The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics

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Macmillan, 2007 M12 26 - 336 páginas

Bestselling author Michael Shermer explains how evolution shaped the modern economy—and why people are so irrational about money

How did we make the leap from ancient hunter-gatherers to modern consumers and traders? Why do people get so emotional and irrational about bottom-line financial and business decisions? Is the capitalist marketplace a sort of Darwinian organism, evolved through natural selection as the fittest way to satisfy our needs? In this eye-opening exploration, author and psychologist Michael Shermer uncovers the evolutionary roots of our economic behavior.

Drawing on the new field of neuroeconomics, Shermer investigates what brain scans reveal about bargaining, snap purchases, and establishing trust in business. He scrutinizes experiments in behavioral economics to understand why people hang on to losing stocks, why negotiations disintegrate into tit-for-tat disputes, and why money does not make us happy. He brings together astonishing findings from psychology, biology, and other sciences to describe how our tribal ancestry makes us suckers for brands, why researchers believe cooperation unleashes biochemicals similar to those released during sex, why free trade promises to build alliances between nations, and how even capuchin monkeys get indignant if they don't get a fair reward for their work.

 

Páginas seleccionadas

Contenido

Economics for Everyone
The Great Leap Forward
Our Folk Economics
BottomUp Capitalism
Of Pandas Products and People
Minding Our Money
The Extinction of Homo Economicus
The Value of Virtue
Why Money Cant Buy You Happiness
Trust with Credit Verification
The Science of Good Rules
Dont Be Evil
Free to Choose
To Open the World
Acknowledgments

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Michael Shermer is the author of The Believing Brain, Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Mind Of The Market, Why Darwin Matters, Science Friction, How We Believe and other books on the evolution of human beliefs and behavior. He is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, the editor of Skeptic.com, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University. He lives in Southern California.

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