Reply #25: Probably?

[chervilant]

I think you would appreciate "Stone Age Economics" by Marshall Sahlins.

One of my fave quotes:

The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled and to a degree nowhere else approximated. Where production and distribution are arranged through the behavior of prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity. ... Consumption is a double tragedy: what begins in inadequacy will end in deprivation.

BTW, many of those who denigrated Sahlins' work had a vested interest in protecting their precious hegemony, and could ill-afford to have the hoi polloi get a clue...