HES: Re: Is Trade Unique to Humans?

[Gavin Kennedy]

Dear Deirdre McCloskey
 
I think we can further dissect Alan Page Fiske’s elementary forms of human relations:
 
‘Authority ranking’ is not just a
justification of the Alpha male getting a larger share by virtue of
position (more likely by strength of coercive
potential).
 
Observing chimps, the alpha male also provides
access to food resources (how much?) and females (how often?) to his
allies and his allies are also ranked by their ‘value’ to the
Alpha.   War lords and feudal lords also dispensed resources in
this manner too, to their retainers, some armed, and to their serfs and,
later, to their tenants (TMS IV.1.10: pp 183-5, inclusive of the famous
‘invisible hand’ metaphor for the outcome).  The exchange
was not monetary,  but it was still a variable ratio of: services
(how valuable?) to the alpha/lord/ gang-leader in exchange for food
resources (how much?) or whatever (in feudal times tenants required their
lord’s permission to marry: ‘yes, no, maybe, perhaps
if
’).
 
This is similar to the exchange ratio in modern
bargaining, which boils down to the ratio of what one negotiator gets for
what they give up to get it - ‘I want/you want’.  The
gradation in money terms is stricter than the gradation in less
quantifiable terms of estimates of ‘worth’, but shares the
characteristic of variability.  Smith’s
‘beaver-deer’ parable left room for arguing about the exchange
ratio depending on the relative size and condition of the kills, in short
for ‘haggling’ or ‘dickering’). 
 
Karl Polanyi took too narrow a view of exchange
markets in my view.  ‘Price’ is a ratio, but so is any
exchange transaction, and the distinct gradations in an exchange
transactions are common to both.  In money transaction the laws of
arithmetic apply; in non-monetary exchanges the ratio is far more subtle,
as a look at bride price behaviour shows – offer too much or too
little, and the family is insulted, and what is ‘too much’ or
‘to little’ may not be obvious because it could apply to what
a previous sibling, or a neighbour’s child had been
‘priced’ at.  I think a far more subtle concept of
‘price’ may be appropriate than projecting monetary measures
to analogous situations, and finding an absence of money in
them.
 
Gavin Kennedy