For relaxation yesterday evening I was listening to OK Computer and reading Captain James Cook's Journal of his voyage of exploration to the Antarctic. It's astonishing to be reminded just how adventurous the early explorers were. At the point where they were forced to turn back by an impenetrable wall of ice, he admits: “I whose ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go, was not sorry at meeting this interruption.” Any other man would needless to say have turned back long before.

I was also wonderfully struck by the vivid descriptions of the economies of Easter Island and New Zealand. Easter Island did not impress him, and his analysis of its environmental poverty causing its economic poverty tally almost exactly with Jared Diamond's in Collapse. In New Zealand, Cook writes about the terms of trade between red feathers or nails and food and water for the ship. On one occasion, the tides of consumer behaviour amongst the Maoris cause a dangerous inflation in the cost of provisions.

“Instead of getting pigs as I expected I found everything quite changed, the nails and other things they were mad after the Evening before they now dispised and in stead of them wanted they did not know what, the reason of this was, some of the young gentlement having been a Shore the preceding day and had given them in exchange various Articles such as they had not seen before and whic took with them more than Nails….thus our market was at once spoli'd and I was obliged to return with 3 or 4 little Pigs which cost me more than a dozn would have done the evening before.”

The point being of course that the appeal of variety and the urge to trade are pretty basic in human society. Anyway, enough light relief – I'm going back to reading about social discount rates now.