s Nobel lecture (Mirrlees 1997); an
excellent but advanced text is Laffont &
Martimort (2002). Holmström & Milgrom
(1991) applies the theory to multiple tasks,
where some tasks are more easily monitored than
others. Applications to multitasking are
discussed in Seabright
(1999).
(10)
Bursztajn et al. 1990, p. 414. This
is an interesting discussion of medical decision
making, with many case studies. Chapter 10 is
entitled “Trust” and describes many of the
difficulties facing doctors in reconciling their
wish to establish trust with patients and the
need to make hard-headed resourceallocation
decisions.
(11)
Holmström & Milgrom
1991.
(12)
Luhrmann 2000, p.
243.
(13)
Ibid., p.
260.
(14)
Ibid., p.
17.
(15)
For evidence that adjusting GDP to
take account of nonmarket aspects of welfare has
an overall positive impact on estimates of
income growth, see Crafts
(2003).
(16)
For an example of the
romanticization of mental illness, see Laing
(1960); for a more subtle and historically
wide-ranging version, see Foucault (1965). Kakar
(1982) is a more nuanced account of the
different ways in which American and Indian
societies both conceptualize mental illness and
respond to individuals with certain presenting
conditions.
(17)
Steckel & Wallis 2009, table
2.
خاتمة الجزء الثالث
(1)
Schelling (1978) is a superb introduction
to the issues.
(2)
Krugman (1991) remains the best
introduction to this literature. See also Fujita et al.
(1999) and the review essay by Neary
(2001).
(3)
Seabright (1993) and Portney (2000) are two
introductory essays; Pearce & Turner (1990), a
textbook treatment, Dasgupta (1993, 2001), two
comprehensive monographs, and Dasgupta & Mäler
(1997), a set of essays about problems of environment
and development.
(4)
See McMillan (2002) and Harford (2005) for
two very readable introductions.
(5)
Farrell (1987) provides a very clear
account of the reasons why asymmetries of information
prevent efficient bargaining of the kind necessary for
the Coase theorem to hold.
مقدمة إلى الجزء الرابع
(1)
Weisdorf (2005) provides an excellent
survey.
(2)
I have developed the argument about defense
and the adoption of agriculture more fully with Bob
Rowthorn in Rowthorn & Seabright (2009). Evidence
about the existence of multiple independent adoptions is
summarized in Richerson et al. (2001), and the rapid
spread of agriculture around the world is documented in
Bellwood (1996) and Cavalli-Sforza et al. (1994). Barker
(2006) provides an encyclopedic overview of what is
known about the origins of agriculture, emphasizing
among other things how many communities had adopted
practices that made agriculture a more natural option
than it would otherwise have been (a point also made by
Tudge (1999)). As Mithen (1996) points out, earlier
humans had sophisticated biological knowledge, so that
it does not seem likely that their disinclination to
adopt agriculture lay in lack of skill. Existing
theories are dominated by two hypotheses: that of a late
Pleistocene food crisis caused by population pressure
(Cohen 1977) and that of rapid climate change including
global warming (Richardson et al. 2001). the first is
problematic because of evidence that hunter-gatherers
were able to control population growth through various
measures, including infanticide. According to Cohen
& Armelagos (1984), the second may only be a
necessary and not a sufficient condition for adoption of
agriculture, given the evidence about the health of
early farmers. Given that evidence, climate change might
not have increased agricultural productivity enough to
make its adoption inevitable. As Mithen points out, many
previous episodes of comparable climate change had not
led to agriculture. Two additional theories help explain
why adoption of agriculture could have led to a “point
of no return,” though neither explains the initial
adoption. Bar-Yosef & Belfer-Cohen (1989) suggest
that sedentism removed constraints to population growth
and made a return to hunting and gathering impossible.
Winterhalder & Lu (1995) suggest that more
intense hunting by already sedentary communities would
have depleted big game, with the same consequence of
rendering a return to hunting and gathering impossible.
