Monkey Business and Freakonomics 182
marct22 writes "Stephen J Dubner, co-writer of 'Freakonomics' said there will be a second Freakonomics book. One of the items that will be covered is capuchin monkeys' use of washers as money, buying sweets, budgeting for favored treats over lesser treats. He mentioned that one of the experiments had similar outcomes as a study of day traders. And lastly, he watched capuchin prostitution!"
Re:There's only been half a book so far.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It never spends much space on economic theory, even "distilled to plain English", because that isn't the purpose of the book.
Re:Good book, big ego (Score:2, Insightful)
it does? In my "Revised and Expanded Edition" there's nothing of the sort.
Also, their blog [freakonomics.com] (which was linked in TFA, but who reads TFA) is well worth a read if you enjoyed the book (or even if you haven't read it).
Re:Yes, but TRAINED (Score:1, Insightful)
Basically it's bullshit to then compare a community of gorillas arificially _trained_ to do X to a community of humans who have a rationale behind doing X, as if there were no difference there. Whatever X may be.
sorry to break your party but EVERYTHING you know and do as a human comes from the TRAINING you received... a school for humans works on the same basic principles as a school for dogs, gorillas, etc .. the only diff is that humans seem to have a way better capacity to assimilate that training .. or it's just that the methods are better suited for them.
Re:Yes, but TRAINED (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't see that development, the money-for-gold of the old days. They see the essentially worthless token that becomes valuable because everyone around them deems it just as valuable. They don't care about how international trade influences inflation and how the Dollar stands towards the Euro or Yen, they know that prices go up or wages go down, but the why and how completely escapes them.
So generally, most people are just at the level of those monkeys. They know that if they perform some tricks (i.e. work), they will get some tokens (a paycheck) and they can redeem them for sweets (or a new computer). And that's it.
When you look at the bottom of it all, you'll see that many people are just that: Trained monkeys.
Re:Yes, but TRAINED (Score:4, Insightful)
Washers and monopoly money aren't worth much because not enough people believe they are worth something.
What it takes is belief.
If the belief in the US Dollar's value weakened, it will fall in value. If it dropped enough you might have to give a million of them to perfect strangers just to buy loaves of bread, or a virtual sword in an MMOG.
Most people do not make buying decisions the way you claim they do. Only a few would do "this will save me X hours, but does it cost more than I make in X hours". Maybe even more people would go "Shiny! Let's buy it" than do what you say (looking at how advertising works
See "The Psychology of Spending": http://web.mit.edu/giving/spectrum/winter99/spend
Re:There's only been half a book so far.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes and no (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, you can say that many individual humans are not much better than trained monkeys. But that's a different topic.
No, IMHO, you can't compare:
A) a human behaviour that evolved over 40,000 years, and based on concepts refined and formalized over all that time, to
B) a monkey behaviour that exists only because someone trained them to do that.
Even if many of the individual humans involved at point A don't really understand that evolution and those concepts, nevertheless, some smarter humans before them did. Joe Sixpack may not understand Keynesian economics in regard to, say, government spending, but Keynes did. It's not a random behaviour that came out of nowhere.
Saying, basically, "haha, human traders act like monkeys" would be valid if we were talking behaviour which the monkeys genuinely discovered on their own. Not when it's monkeys trained to reproduce a human behaviour. Then it becomes, basically, "haha, human traders act like monkeys trained to act like human traders"... err... what's the surprise or revelation there, then?
Even if you talk about the individual "trained monkey" humans, the best you can say that something is simple enough so both a human and a monkey can be trained to do. That's a valid observation.
But reducing the behaviour itself to, basically, "it's the same that monkeys do", isn't saying that much when those monkeys only do it because someone coaxed them to. It's not really monkey behaviour, it's _human_ behaviour that the monkeys have been trained to imitate. It's not really comparing human behaviour to monkey behaviour, but really human behaviour to the same human behaviour. Whop-de-do, big surprise that it ends up the same.
Even if you view humans as trained monkey, it's really comparing:
A) a human trained humans to do X, vs
B) a human trained monkeys to do X.
The real common denominator there isn't "humans act like monkeys", but the fact that a human trained both to do the same.
That is, basically, my objection.
Humans are not trained? (Score:3, Insightful)
So you are saying you emerged from the womb with complete understanding of language, mathematics, and cause-effect association? When you were a child, did you have a clear rationale explaining why you were being taught how to divide or expand your vocabulary? I think you were sent to school where you received exposure to these and other concepts repeatedly until you began accurately repeating them to your instructors. Eventually you learned how to independently form sophisticated compositions of those simple concepts, possibly through repetition, for the purpose of solving problems. This seems a lot like training [reference.com] to me.
Re:Yes, but TRAINED (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes and no (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I've read the book... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yes, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
(Or do you think pretty, shiny diamonds truly are useful, and so on?)
Re:I've read the book... (Score:3, Insightful)
The article you quote says "The top 1 percent owns over 38 percent of the nation's wealth"
You got confused with "The top 1 percent's financial wealth is equal to that of the bottom 95 percent" which is not the same.
Re:Or maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Allow me to start by mentioning my bias, I liked the book, took classes from Steve Levitt, and worked for him for a while during and after college. It may help to know that those gimmicky "comparisons" really were not a part of Levitt's academic papers [uchicago.edu] which the book is based on. Here's a bit of background on Freakonomics, basically Levitt writes a ton of clever papers that win him some recognition. Dubner took these papers and simplified them to try and make them accessible to the non-economic public. Sure, stylistically, there's issues that I have with it as well (and these are issues I have with virtually every pop-science book out there). But I feel as if you've belittled the book's content based on some style choices designed to draw the reader in.
Perhaps I've misunderstood your point, but gimmicky comparisons aside, there's a lot of well thought out content to that book that shouldn't be outright dismissed or characterized badly due to some tasteless introductory paragraphs.
Re:I've read the book... (Score:2, Insightful)
Check out the top tax brackets from the 50s and 60s (a time of great economic growth) sometime.