"This book is an exploration of the psychology of everyday economic life, written by an anthropologist who has carried out long term fieldwork in rural China and Taiwan. It is also an attempt - not the first one, of course - to bring anthropology, psychology and economics into some kind of conversation. On the surface, this shouldn't be too huge a task. Anthropology, psychology and economics are three human science disciplines. They share a good deal in terms of their intellectual origins and their contemporary subject matter. Of particular relevance to this book is their shared interest in moral aspects of economic agency, including the question of whether ours is a fundamentally cooperative or fundamentally selfish species. Much of the time, however, scholars in these academic fields live on very different planets. In fact, anthropologists could be said to pay quite a lot of attention to economists, but this manifests itself in an odd way.

They are sharply critical of them while having little understanding of what they actually do in their work and of the Utilitarian tradition that helped to inspire this. Meanwhile, it sometimes feels as if half the economists in the world would like to turn themselves into psychologists - albeit not in a way that every psychologist would credit - while the other half are running in the opposite direction"--.