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You haven't heard of monkey economics? That's probably because I just invented the term. However, there have been some interesting experiments done with monkeys which shed light on the evolutionary economics of humans.
Haven't heard of evolutionary economics? That's not surprising either. It's a relatively new area of study that looks into the biological and evolutionary forces and developments which explain our economic decisions - especially our seemingly irrational ones. Behavioral economics, a related field, describes how we make money and trade decisions, while the evolutionary perspective is all about hypothesizing why we make the decisions we make.
Now, about those monkeys. Actually the research has been done with both chimpanzees and monkeys. In one experiment at Emory University, when two primates participated in a mutual task for which one was rewarded, the second one stopped helping out in future tasks if the first didn't share the rewards. That seems rational, and very human-like.
However, monkeys also seem to share with humans the extreme and seemingly irrational tendency to hurt their own self interest in order to protest unfairness. Pairs of capuchin monkeys, for example, were trained to trade a stone for a cucumber slice, a good deal from their perspective. There was usually a 95% rate of cooperation. But when one of the monkeys was given a grape - which is more highly valued - the monkey getting the cucumber slice suddenly didn't make the trade nearly as often. In fact, the cooperation rate dropped to 60%. Sometimes the monkeys simply refused to take the slice at all, even having handed over the stone. Apparently they would rather go hungry than be "taken advantage of" in an unfair exchange.
It seems that all primates including us have evolved a emotional sense of justice or fairness. This may have helped maintain harmony in the small groups we lived in thousands of years ago - a common evolutionary hypothesis. Oh, but we haven't covered the human experiments.
There is an experiment economists call the "Ultimatum Game, which is typically played with two people. They are given $100 to split between them, but player one gets to propose how to divide it. She might suggest that she gets $80, for example, while the other "player" gets $20. Player two can say yes, and each will get his or her designated share. If player 2 says no, neither gets anything.
Rationally, player two should always say yes, since even if the split proposed is $95 and $5, that $5 is still better than nothing. There is nothing to be gained (financially) by saying no. Players know they won't be playing again, so a reputation for turning down a low proposal gives them no advantage.
Interestingly, while people mostly accept "reasonable" proposals, the obvious one being a 50/50 split, they refuse many "unreasonable" ones. Specifically, most players turn down proposals that give them less than 30% of the money. Why turn down free money? Many simply say it isn't fair.
Scientists working in the area of evolutionary economics hypothesize that we have a built-in sense of "reciprocal altruism," which evolved over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. This emotional reaction demands fairness, and must have provided some advantage to the human species, even at the expense of personal gain. Though the world is changed, and it would be more advantageous to take the money now, our minds are still functioning as they have for hundreds of thousands of years.
Where will money economics and other investigations into evolutionary economics lead? It seems likely that in addition to the irrational responses to the "Ultimatum Game," we can identify other common self-defeating economic behaviors that take place in daily life, and then correct them. Though they result from the hard-wiring of our brains, according to the scientific theories, our "software" or conscious mind can evolve more quickly.