Mean Genes

Consumption

Many people find saving difficult. Just look at the United States’ 0.8% consumer savings rate. Why do people consume when they should save? Probably because, for humanity’s ancestors, consumption was saving. To understand this paradox, consider the !Kung San peoples of southern Africa, whose lifestyle closely resembles that of human beings thousands of years ago. Like early humans, the !Kung San don’t have refrigerators. When they kill a large animal, they consume all of it, storing the surplus in a handy place - on their bodies as fat. This is what most animals do. Elephant seals save up to 2,000 pounds of food as body blubber to prepare for their three-month fast during the mating season. It isn’t pretty, but it works.

So by default your mean genes are telling you to consume any surplus before it spoils. Are you then fated to do so? Not at all. Just because you have a bias toward a certain behavior doesn’t mean you can’t retrain yourself. For instance, human beings (like many mammals) have an instinctive fear of snakes - a genetically encoded bias that was crucial to the human species’ survival in the ancestral environment. But the native peoples living...