I'm

christa tippet, and this is on being to day with biological and evolutionary anthropologist augustine fuentis. We are exploring his spacious perspective on human nature and capacities. His intelligence for working with the inside twenty twenty has laid bare in a chapter on the economy in his most recent book, why we believe evolution and the human way of being. He underscores that every economy is an act of human imagination, literally, believed into being. And modern economic theory was founded on a belief that human beings are, on balance, rational and logical as economic actors. But this cannot be squared with the extreme inequity in wealth distribution across the planet in the early twenty first century, or with the disconnect of the stock market with human well being across the pandemic we touched on cove nineteen, the virus. And this is also part of the human niche, as you describe it. Then there's the incredible economic fall outof response to this virus. And it's also a moment, i mean, this moment was upon us, but it's even more upon us now, and i think this will deepen as we move into next year, that there's something profoundly out of wack in the way we do an economy, um. And this the perspective that you bring is is isn't interesting and i think a refreshing way to look at it, because the discussion that gets had is becomes very partisan and actually quite emotional. But just to point out, as you do, that, that we have the system that actually is based on an idea about how human beings behave that is simply not true.

Mean, i think something at's really important to point out is the ifferenceas whell communism failed, yes, soviet communism failed miserably, right? That doesn't mean that american capitalism is working wonderfully. We'rright, right? Those two things are not. They're actually not. Gan iine rei binari, right? So let's get rid of that binar, and let's ask ourselves, like, how does our economy work? Right? Our people getting paid the level, the value, the quality of their work? Is there equal access to different things? Tat, you knowhees, these questions, as you said, have been going on. Ue, for example, in the united states, the last century has been this incredible dynamic of thinking about these kind of economic processes. But now i think you're right. I think people are saying, wait a minute. How did we get here?