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Journal of Bioeconomics (2007) 9:7577 Springer 2007
DOI 10.1007/s10818-007-9010-9
MARK TOMADepartment of Economics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA([email protected])
In the context of the long span of human history, the world we modern humans inhabit is atypical. Upon meeting a stranger, our hunter-gatherer ancestors would more than likely have been confronted with a club. We, on the other hand, walk into Starbucks and are confronted with a smile. Then, after handing over a tattered green piece of paper, the stranger gives us a gift of caffeine. The gift-giving dance is repeated so often in the course of our everyday routine, that we hardly give it a second thought.
In The Company of Strangers, Paul Seabright, Professor of Economics at the University of Toulouse, reects on the exceptional nature of our modern attitude toward strangers. The book is divided into four parts. The rst two parts Tunnel Vision and From Murderous Apes to Honorary Friends introduce the main question to be addressed: How humans made the transition some 12 000 years ago from murder that stranger to smile at that stranger? The behavioral change roughly coincided with the move into an agriculturally based mode of production, characterized by increased population density. Once encounters with strangers became commonplace in this high-density environment, survival of the species required that we solve the problem of how to peacefully coexist.
Seabright points out that any solution must take as given the human psychology that had evolved in the hunter-gatherer era. This psychology was two-sided. On the bright side, humans tended to trust and cooperate with those in their immediate circle, which in the early hunter-gatherer days might comprise little more than members of an extended family. On the dark side, early humans tended to distrust those outside the narrow circle. If humans were to thrive in a more densely populated environment, therefore, the circle of cooperation somehow must be enlarged.
Seabright argues the trick that made extended cooperation possible was the development of behavioral rules, whether formally embodied in certain institutios
Book Review: Paul Seabright. 2004. The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life. Princeton University Press, Princeton. x +...