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RE: Status Competition, Virtue Signals and Moral Markets (preview post)
And then there are upvotes on Steemit... Good? Bad? Nah, it's just money.
I'm not entirely discounting your post here. It's just a cart and horse sort of situation. Let's remember that morality preceded the markets by a long shot. In fact, most human behavior preceded the invention of markets or market logic, especially in the globalized sense; therefore, any attempt to use market logic to explain human behavior is putting the cart before the horse.
I don't think morality preceded markets. I think behavior is the result of incentives in the environment as shown by behaviorism. So this means nature produces markets. For example the competition for attention from the opposite sex is something lifeforms did before humans even existed and these are markets. This means markets exist for non-human animals prior to humans evolving.
You can say what those other animals are doing are not "markets" because they don't call them markets but their behaviors correlate exactly with the behaviors we associate with market behavior.
So I would say humans didn't invent trade, or markets. Humans just invented the language and called it trade and markets. For this reason I think when we saw markets emerge and trade emerge in humans we were seeing a rediscovery of something which existed in nature for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.
How do you interpret natural selection? You could interpret it such as each individual animal is participating in a market to acquire favorable genetic materials for their offspring.
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