The Company of Strangers A Natural History of Economic Life [Paperback]

The Company of Strangersshows 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?

"One of Strategy & Business's Best Business Books for 2004""Shortlisted for the 2005 British Academy Book Prize"Paul Seabrightis professor of economics at the Toulouse School of Economics. He has been a fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, and Churchill College, University of Cambridge. A brilliant book. ---Martin Wolf,Financial Times The Company of Strangersis a model of how different disciplines can enrich each other to explain human progress. ---George Peden,Times Literary Supplement [A] clear, thought-provoking, and elegant book. ---Howard Davies,Times Higher Education Why is everyday life so strange? Because, explains Mr. Seabright, it is so much at odds with what would have seemed, as recently as 10,000 years ago, our evolutionary destiny. An important and timely book. . . . It starts in the mists of prehistory but ends emphatically in the here and now. ---Giles Whittell,Times A welcome and important contribution. . . .The Company of Strangersexemplifies a new brel³j