For Kid Nation, a reality show that aired in 2007, forty children went to stay in a New Mexico ghost town for forty days. They lived as laborers, cooks, merchants, or an upper class; many worked fourteen-hour days to earn buffalo nickels to spend on root beer. In the final episode, some participants raided the dry goods store. “It’s free,” said one kid, his mouth stuffed with gummy bears. Another raider was heard announcing, “There is a god.”

In the eighteenth century, a cash-strapped French government began selling rente viagère, in which an investor paid an up-front sum pegged to someone’s life—sometimes the king or the pope—and received returns until death. A group of Genevan bankers diversified their portfolio in the 1770s by buying rente contracts on the lives of thirty wealthy young Genevan girls. The fund gained popularity; by 1789 a significant portion of French debt was owed on the lives of just these “thirty heads.”

“Why do you wrong the gods so much?” Greek poet Athenaeus asks a sober party guest in a late second-century work. “You’re no use to the city if you drink water, / because you’re hurting the farmer and the trader; / whereas I increase their income by getting drunk.”

A thirteenth-century Song dynasty text about commerce describes dangers faced by pearl divers, who sometimes fell prey to “huge fishes, dragons, and other sea monsters” that would rip open their stomachs or bite off their feet. A pearl was considered most valuable if perfectly round; the test was “that it will not cease rolling about all day when put on a plate.” To avoid heavy export duties, foreign traders sometimes concealed pearls in canes or umbrella handles.

When Arctic traveler Vilhjalmur Stefansson traded with the Inuit of Victoria Island in 1911, he found the metal of their knives to be of curious provenance: Inuit to the east had bought guns from the Hudson Bay Company and traded them westward; the firearms were then traded farther west, eventually reaching the Inuit he’d met—who, having no use for guns, had beat the metal barrels into knife blades.