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!"

Comments

Re:There's only been half a book so far..

[vidarh]

From the descriptions on Amazon, it seems like Naked Economics tries to be something completely different than Freakonomics. The entire point of Freakonomics is applying economic theory to areas economists don't usually look at, and describe some of the more interesting results in an entertaining and accessible way, not to be an economy textbook. You say it was "dumbed down" - I say it was written with a specific audience in mind: People who are not interested in economics, i.e. most of us, but who might find a description of some of the results of applying economic theory to everyday situations interesting and entertaining.

It never spends much space on economic theory, even "distilled to plain English", because that isn't the purpose of the book.

Re:Yes, but TRAINED

[Opportunist]

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.