The most sophisticated way of establishing rank order so far devised by man is by means of currency in all its manifestations. There are many other games, such as warfare, politics, organised religion, bureaucracy, sport, artistic fame, entertainment, and even who wears the trousers in marriage, but the currency game is the most multifarious, and the one that has the most potential for either widespread prosperity or disaster. Economics is best studied by watching what happens to currency.

So described, economics seems to cover all of man's activities. But there are two extremely important ones that I have left out so far. One can be summarised by a blunt quotation of Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate who married two of the most famous women in the modern world—Maria Callas, the opera diva, and Jacqueline Kennedy, the widow of US President John F. Kennedy—who died in 1975, when he said "There is no point in being rich unless you can't have sex with beautiful women." So when we're talking about the male urge for status, or the female urge for a dependable partner who will give her security and good progeny, we're really talking about powerful drive of sex.

The other is that the human species, in contrast to our close cousins, the chimps, is extraordinarily more curious and can be so in a purely objective way, not immediately connected with daily survival. All this can be put down to the vast expansion of the frontal lobes of our cortex in the evolutionary line which led to man, and I will be devoting a chapter of my book to this. Everybody has a certain intellectual curiosity but, in the case of some, it becomes an overwhelming passion, as strong in its own way as yearnings for status and sex -- hence, throughout history, our great philosophers and, in the last few hundred years, our great scientists -- including, of course, some of our great economists!

Our economic systems can therefore be considered to be the practical outcome of a conjunction between the strongest instinct in the most ancient parts of our brain and the evolutionarily youngest parts -- that is, strange as it may seem, status goods acting vicariously for the continuation of the species.

Keith Hudson