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The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life
 
 
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The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life [Hardcover]

Paul Seabright (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)

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A brilliant book. -- Martin Wolf Financial Times A very unusual new book about economics, and much else besides... Elaborate co-operation outside the family, but within the same species, is confined to humans. The requirements for such co-operation, and hence for modern economic life, which is founded on specialization and an infinitely elaborated division of labor, are more demanding than you might suppose... The fact that things could have turned out so differently makes the modern global economy, with all its awesome productivity, seem even more miraculous. The Economist A welcome and important contribution... The Company of Strangers exemplifies a new breed of economic analysis, seeking answers to fundamental questions wherever they are found and ignoring disciplinary boundaries... [It] is highly readable and will be accessible to a wide audience. bert Gintis," Nature In his absorbing book, Seabright ... marvels at how easily we 'entrust our lives to the pilot of an aircraft, accept food from a stranger in a restaurant, enter a subway train packed full of our genetic rivals.' It's not often that an economist provides nuggets for cocktail party conversation. -- Peter Young Bloomberg News A clear, thought-provoking and elegant book. -- Howard Davies Times Higher Education Supplement An important and timely book. -- Giles Whittell The Times (London) We now depend on the efforts of many strangers for our lives. In these days of terror and conflict, Seabright's stunning exploration of this human social experiment is timely... This is a book every concerned citizen should read, along with anybody in business who ever has to tangle with government regulations or the law, and who wants to understand why those relationships are so complex. -- Diane Coyle Strategy and Business An entertaining, wide-ranging account about how the economy evolved in a way that allowed strangers, even potentially hostile strangers, to cooperate and even collaborate within market-based institutionsS. Seabright tells the story of how human beings, despite their genetic predisposition toward violent and even murderous behavior, have managed to produce a complex civilization through market-based institutions. Choice

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No one, economist or civilian, could turn the pages of this book without spotting, time and again, some unexpected and arresting idea that really wants to be thought about. Paul Seabright takes the evolutionary point of view seriously and asks how human institutions make social life possible at all, especially when the many people on whom we depend for our subsistence are strangers. From biology to banking, it is a lively landscape.
(Robert M. Solow, Institute Professor Emeritus, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences ) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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5.0 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A history indeed, July 22 2006
This review is from: The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Paperback)
This book is an expose into the history of one of the very foundations of our society: our trust in each other. The author describes expertly how we transformed (not evolved) from shy, murderous apes, to generally trusting, peaceful members of complex societies. The author argues that we did not evolve into this modern state because we as a speccies still retain the psychology of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Instead, our society and its institutions have build constraints to prevent the psychology of our ape ancestry from emerging and destroying ourselves and our collective civilization. His explanation of this encompassed not economic theory, but an exploration of the varied social sciences to develop a portrait of the way in which we acquired our current economic system. He also warned of the fragility of our institutions and that in order to survive the challenges of the 21st century, we must recognize that fragility and work to strengthen the bonds that bind us strangers together. The author's intelligent criticism of the modern capitalist system was refreshing as it recognized and gave voice to the dynamism and creativity that the market system has produced.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful stuff, Jun 13 2004
This review is from: The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Hardcover)
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 to work together. This cooperation with strangers is, though, a fragile thing, and Seabright's conclusion raises the specter that in the future we may need to work a lot harder to remain in the company of strangers. I'm not fully convinced by the book's end, but the argument is worth thinking about. Also see Robert Wright's "Nonzero," Howard Rheingold's "Smart Mobs," and James Surowiecki's "The Wisdom of Crowds" for variations on this argument.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars The Great Experiment -- Trade and Trust, Jun 1 2004
This review is from: The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Hardcover)
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 be one of the strangest.

In this wonderfully readable book, subtitled "A Natural History of Economic Life", Paul Seabright follows the story of what he calls the "shy, murderous ape" from lonely hunter to homo economicus, confidently mingling with crowds of strangers and daily dependant on numerous people whom he has never met. Amazingly, to our Neanderthal, we have learned to trust strangers.

The question asked in the second half of the book is how far we should rely on such leaderless chains. Some items, such as airline travel and hospital care, don't lend themselves to blind trust. And who is to stop the cotton farmer from polluting the river that the dyer downstream drinks from, or the dyer from polluting the air that the tailor breathes? At what point do the connections between countries or companies become impossibly fragile?

Finally Professor Seabright dismisses recent talk about globalization as "excitable" and dismisses it as a mere continuation of a trend of "at least the last ten thousand years." That does imply that, as far as economics is concerned, camels and the Silk Road are no different from container ships and the internet highway. This is one of several topics in the final chapters of the book which are only touched upon and which would repay our closer attention. Perhaps we can hope that The Company of Strangers is only the first volume in a story to be continued.

Kudos also to Leslie Flis, Tim Flach and Augustin de Berranger for the stunning dust jacket. They too were part of the chain in the production of this highly entertaining and likable book.

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