SFI Omidyar Fellow Paul Hooper is interested in how economics and human social behavior co-evolved through human history to create the highly complex institutions we are a part of today -- governments, companies, worldwide financial markets, trans-governmental organizations like the United Nations, even the global Internet community.
By understanding the evolutionary benefits and costs of different forms of human social interaction, Hooper hopes to better predict how our social structures are likely to adapt to changing ecological and technological conditions in the future.
Paul is an evolutionary anthropologist, and he works side-by-side with economists, biologists, and scientists from other fields to explore these interrelationships.
But to truly understand how human institutions evolved, he needs to see where they started. For this perspective, he does field work in the Amazon rainforest, living with and studying the Tsimane people, a group of hunters and gatherers whose lifestyle is closer in many ways to that of humanity in the distant past.
Learn about Hooper's work in this new SFI video interview (3 minutes)