This hypothesis is strongly corroborated by data in
Stutz et al. (2009). And Mithen himself offers his
account of an evolving human consciousness as a way of
explaining why modern humans might have been more aware
of the possibilities of agriculture than their
biologically sophisticated, but less symbolically
creative, forebears: they knew about wild animals and
plants but were not used to thinking of them as
potentially domesticable.
So my suggestion that defense needs imposed important externalities is best seen as a way to reconcile the evidence about the health of early farmers with the possibility that climate change might nevertheless have made agriculture sufficiently productive to become strongly attractive to individual communities. That defense needs were an important preoccupation of early agricultural societies is strongly argued by Gat (2006).
(3)
This point therefore also applies to some
hunter-gatherer societies like the salmon fishers of the
Pacific Northwest that had become relatively sedentary
(and also therefore large, complex, and socially
stratified) because of the immobile nature of their
hunting grounds.
(4)
Ferguson 1773, p. 218. I owe both
this and my acquaintance with Ibn Khaldun (1377)
to the excellent book by Gellner (1994), on pp.
62-63 of which I originally came across the
reference to Ferguson.
الجزء الرابع: العمل الجماعي: من دول مُحارِبة إلى سوق أُمَمية
الفصل السادس عشر: دول وإمبراطوريات
(1)
Cavalli-Sforza 2000, pp. 104–13.
Renfrew (1989) is a treatment of the puzzle of
the origins of Indo-European languages that also
depends on the hypothesis of a gradual spread of
a technology (in this case, a linguistic
technology) carried by the spread of
agriculture.
(2)
Gkiasta et al.
2003.
(3)
See Zeder
2008.
(4)
Cavalli-Sforza (2000). For the
Bantu expansion more generally, see Ehret
(1998).
(5)
Leblanc et al.
2007.
(6)
Richards (2003) reports point
estimates for the proportion of mitochondrial
DNA from Neolithic migrants from Turkey in
northern Greek populations to be around 20% and
the proportion of Y-chromosome DNA to be around
25%—a higher proportion of the latter being
expected if indigenous females were incorporated
into the migrants’ gene pool at a higher rate
than indigenous males.
(7)
The claim that almost no societies
refrained from enslaving others at some time in
their history, and that slavery became more
likely the wealthier the society concerned, was
due atfirst to Nieboer (1900, especially pp.
255–61, 286–88, 294, 303, 306, and 417–27). I am
grateful to Stanley Engerman for this reference.
The classic source for the economics of slavery
is Fogel & Engerman
(1974).
(8)
Gat 2002, 2006, chapter
9.
(9)
Hanson 1989, pp.
xxiv–xxv.
(10)
Pericles’ description of
the Peloponnesians comes from
Thucydides, book 1, chapter 141; in the
edition by Strassler (1998), p.
81.
(11)
Hanson 2001, pp.
274-75.
(12)
Kennedy 1989. The work of Peter
Turchin (2003) explores inter alia the
interaction between demographic expansion and
fiscal strength, in a more quantitative style
than Kennedy.
(13)
Darwin 2008.
(14)
White 1966.
(15)
Scott 1998, pp.
64–73.
(16)
This view is reviewed and rejected
in Keeley (1996, especially pp. 121–26). Gat
(2006) defends a more nuanced version of the
view, which is that states that have overcome
the Malthusian population trap have more reason
to avoid conflict since they have more to lose;
trade may play a part in the generation of that
prosperity. However, if you are more prosperous
this gives you a reason to avoid conflict with
any opponent, not necessarily only your close
trading partners.
(17)
For the annihilation of the
aboriginal Australians and Tasmanians and the
Hereros, see Diamond (1992, pp.
278–88).
(18)
Hochschild 1999, passim, but
especially chapter 15. Such slaughter may even
have been encouraged by the fact that, with the
end of slavery, these inhabitants no longer
represented an economic resource for their
murderers; they were simply in the
way.
(19)
The argument that asymmetries in
size and strength explain violence between
adults in some species is discussed in Wrangham
& Peterson (1996, pp. 156–72). The
evidence on gorilla infanticide is at pp.
146–51.
(20)
Hanson 2001, pp.
273–75.
(21)
Cohen 1992, pp.
43-44.
