Money See, Money Do?

The little feller you see to the left is a capuchin monkey. (So-named because of a visual similarity to Capuchin attire.)

They’re interesting critters:

The capuchin is a New World monkey, brown and cute, the size of a scrawny year-old human baby plus a long tail. ”The capuchin has a small brain, and it’s pretty much focused on food and sex,” says Keith Chen, a Yale economist. . . . ”You should really think of a capuchin as a bottomless stomach of want,” Chen says. ”You can feed them marshmallows all day, they’ll throw up and then come back for more.”

Now, you may be wondering: Why is a Yale economist telling us about capuchin monkeys?

‘Cause he’s studying their capacity for economics.

GET THE STORY.

He’s taught them to use money to buy grapes, apples, Jello-O cubes, cucumber slices, and . . . other things.

The currency Chen settled on was a silver disc, one inch in
diameter, with a hole in the middle — ”kind of like Chinese money,”
he says. It took several months of rudimentary repetition to teach the
monkeys that these tokens were valuable as a means of exchange for a
treat and would be similarly valuable the next day. Having gained that
understanding, a capuchin would then be presented with 12 tokens on a
tray and have to decide how many to surrender for, say, Jell-O cubes
versus grapes. This first step allowed each capuchin to reveal its
preferences and to grasp the concept of budgeting.

Then Chen introduced price shocks and wealth shocks. If, for
instance, the price of Jell-O fell (two cubes instead of one per
token), would the capuchin buy more Jell-O and fewer grapes? The
capuchins responded rationally to tests like this — that is, they
responded the way most readers of The Times would respond. In
economist-speak, the capuchins adhered to the rules of utility
maximization and price theory: when the price of something falls,
people tend to buy more of it.

Monkeys may not be able to come up with the idea of money, but this kind appears to be able to grasp the rudiments of the concept when they were taught it. They even behave surprisingly like humans in their use of money:

When taught to use money, a group of capuchin monkeys responded quite
rationally to simple incentives; responded irrationally to risky
gambles; failed to save; stole when they could; used money for food. . . . In other words, they behaved a good bit like the
creature that most of Chen’s more traditional colleagues study: Homo
sapiens.

The monkeys got quite creative with their manipulation of money. Before Chen took steps to prevent it they even developed the concept of . . . well, let’s just say that they invented a very old profession–the proceeds of which were then used to buy a grape.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin