The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (Abridged) Audiobook

How did we evolve from ancient hunter-gatherers to modern consumer-traders? Why are people so emotional and irrational when it comes to money and business decisions?

Best-selling author Michael Shermer believes that evolution and evolutionary psychology provides an answer to both of these questions through the new science of evolutionary economics. Drawing on research from neuroeconomics, Shermer explores what brain scans reveal about bargaining, snap purchases, and how trust is established in business. Utilizing experiments in behavioral economics, Shermer shows why people hang on to losing stocks and failing companies, why business negotiations often disintegrate into emotional tit-for-tat disputes, and why money does not make us happy.

Employing research from complexity theory, Shermer shows how evolution and economics are both examples of a larger and still somewhat mysterious phenomenon of emergence, where one plus one equals three. The Mind of the Market will change the way we think about the economics of everyday life.

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"There is more information in the 261 pages of The Mind of the Market than there is in most books more than twice its size. That is both an advantage and a disadvantage in the sense that the book held the reader's attention even though the fecundity of ideas sometimes bordered on the overwhelming. Michael Shermer, the author of The Mind of the Market, is the publisher of Skeptic Magazine and the author of nine previous books. In this book he attempts to capture the "Mind" of the Market while arguing against previous visions of how the market works while surveying scientific theories that he believes may be used to replace these earlier visions. I came to the book receptive to his support of free market economics, his penultimate chapter is entitled "Free to Choose" - a direct reference to Milton Friedman's classic text of the same name; however I was not convinced that, with all the scientific theories and studies used as examples of "evolutionary" economics and the neuroscience of the market, he made a convincing case. Many of the pieces of the book seemed to just hang there, fascinating little essays on some aspect of science or how "Homo Economicus" no longer exists (or perhaps never did!). He summarizes his goals as describing 1) How the market has a mind of its own; 2) How minds operate in markets: and, 3) How minds and markets are moral. Each of these goals can be included under the rubric of "Evolutionary Economics" in Shermer's estimation. For my "money" and "mind" I found his attempt to be informative and entertaining if not, in the end, convincing."

— James (4 out of 5 stars)