The Rational Optimist (44 page)

p. 81 ‘causing the anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers to puzzle’. Shennan, S. 2002.
Genes, Memes and Human History
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p. 81 ‘Shell beads had been moving long distances across Australia since at least 30,000 years ago.’ Balme, J. and Morse, K. 2006. Shell beads and social behaviour in Pleistocene Australia.
Antiquity
80: 799–811.

p. 81 ‘The best stone axes travelled up to 500 miles from where they were mined.’ Flood, J. 2006.
The Original Australians: the Story of the Aboriginal People
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p. 81 ‘In contrast to Tasmania, Tierra del Fuego’. Heinrich, J. 2004. Demography and cultural evolution: how adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses – the Tasmanian case.
American Antiquity
69:197–214.

p. 82 ‘The success of human beings depends crucially, but precariously, on numbers and connections.’ Incidentally, the story of the Greenland Norse, or of the inhabitants of Easter Island, told so eloquently as tales of ecological exhaustion in Jared Diamond’s book
Collapse
, probably say as much about isolation as ecology. Isolated from Scandinavia by a combination of the Black Death and the worsening climate, the Greenland Norse could not sustain their lifestyles; like the Tasmanians, they forgot how to fish. Easter Island Diamond may have partly misread: some argue that its society was possibly still flourishing, despite deforestation, when a holocaust of slave traders arrived in the 1860s – see Peiser, B. 2005. From genocide to ecocide: the rape of Rapa Nui.
Energy & Environment
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p. 82 ‘This may explain why Australian aboriginal technology, although it developed and elaborated steadily over the ensuing millennia, was lacking in so many features of the Old World’. O’Connell, J.F. and Allen, J. 2007. Pre-LGM Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea) and the archaeology of Early Modern Humans. In Mellars, P., Boyle, K., Bar-Yosef, O. et al.
Rethinking the Human Revolution
. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp. 395–410.

pp. 82–3 ‘The “Tasmanian effect” may also explain why technological progress had been so slow and erratic in Africa after 160,000 years ago’. Richerson, P.J., Boyd, R. and Bettinger, R.L. 2009. Cultural innovations and demographic change.
Human Biology
81:211–35; Powell, A., Shennan, S. and Thomas, M.G. 2009. Late Pleistocene demography and the appearance of modern human behaviour.
Science
324:1298–1301.

p. 83 ‘As the economist Julian Simon put it’. Simon, J. 1996.
The Ultimate Resource 2
. Princeton University Press.

p. 84 ‘Tasmanians sold women to the sealers as concubines’. Flood, J. 2006.
The Original Australians: the Story of the Aboriginal People
. Allen & Unwin.

Chapter 3

p. 85 ‘Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed’. Ferguson, N. 2008.
The Ascent of Money
. Allen Lane.

p. 85 Homicide rate graph. Spierenburg, P. 2008.
A History of Murder
. Polity Press. See also Eisner, M. 2001. Modernization, Self-Control and Lethal Violence. The Long-term Dynamics of European Homicide Rates in Theoretical Perspective
The British Journal of Criminology
41:618-638.

p. 85 ‘Greenstreet whispers to Bogart’. Siegfried, T. 2006.
A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory and the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature
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p. 86 ‘As the economist Herb Gintis puts it’. http://www.reason.com/news/show/34772.html.

p. 86 ‘people in fifteen mostly small-scale tribal societies were enticed to play the Ultimatum Game’. Henrich, J. et al. 2005. ‘Economic man’ in crosscultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
28:795–815.

p. 87 ‘costly punishment of selfishness may be necessary’. Fehr, E. and Gachter, S. 2000. Cooperation and punishment in public goods experiments.
American Economic Review
, Journal of the American Economic Association 90: 980–94; Henrich, J. et al. 2006. Costly punishment across human societies.
Science
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p. 88 ‘in other group-living species, such as ants or chimpanzees, the interactions between members of different groups are almost always violent’. Brosnan, S. 2008. Fairness and other-regarding preferences in nonhuman primates. In Zak, P. (ed.) 2008.
Moral Markets
. Princeton University Press.

