Michael Blastland
speaker
745 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Michael Blastland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Even though few people now have a problem with the idea of lending at interest, my guess is that many still blame conjuring tricks in the world of finance for bringing the house down.
From time to time, we're going to hear from an historian or two.
Here's the first, Roger Backhouse.
He wrote The Definitive Guide to the History of Economics.
So, economics started moral.
You could say that not just the study of economics, but economic life itself, that whole shebang of trading, buying and selling that began with the first tentative bartered exchange, was a giant moral leap forward.
To find out what was moral about it, we need some animals.
We've come to London Zoo to talk about economics and I'm watching a little squirrel monkey who's just climbed on the rope next to me and is chewing away at something and threatening to climb on me.
The relationship between primates and humans is something that doesn't often strike us about the way that economies work.
But I'm here to talk to Paul Seabright, who's an economist, and has thought about exactly that.
Paul, why are we talking about economics in the company of squirrel monkeys and other primates?
Well, we're primates ourselves.
I'm not sure if you realise this, but there's a bunch of other small primates on an outing from school just past us.
And if you'd been concentrating on them rather than on the squirrel monkeys, you'd have picked up some very interesting noises from them because we're the primates, I suppose, who have cornered the market in cooperative behaviour.
If we were chimpanzees, we would be fighting each other much more than talking.
If we were bonobos, we would be largely having sex rather than talking.
I should specify for your listeners that we're not actually having sex.
That's one of the things about radio you never are quite sure of.
Bonobos build trust by sexual encounters between the members of the group, which essentially diffuse aggressive instincts.
Chimps do it more by building coalitions which are of sufficient size to deter...
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