Yesterday I took a break from reading Capitalism (#1421528); there's only so much Marxian mumbo-jumbo I can take at a time... eyeing my lil bookshelf (#1414732), I spotted this little gem:
The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life by Paul Seabright (Econ professor at Toulouse)
I never really properly published anything about this book on its own, sneaking in some extracts or commentary from it here and here #830458, and reading some 30-odd pages now makes me feel like I overlooked something. Insanely powerful
Some of the notes I have from when I read this book back in 2019 say "a little dull" and "author trying too much":
the nature of his topic is to be all over the place of how evolutionary psychology impacts and constraints economic activities. In the chapters on division of labor and money, he does this remarkably well; in the ones about professionalism and externalities, less so.
Reading it now, probably because division of labor and globalization and (human?) capital has been on my mind, I find it exceedingly powerful. Our ability to cooperate with complete strangers, often non-repeat transactions, and completely without expectation of future reciprocity (from those same people or their tribe at least), is amazing. It's the central problem money tries to bridge, the source of which division of labor is. All economic (capitalist?) life stems from this
@Scoresby painfully thought through this a few days ago (#1426207):
Money "symbolizes the way in which we are connected to strangers as never before" (105)Money "symbolizes the way in which we are connected to strangers as never before" (105)
And this, introductory page (p. 4) might be the most succinct summary of Mr. Seabright's idea:
we can understand why human beings have proved capable of cooperating with strangers, thanks to institutions that build on their already evolved hunter-gatherer psychology... Our mutual interdependence has produced effects that utterly surpass what any of the participants can have intended or sometimes even imagined
In no small part thanks to e.g., Seabright articulating this so well, I've long carried this idea with me that the global division of labor and money-using economic society is the greatest, grandest cooperation for mutual well-being humans ever devised. Call it "capitalism" or the Great Enrichment or modernity or collective delusions or unsustainable blah-blah or whatever, but beautiful and magnificent it is.
...and we're able to do this, without morals, without a shared belief system, without a religious or political ruler telling us. That's QUITE remarkable
Well worth your time, frenz.
Going out of get this book right now.
I get this feeling from the internet. It is a wonder that makes the stone stacking our ancestors did look like the work of ants.
This is good. This really gets to it. As I've been following along with your book club, I keep feeling like Beckert thinks capitalism is somehow not this thing that all humans naturally do, but instead the particular governance structure we've lately created. But it seems to me that capitalism is just human nature.
Same, that's my impression too. (Ofc Beckert just says that that's my naturalizing bias for growing up/brainwashed in a capitalist society...)
What's the best account you've come across of how living standards have changed over time?
I've always wanted to find something that detailed what regular life was like for people around the world in different eras: i.e. What kind of dwellings do they live in? With how many other people? What do they eat? What kinds of labor saving technologies do they use? etc.
My favorite book that does some of that is 1491.
McCloskey's second Bourgeoisie book (Equality? No, Dignity )
or actually one of the progress books, like Hans Rosling. But for a more econ history approach, Angus Deaton's The Great Escape
takk
How flashy, sir <3
scandi appreciation
Many Duolingo courses have finally paid a dividend