Despite the rough treatment handed to Edward O. Wilson's call for a unification of biology and the social sciences some three decades ago, and despite the hostility still aroused by the notion of "sociobiology" by some traditionalists, the process of integrating social science into natural science appears to be in full swing. Paul Seabright's new book is a welcome and important contribution to this process. The idea behind...
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Credit author Paul Seabright's achievement on several scores. First, he is an economist who thinks outside the supply-and-demand box, and whose thoughts actually are comprehensible to the average reader. Second, his ideas are original, blending evolution, economics and sociology. In his view, the daily trusting interaction of complete strangers is a marvel that is unprecedented in the animal kingdom. Moreover, this high degree...
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Academic press books rarely get the attention they deserve, so I hope this book does not get lost in the mix. Paul Seabright is a terrific writer, and his account in this book of the origins of cooperation is lucid and exciting. Seabright makes the important point that successful economies and societies depend on cooperation, and that even though self-interest would seem to lead us to reject that, time and again we manage...
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It's a scary world out there, but Professor Seabright helps explain why we're prepared to put our trust in people to whom we're not related. Starting with the example of the (unplanned) global cooperation needed just to enable Paul to buy a new shirt, he takes the reader on an ambitious tour of the economic evolution of human nature.Previous Seabright publications have included macroeconomic monographs on Eastern Europe. Though...
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The Company of Strangers starts with the purchase of a shirt. How is it that exactly the item we want is available in our local store, when we didn't know the farmer who grew the cotton, the dyer who dyed the thread, the tailor who sewed the pieces, nor the shipper who shipped the shirt? Nor did most of these people know each other. Of all the things that might puzzle a Neanderthal who wandered into our time zone, this would...
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