grapes or jello cubes? the eternal question
More from the Freakonomics folks (with video clips and everything):
Keith Chen is a 29-year-old Yale economist who is teaching capuchin monkeys to use money. Why? Well, to see what they spend it on, and how their spending might relate to human spending... A capuchin monkey must decide how to spend his budget of twelve coins...Two human research assistants are present (one wearing blue and one wearing red), and both hold a piece of food in an orange dish for the monkey to see. The red research assistant "sells" grapes and the blue research assistant "sells" Jell-o cubes, with each piece of food costing a coin from the monkey's budget. The capuchin must make a decision analogous to a grocery store shopper's: how much of their budget to spend on grapes and how much to spend on Jell-o.
Anyone who knows me knows that if I were a capuchin monkey, it would be all grapes all the time.
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