Storage for Good Times and Bad: Of Rats and Men

Fabulists, from Aesop to Walt Disney, have employed animal characters to play human-like roles in their stories. The success of these stories suggests that people are willing to take a sharper look at the foibles of their own species if they pretend to see them in other creatures. In this paper, I confess a similar motivation. The paper is motivated by the evolution of food-hoarding behavior in rats, squirrels, and other creatures, but I have found that thinking along these lines makes it easier to take a fresh look at the way that human preferences toward wealth-acquisition and risk-taking may have evolved. Unlike the fables of Aesop and Disney, this paper is inspired by the work of behavioral ecologists who have studied real animals 1 and I hope that it may be a useful contribution to the understanding of animal behavior as well as a fable for economists.