But what is particularly interesting is the role of market pricing, which Fiske speculates might have been the last to evolve in our prehistoric ancestors' brains.
It makes sense. For hunter-gatherers in small bands, sharing, matching and ranking were probably as fundamental to survival as eating and breeding. But market pricing involves complex choices based on mathematical ratios.
"It's the difference between addition and subtraction on one hand, multiplication and division on the other," Fiske says.
Commerce and global trade, of course, require a finely honed version of the market-pricing model. But if humans developed this model relatively late, it might well be less than universal, even today.
In other words, to have an intuitive grasp of economics, you might just need to take a step or two up the evolutionary ladder.
Cara, isso explica muita coisa!
