*Okay, this is a pdf, and it's an academic economics paper; it is impossible to write in a way which is more boring. So I'm not saying you ought to read this.
*However, if you took the ideas in this paper – that shoppers rather enjoy being snowed by commercial lies and frauds, because they know this general miasma of deceit will allow them to take some second-hand advantage of innocent, well-meaning naifs – In other words, that capitalist markets are a giant call-my-bluff poker game, and if you're not hip to who the mark is, then it's you – well, if you took that basic understanding, that "shrouding and information suppression" are a platform for development, that a broken gravel-bed of millions of small semi-deceits is the universal bedrock of human relations....
*If you took that understanding of the nature of sociality, and you applied it, not just to the American consumer marketplace like in this learned paper here, but to every possible aspect of human activity: business, the state, the church, the military, the arts, gender relations, parents, children... The works, basically... And if you applied that, powerfully and relentlessly, top to bottom, north, east, south and west, for five millennia: well, then you'd have Italy.
http://aida.wss.yale.edu/~shiller/behmacro/2003-11/gabaix-laibson.pdf