p. 88 ‘human beings can treat strangers as honorary friends’. Seabright, P. 2004.
The Company of Strangers
. Princeton University Press.

p. 88 ‘primatologists such as Sarah Hrdy and Frans de Waal’. Hrdy, S. 2009.
Mothers and Others
. Belknap. De Waal, F. 2006.
Our Inner Ape
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p. 89 ‘The traders of Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines were often women, who were taught to calculate and to account from an early age.’ Pomeranz, K. and Topik, S. 2006.
The World That Trade Created
. M.E. Sharpe.

p. 89 ‘the British government trusted a Jewish lender named Nathan Rothschild’. Ferguson, N. 2008.
The Ascent of Money
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p. 90 ‘the experiment, run by Bart Wilson, Vernon Smith and their colleagues’. Crockett, S., Wilson, B. and Smith, V. 2009. Exchange and specialization as a discovery process.
Economic Journal
119: 1162–88.

p. 90 ‘the Yir Yoront aborigines, in northern Australia’. Sharp, L. 1974. Steel axes for stone age Australians. In Cohen, Y. (ed.) 1974.
Man in Adaptation
. Aldine de Gruyter.

pp. 91–2 ‘a young naturalist named Charles Darwin came face to face with some hunter-gatherers’. Darwin, C.R. 1839.
The Voyage of the
Beagle. John Murray.

p. 92 ‘New Guinea highlanders, when first contacted by Michael Leahy and his fellow prospectors in 1933’. Connolly, R. and Anderson, R. 1987.
First Contact
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p. 92 ‘The people of the Pacific coast of North America were sending seashells hundreds of miles inland, and importing obsidian from even farther afield.’ Baugh, T.E. and Ericson, J.E. 1994.
Prehistoric Exchange Systems in North America
. Springer.

pp. 92–3 ‘The Chumash of the Californian channel islands’. Arnold, J.E. 2001.
The Origins of a Pacific Coast Chiefdom: The Chumash of the Channel Islands
. University of Utah Press.

p. 93 ‘
Das Adam Smith Problem
’. Coase, R. H. 1995. Adam Smith’s view of man. In
Essays on Economics and Economists
. University of Chicago Press.

p. 93 ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed’. Smith, A. 1759.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
.

p. 93 ‘Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren’. Smith, A. 1776.
The Wealth of Nations
.

p. 93 ‘honorary friends’. Seabright, P. 2004.
The Company of Strangers
. Princeton University Press.

p. 94 ‘As the philosopher Robert Solomon put it’. Solomon, R.C. 2008. Free enterprise, sympathy and virtue. In Zak, P. (ed.). 2008.
Moral Markets
. Princeton University Press.

p. 94 ‘a baby smiling causes particular circuits in its mother’s brain to fire’. Noriuchi, M., Kikuchi, Y. and Senoo, A. 2008. The functional neuroanatomy of maternal love: mother’s response to infant’s attachment behaviors.
Biological Psychiatr
y 63:415–23.

p. 94 ‘the neuro-economist Paul Zak’. Zak, P. 2008. Values and value. In Zak, P. (ed.). 2008.
Moral Markets
. Princeton University Press.

p. 94 ‘Zak, together with Ernst Fehr and other colleagues, conducted one of the most revealing experiments in the history of economics’. Kosfeld, M., Henrichs, M., Zak, P.J., Fischbacher, U. and Fehr, E. 2005. Oxytocin increases trust in humans.
Nature
435: 673–6.

p. 95 ‘by suppressing the activity of the amygdala, the organ that expresses fear’. Rilling, J.K., et al. 2007. Neural correlates of social cooperation and non-cooperation as a function of psychopathy.
Biological Psychiatry
61:1260–71.

p. 96 ‘says the economist Robert Frank’. Frank, R. 2008. The status of moral emotions in consequentialist moral reasoning. In Zak, P. (ed.) 2008.
Moral Markets
. Princeton University Press.

