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1 " One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. "
― Marshall Sahlins , Stone Age Economics
2 " The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. "
3 " Apes do evidently understand what others are doing, and they can prudently do the same, in which sense they "cooperate"—for their own reasons. But they lack the ability to symbolically participate in others' existence and thus communalize their own. [...]"Traditional models of economic decision-making assume that people are self-interested rational maximizers. Empirical research has demonstrated, however, that people will take into account the interest of others and are sensitive to norms of cooperation and fairness. [...] Here we show that in an ultimatum game, humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are rational maximizers and are not sensitive to fairness. These results support the hypothesis that other-regarding preferences and aversion to inequitable outcomes, which play key roles in human social organization, distinguish us from our closest living relatives." {Jensen, Call, and To masello 2007, 107; see also Jensen et al. 2006)So much, then, for the dismal economic science—whose future is not bright either, inasmuch as chimpanzees are disappearing. "
― Marshall Sahlins , What Kinship Is-And Is Not
4 " We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free. "
― Marshall Sahlins
5 " Parsons famously divided the social science world into a set of component "systems"—notably the social, the cultural, and the psychological—a division that by now seems as arbitrary as it was then influential, especially in its distinction between social structure and the cultural order. Even at the time, it struck some that the project was like analyzing water into its discernible elements of hydrogen and oxygen in order to understand why it runs downhill. "