(22)
Cave & Coulson 1936,
pp. 104-5.
(23)
Landes 1998, p. 339. It is
not entirely clear what Landes means by
this last remark—perhaps that no
European state was without powerful
enemies who were always trying to
achieve a military
advantage.
(24)
The website of the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute is at
www.sipri.se.
(25)
Barro & Sala-i-Martin
1995.
(26)
Aizenman & Glick 2005. This
evidence suggests that military spending is good
for economic growth once the nature of the
military threats faced by a country is taken
into account. Of course, this may be true on
average even if for certain countries military
spending is useless or counterproductive or
serves the interests only of a narrow
elite.
(27)
Aidt et al.
2006.
الفصل السابع عشر: العولمة والعمل الجماعي
(1)
Macaulay
1857.
(2)
Gray 1998.
(3)
Burke 1790.
(4)
Ricardo
1817.
(5)
Rodrik (1997) places more emphasis
on the risks of globalization; though see also
Bourguignon et al. (2002) and Wolf
(2004).
(6)
Bourguignon & Morrison
2002.
(7)
Quoted in Thucydides’
history of the Peloponnesian War, book
2, chapter 39; in the edition by
Strassler (1998, p.
113).
(8)
I am grateful to David Wiggins for
making me realize that my wording in the first
edition was anachronistic on this
point.
(9)
Miller (2009) discusses how our
evolved desire to signal our personal attributes
through consumption decisions can be manipulated
by advertisers in ways that are no longer even
very effective signals.
(10)
Packard
1957.
(11)
Wantchekon
2003.
(12)
Rawls
1975.
(13)
Huntington
1993.
(14)
Macpherson
1962.
(15)
The importance of the religious
wars is particularly emphasized by Tully (1980,
1993).
(16)
For example, Sandel
1982 and Gray
2000.
(17)
Constant
1819.
(18)
Williams
1993.
(19)
Lewis 2002, p.
6.
(20)
Lewis (2003) is one of several
writers to develop this
argument.
(21)
Rousseau 1755, p.
90.
الفصل الثامن عشر: الخاتمة: ما مدى هشاشة التجربة الكبرى؟
(1)
World Health Organization 2004. In
addition, infectious agents are suspected of
involvement in a number of cancers that are
recorded as noncommunicable diseases (see
Price-Smith 2002, p. 37).
(2)
For the influenza pandemic, see
Taubenberger & Morens (2006). Keeley
(1996, especially pp. 89–94) reviews evidence
suggesting that prehistoric and preindustrial
societies had casualty rates from warfare that
were much higher even than the wartime casualty
rates of industrial
societies.
(3)
See Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change 2008, especially chapter
4.2.
(4)
See Homer-Dixon
1999.
(5)
Ibid., p.
75.
(6)
Radical technological innovations
could conceivably change this in the
future—targeted viruses that can kill massive
numbers of an enemy population while leaving a
domestic population unharmed, and do not need
sophisticated delivery mechanisms might be one
way—but this remains entirely
speculative.
(7)
Geoffrey Hawthorn tells me the
story of a popular Venezuelan rock band that was
asked by the FARC to play for them. The band
said it required twenty thousand dollars, a
decent stadium to play in, and safe passage to
and from Caracas. No problem, said the FARC. The
band had its fee, a private jet to and from the
venue, and at the venue itself a large stadium
with state-of-the-art sound and lighting. In
itself trivial, but indicative of how much
nonstates can confidently
control.
(8)
Gladwell (2000) provides an
excellent account of the way in which ideas
(including panics) can spread, emphasizing the
role of certain key individuals with large
numbers of links to others and a strong
persuasive power. This means that societies can
have hubs in the realm of ideas even if their
physical and formal organizational hubs are
few.
(9)
See Barabási (2002) for an
introduction.
(10)
“Moins de 400 femmes porteraient le
voile intégral en France,” Libération, July
29, 2009, at
www.liberation.fr/societe/0101582553-moins-de-400-femmes-porteraient-le-voile-integral-en-france.
(11)
Olson 1965, p.
29.
(12)
Published as Stern
2007.
