ABSTRACT
The market system is a way of organizing economic activity that leaves individuals and companies free to produce whatever they want, and free to sell what they produce at any price they can get. The market system can be seen as one big prisoner's dilemma game. People constantly have to make choices, choices between self and other. No one measures the psychological impact of such decisions on the people who make them. In the market system, people have to invent their own work-life balance. The study of evolution has made it clear that some degree of competition is inherent in life. Organisms are designed to seek their own survival, which sometimes brings them into conflict with other organisms. Finding a mate has always been implicitly competitive. In Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, Moira Weigel traces the beginning of what we now call dating to well-to-do students in the 1920s and 1930s.
