The Company of Strangers
By P. Seabright. 2010
232 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The Company of Strangers shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives. This completely revised and updated edition includes a new chapter analyzing how the rise and fall of social trust explain the unsustainable boom in the global economy over the past decade and the financial crisis that succeeded it. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Paul Seabright explores how our evolved ability of abstract reasoning has allowed institutions like money, markets, cities, and the banking system to provide the foundations of social trust that we need in our everyday lives. Even the simple acts of buying food and clothing depend on an astonishing web of interaction that spans the globe. How did humans develop the ability to trust total strangers with providing our most basic needs?
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/23e239304e92faf33b5186cbab08f25bdafa3f74
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In Economics and Econometrics
Citations in the corpus
- Feeling Duped: Emotional, Motivational, and Cognitive Aspects of Being Exploited by Others (2007, background): “Humans evolved to be willing to participate in such interactions in a degree unprecedented in other species, and much to their general benefit (e.g., Seabright, 2004).”
- The Evolutionary Foundations of Preferences (2011, unknown): “, Seabright [139]).”
- Close social associations in animals and humans : functions and mechanisms of friendship (2010, background): “Human groups, however, have become larger and larger and humans now also frequently interact with strangers (Seabright, 2004).”