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At TPMcafe this morning, Daniel Gross is discussing his new book Pop! which argues, counter-intuitively, that the hand-wringing about “bubbles” in various industries is unwarranted, that there’s a relatively permanent residual “mental infrastructure”–what we anthropologists would rather call “culture”–that results from periods of overheated investment:

Physical infrastructure isn’t the only thing left behind after bubbles. During bubbles, a great deal of cash is spent building what I call “mental infrastructure”—convincing people to try new ways of doing business. Most of the pioneering Internet bubble-era companies failed as businesses. But they succeeded in making millions of people believe that it was safe, efficient, and desirable to complete transactions online. Post-bust innovators were thus able to tap into both a commercial physical infrastructure (near-universal broadband) and a huge installed base of customers. As a result, the best time to start an internet business wasn’t in 1998 and 1999, when venture capital money was plentiful and the NASDAQ offered a sure route to IPO riches. It was in 2002 or 2003, when investors were irrationally pessimistic about the internet, when the building blocks of internet businesses were dirt cheap, and when there was a massive, installed base of users to tap.

There is a rhetorical opening here which strikes me as an excellent opportunity for anthropologists. Certainly, as Gross points out in his discussion, bubbles are problematic for economists who are, by and large, deeply committed to a rational-actor theory of social life and to the orderly and efficient principles according to which markets are purported to work. But anthropologists have known for some time that markets work just like every other aspect of culture. Individual actors are asymmetrically prepared to operate in their own best interests. That is, participants are never equally informed, so their “rationality” is highly perspectival. Indeed, it is this very principle on which financial markets–and poker games–thrive.

When the dissemination of the capacity to both recognize and produce a communicative form (such as buying into a market) expands dramatically, we can argue that there has been some element of cultural transformation. In Gross’s terms, we have a larger “installed base of users.”

In the case of real-estate, this seems particularly poignant. Certainly, according to most statistics, home ownership is on the rise. Even if those numbers are substantially diminished by a real-estate bubble, rising interest rates and increased foreclosures, the number of people who imagine themselves–who inhabit the “mental infrastructure”–as home-owners will have risen. Indeed, anyone who has been through the house-buying process has likely developed more than a passing interest in the behavior of real estate markets, the meaning of interest rates, amortization, etc. An acquaintance, even just with the vocabulary of real-estate investment, probably results in lowered barriers to subsequent participation in the real-estate market, even if former buyers felt the burn of an overheated market. But home ownership is not exclusively–or even primarily–a financial decision. And as with any infrastructure, “mental infrastructure” (as culture, of course) requires substantial upkeep. Are there institutions arising that are committed to that task? Has there been a permanent change in the various stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be American that would make the “installed base of users” more durable in the real estate market than in, say, the Tulip market?

I haven’t read the book, but I wonder if part of the argument about bubbles being good for the economy is that it reduces the fundamental asymmetry in preparation for people entering the market. In that case, Gross is still adhering to a “rational-actor” theory in which this bigger base of “market users” is “good” because those market users are more likely to act rationally in sustaining the resulting (and newly stabilized) market.

Anthropologists who are interested in social justice issues, the behavior of markets, and cultural transformation would do well to take a look at what the discipline’s considerable strengths can offer to this discussion.

All religionist efforts to the contrary, Evolutionary Biology’s authority is ascendant. The pace of discovery and breadth of research has steadily accelerated in the decades since Watson and Crick (and, perhaps more to the point here, Rosalind Franklin) sketched the structure of DNA. But the enthusiasm for a genetic model of humanness modeled on computer programming–one of the other authoritative discourses these days–with its “codes”, “inputs”, “outputs” and, occasionally, “errors” has, when filtered through the exuberant prose of journalism and other popular representations, contributed to what we might snarkily call a culture of “Genetic Fundamentalism.” The rhetorical handmaiden to GF is the “naturalization” of culturally and historically localized practices across space and time. This article from the April 2nd, 2007 Inquirer is a great example. To be sure, no small amount of contemporary gender inequity, at least in the United States, is enabled by the heroic myths of the fighting, striving, and innovating of prehistoric men, to the exclusion of women. To the extent that these misconceptions about human evolution persist in popular form, as always-available sexist insults for instance, any work in this area is greatly welcomed. Here is a passage that captures some of the tension:

Groping toward a fuller understanding of how we became human, some researchers are looking at how and when we came to act as women and men.

Note the structure of presuppositions. First, there’s the appeal to a threshold concept of humanness, which is echoed in its more explicit genetic form later in the article:

Stanford’s Klein sees no connection with sex roles. Gender distinctions, in his more mainstream view, go back more than a million years. He believes a genetic change spurred artistic and cultural advances.

A mutation in the DNA, he says, might have reorganized the brain without changing its size. It may have helped humans create more complex communication - thus offering an advantage that would spread through the population.

A mutation like he envisions having hit modern humans would have contributed to our survival and the Neanderthals’ demise. Klein is hoping the actual mutation will surface as scientists continue to decode bits of DNA scraped from Neanderthals’ bones, and compare them with our own.

Such a mutation, he says, would have spread not just because it made men better, more specialized hunters. It would have helped both men and women do almost everything better.

The implicit assumption is that some modification to the genetic code pushed ‘us’ over the line from pre-human to human as though such categories themselves might have some extra-cultural, ‘natural’, or biological significance. Secondly, the formulation “…how and when we came to act as women and men” effectively renders uncontroversial the observation that “we…act as women and men” (that is, we act differently) cross-culturally and trans-historically. But to make this observation, one must systematically ignore vast cultural differences in how women and men divide labor among contemporary populations. It also appeals to the widely-held conservative notion that our modern values of sex equality are really just a turning-away, or a concealing, of a true (because genetic and evolutionarily derived) difference between the sexes. Sex differences aren’t the only thing getting the naturalization treatment. The author asks:

Could it be that Neanderthal females achieved an equality that is rare even by today’s standards?

Anyone who has ever read the U.S. Declaration of Independence (a naturalizing tour de force if ever there was one) can be forgiven for having thoroughly absorbed the idea that “equality” is an unproblematic concept, easily measured across time and space without regard for cultural norms and values. But “equality” is a thoroughly culture-bound concept, meaningless without appeal to culture-internal discourses about it, discourses that are not salvageable, sadly, from the pre-historic record. Genetic Fundamentalism, where it touches on human evolution, threatens to foreshorten our understanding of how concepts like “equality” and “gender” arise and are sustained by the work of culture. It projects these concepts into the paleolithic as fundamentally immutable components of human nature, effectively “naturalizing” them in the popular imagination. Evolutionary Biology is a cautious science, but Anthropology’s abuse of its central theoretical constructs by extending them to essentially cultural phenomena threatens the reputation of both disciplines.