Overheard Starbuck

"All significant human interactions can be analyzed in market terms. What essentially drives human beings is a desire to maximize their pleasures, comforts and material possessions. ... In the beginning there was barter. People were forced to get what they wanted by directly trading one thing for another. Since this was inconvenient, they eventually invented money as a universal medium of exchange. The invention of further technologies of exchange--credit, banking, stock exchanges--is simply a logical extension."

---"There is no reason to believe a society based on barter ever existed. Anthropologists discovered societies where economic life was based on utterly different principles, and most objects moved back and forth as gifts — and almost everything we would call 'economic' behavior was based on a pretense of pure generosity and a refusal to calculate exactly who had given what to whom. Such 'gift economies' could on occasion become highly competitive, but when they did it was in exactly the opposite way from our own: Instead of vying to see who could accumulate the most, the winners were the ones who managed to give the most away."

"Like your momma." (laughs)

---"Like YOUR momma".