hey hey, we're the monkees, people say we engage in complex economic behaviors

To preface; NPR's Planet Money podcast is one of the most mind-bogglingly interesting and relevant things I spend my time listening to. You know those episodes of This American Life where they explain, in plain English, the causes and mechanisms behind the financial crisis? It's like that three times a week, except it's not completely depressing. They focus on the ways economics impacts our everyday lives, talking about tariffs, financial regulation, lending practices, and the way industries deal with changing economic environments.

And sometimes they do stuff like exploring the economic interactions between monkeys.

I'd recommend listening to the whole thing, but the jist of it is that researchers took a very hierarchical troop of wild vervet monkeys and taught a low-ranking female to open a box containing apples. They found that very soon after she gained this new power of control over a highly sought-after commodity, the amount of time she spent being groomed by other monkeys skyrocketed to a level comparable to the strongest and most dominant alpha monkeys. However, once they trained another low-ranking monkey to open another box of apples, her grooming time increased to about half of the first monkey, the exact amount that the first monkey's grooming time dropped. The monkeys basically use time spent grooming as currency, which makes perfect sense when you think about it - what is money, if not a physical substitute representing manhours of labor? When you think about it in those terms, you see that when the supply doubled, the price dropped by half, just like anyone who listened to the first ten minutes of Econ101 would tell you.

But... they're fucking monkeys! They have no language, no ability to negotiate, no concept of math beyond the ability to recognize that five apples is less than ten, and the market worked anyway. This means that, far from being a product of human ingenuity, basic economic behavior is something that comes naturally to us, like breathing. Or being adorable for the camera.



Also, male vervet monkeys have bright blue scrotums. This has nothing to do with their ability to form an ad-hoc economy, but it is hilarious.