Chapter One

Thesis: The greatest threat to and the best hope for a better life, in the long run, comes from other human beings. Historically, trade has been a great liberator.

Prehistory of Commerce

Homo sapiens became the wisest of primates around forty thousand years ago, when we learned to make deals with strangers. Many steps in our social evolution involved expanding the spheres of mutually advantageous commerce. Paradoxically, we are inclined, perhaps even biologically programmed, to see commerce as a zero-sum game: that is, we see people who profit by selling us food or tools as getting rich at our expense. Eons ago, though, brave souls began to imagine what human beings could do, and saw that the key to a better life was trade. Thus began our liberation from the brutality of life as cave-dwellers.

As we spread, our closest cousins, the Neanderthals, went extinct. Why? Neanderthals were stronger than Homo sapiens and had larger brains. They existed for half a million years, far longer than Homo sapiens has existed so far. What drove them to extinction? One theory is that H. sapiens had better weapons and systematically exterminated the Neanderthal. Archeologists now consider this unlikely, for there is no evidence of such slaughter: no evidence of such weapons, no mass graves, no battlegrounds. Another theory is that H. Neanderthalensis was absorbed into the human genome via inter-breeding: a not uncommon path to extinction. However, geneticists have recently said that this didn't