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September 29, 2003
Talk of the chimp town
The New Yorker Talk of the Town this week discusses the objection to Dick Grasso's $180m compensation package. The really interesting part, though, is the author's conclusion that monkeys - not to mention people - "seem to believe that there should be a clear connection between work and pay."
I'll just add that if there's one thing I've learned so far in school it's that economists are deeply disturbed people (no offense John).
It so happened that, on the very day Grasso resigned, the primatologists Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B. M. de Waal released a study showing that female brown capuchin monkeys seem to have a sense of fairness, too.
Pairs of capuchins had been trained to give Brosnan pebbles in exchange for slices of cucumber. This idyllic monkey market economy was disrupted, though, when the scientists changed the pay scale, rewarding one monkey with a delicious grape and the other with the same measly old cucumber. Exposed to this injustice, the capuchins who were given cucumbers often refused to eat; forty per cent of the time, they stopped trading entirely.
Things got worse when one monkey in each pair was given a grape for doing nothing at all. The other monkeys often responded by tossing away their pebbles; eighty per cent of the time, they stopped trading. The capuchins were willing to forfeit cheap food simply to express their displeasure at their partners’ unearned riches.
Posted by sam at September 29, 2003 09:46 PM