p. 96 ‘people acutely remember the faces of those who cheat them’. Mealey, L., Daood, C. and Krage, M. 1996. Enhanced memory for faces of cheaters.
Ethology and Sociobiology
17:119–28.

pp. 96–7 ‘Capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees are just as resentful of unfair treatment’. Brosnan, S. 2008. Fairness and other-regarding preferences in nonhuman primates. In Zak, P. (ed.) 2008.
Moral Markets
. Princeton University Press.

p. 97 ‘the more people trust each other in a society, the more prosperous that society is’. Zak, P. and Knack, S. 2001. Trust and growth.
Economic Journal
111:295–321.

p. 99 ‘John Clippinger draws an optimistic conclusion’. Clippinger, J.H. 2007.
A Crowd of One
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p. 99 ‘as Robert Wright has argued’. Wright, R. 2000.
Non Zero: the Logic of Human Destiny
. Pantheon.

p. 101 ‘Michael Shermer thinks that is because in most of the Stone Age it was true’. Shermer, M. 2007.
The Mind of the Market
. Times Books.

p. 101 ‘incredible augmentation of the pots and pans of the country’. Quoted in O’Rourke, P.J. 2007.
On The Wealth of Nations
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p. 102 ‘said the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2008’.
Spectator
, 24 September. 2008.

p. 102 ‘As the Australian economist Peter Saunders argues’. Saunders, P. 2007. Why capitalism is good for the soul.
Policy Magazine
23:3–9.

p. 102 ‘Brink Lindsey writes’. Lindsey, B. 2007.
The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture
. Collins.

p. 102 ‘Arnold Toynbee, lecturing working men on the English industrial revolution which had so enriched them’. Quoted in Phillips, A. and Taylor, B. 2009.
On Kindness
. Hamish Hamilton.

p. 103 ‘In 2009 Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor argued’. Phillips, A. and Taylor, B. 2009.
On Kindness
. Hamish Hamilton.

p. 103 ‘As the British politician Lord Taverne puts it’. Lord Taverne, personal communication.

p. 103 ‘John Padgett at the University of Chicago compiled data on the commercial revolution in fourteenth-century Florence’. Described in Clippinger, J.H. 2007.
A Crowd of One
. Public Affairs Books.

p. 103 ‘observed Charles, Baron de Montesquieu’. Quoted in Hirschman, A. 1977.
The Passions and the Interests.
Princeton University Press.

p. 103 ‘David Hume thought commerce “rather favourable to liberty”’. McFarlane, A. 2002. David Hume and the political economy of agrarian civilization.
History of European Ideas
27:79–91.

p. 104 ‘The rapid commercialisation of lives since 1800 has coincided with an extraordinary improvement in human sensibility’. Pinker, S. 2007. A history of violence.
The New Republic
, 19 March 2007.

p. 105 ‘it was the nouveau-riche merchants, with names like Wedgwood and Wilberforce, who financed and led the anti-slavery movement’. Desmond, A. and Moore, J. 2009.
Darwin’s Sacred Cause
. Allen Lane.

p. 105 ‘Far from being a vice,’ says Eamonn Butler’. Butler, E. 2008.
The Best Book on the Market
. Capstone.

p. 105 ‘When shown a photograph of an attractive man’. Miller, G. 2009.
Spent
. Heinemann.

p. 106 ‘As Michael Shermer comments’. Shermer, M. 2007.
The Mind of the Market
. Times Books.

p. 106 ‘your chances of being murdered have fallen steadily since the seventeenth century in every European country’. Eisner, M. 2001. Modernization, self-control and lethal violence. The long-term dynamics of European homicide rates in theoretical perspective.
British Journal of Criminology
41:618–38.

p. 106 ‘Murder was ten times as common before the industrial revolution in Europe, per head of population, as it is today.’ See also Spierenburg, P. 2009.
A History of Murder
. Polity Press.