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Monkey Business and Freakonomics
marct22 writes "Stephen J Dubner, co-writer of 'Freakonomics' said there will be a second Freakonomics book. One of the items that will be covered is capuchin monkeys' use of washers as money, buying sweets, budgeting for favored treats over lesser treats. He mentioned that one of the experiments had similar outcomes as a study of day traders. And lastly, he watched capuchin prostitution!"
It never spends much space on economic theory, even "distilled to plain English", because that isn't the purpose of the book.
Still, the analogy holds. Since we too are "trained" to see money as money. Do you really think a lot of people put any thought into the development of money and currency? No, they are trained that they get goods for their greenbacks, and that they may accept those green bills for their stuff 'cause there's someone else who's gonna give them other items for them.
People don't see that development, the money-for-gold of the old days. They see the essentially worthless token that becomes valuable because everyone around them deems it just as valuable. They don't care about how international trade influences inflation and how the Dollar stands towards the Euro or Yen, they know that prices go up or wages go down, but the why and how completely escapes them.
So generally, most people are just at the level of those monkeys. They know that if they perform some tricks (i.e. work), they will get some tokens (a paycheck) and they can redeem them for sweets (or a new computer). And that's it.
When you look at the bottom of it all, you'll see that many people are just that: Trained monkeys.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Most people don't understand money either. They're just passing around tokens the way they've been trained by their parents and others around them.
;) ).
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Washers and monopoly money aren't worth much because not enough people believe they are worth something.
What it takes is belief.
If the belief in the US Dollar's value weakened, it will fall in value. If it dropped enough you might have to give a million of them to perfect strangers just to buy loaves of bread, or a virtual sword in an MMOG.
Most people do not make buying decisions the way you claim they do. Only a few would do "this will save me X hours, but does it cost more than I make in X hours". Maybe even more people would go "Shiny! Let's buy it" than do what you say (looking at how advertising works
See "The Psychology of Spending": http://web.mit.edu/giving/spectrum/winter99/spend
You're right, but IMHO, that just tells me that the monkeys and us are not so different. They haven'thad to evolve that behaviour, but they're capable of implementing it. It suggests that monkeys would be capable of arriving at a society similar to ours, given enough time and environmental pressure to do so (including specialization, see the post about the female bonobo monkey).
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Or maybe, it just shows that you can compare anything to anything, if you carefully choose only the aspects that sorta superficially support your idea, do a lot of sophistry to make them look even more supportive, and keep your fingers crossed that noone notices all else you've ignored.
Allow me to start by mentioning my bias, I liked the book, took classes from Steve Levitt, and worked for him for a while during and after college. It may help to know that those gimmicky "comparisons" really were not a part of Levitt's academic papers which the book is based on. Here's a bit of background on Freakonomics, basically Levitt writes a ton of clever papers that win him some recognition. Dubner took these papers and simplified them to try and make them accessible to the non-economic public. Sure, stylistically, there's issues that I have with it as well (and these are issues I have with virtually every pop-science book out there). But I feel as if you've belittled the book's content based on some style choices designed to draw the reader in.
Perhaps I've misunderstood your point, but gimmicky comparisons aside, there's a lot of well thought out content to that book that shouldn't be outright dismissed or characterized badly due to some tasteless introductory paragraphs.