The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life

By Paul Seabright

Book Overview

Human beings are the only species in nature to have developed an elaborate division of labor between strangers. Even something as simple as buying a shirt depends on an astonishing web of interaction and organization that spans the world. But unlike that other uniquely human attribute, language, our ability to cooperate with strangers did not evolve gradually through our prehistory. Only 10,000 years ago--a blink of an eye in evolutionary time--humans hunted in bands, were intensely suspicious of strangers, and fought those whom they could not flee. Yet since the dawn of agriculture we have refined the division of labor to the point where, today, we live and work amid strangers and depend upon millions more. Every time we travel by rail or air we entrust our lives to individuals we do not know. What institutions have made this possible? In The Company of Strangers , Paul Seabright provides an original evolutionary and sociological account of the emergence of those economic institutions that manage not only markets but also the world's myriad other affairs. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Seabright explores how our evolved ability of abstract reasoning has allowed institutions like money, markets, and cities to provide the foundation of social trust. But how long can the networks of modern life survive when we are exposed as never before to risks originating in distant parts of the globe? This lively narrative shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691118213
• ISBN13: 9780691118215
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A Bioeconomic Masterpiece

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...

Packed with Knowledge!

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...

Wonderful stuff

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...

Why it's in our interests to cooperate with strangers

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...

The Great Experiment -- Trade and Trust

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...