Laughing All the Way to the Darwinian Bank is a chapter in the book Mean Genes by Burnham and Phelan. The book’s is non-fiction, as it deals specifically with the issues that human beings face in America. The book is sociological in nature, seeking to understand why groups of people in the US behave in the manner they do. Specifically, it provides an overview of the challenges that people have in saving money, even though they know very well that they need to do so. The main idea of the book is that there are natural human reasons why people can sometimes struggle to make good financial decisions even when everything in front of them suggests that they should do one thing or another.

The authors posit that one of the chief reasons people can struggle to save is evolutionary in nature. They argue that human beings are, after all, just the result of an evolutionary process, just like all the other beings around them. Importantly, in the past, it did not make sense to save. Before technology, if people did not consume everything they killed during a given moment, they would lose it. To kill a giant animal and not eat the meat was wasteful. People would eventually learn how to cure and store meat, but there were no refrigerators in pre-historic times which would allow people to simply throw some meat in for a few days while it waited. With this in mind, the people who survived and in fact thrived were people who understood the importance of consuming as much as possible as quickly as possible. They were, for lack of a better term, consumptionists who had no use for future planning when it came to food, their most important resource. The authors opine that this has continued today, into the future, as human beings are just playing this evolutionary game out on a broader scale.

The tone of the piece is academic in nature. When one reads, one feels as if he or she is sitting in a classroom. This helps to impart the wisdom of the work and it adds something significant to the work’s overall appeal. The work’s organization is also critical to the meaning of the work. Importantly, the author uses a question at the beginning to generate the reader’s interest. It is, in effect, a hook that gets the reader thinking in the terms the author wants right from the beginning. Another element that works well is the language. The authors use common financial terms that people understand, such as “nest egg,” to generate better connection between the topic and the audience.

The author seemingly wrote this topic to the average person. The book is based upon the idea that average people need to better understand their own lives in order to live effectively. With this in mind, the book is geared toward average people in a way that is visceral. They wrote it because they seemed to believe that people were operating under many preconceived notions that were not exactly accurate. With this in mind, the book was effective and useful. I disagree with the straight line the author draws between human evolution and today’s saving habits. I believe there are deeper sociological concerns, such as student debt, that trap current people in habits where they cannot save. Simply put, it is difficult to save when one does not have any money or when one’s income is not great. While the authors gloss over these overall points, their insight into the human condition is spot-on and helpful for those who want to better understand themselves. In this way, the authors accomplished their goal.