1 . It is sometimes thought that the longing for material goods, the need to buy things, is a relatively modern invention.     1     Trade or shopping is certainly an ancient desire, and existed before our ancestors invented writing, laws, cities or farming, even before they used metal to make tools.

Humans are born to trade.     2     Evidence from hunter-gatherers suggests that the exchange of food and other necessary things comes naturally, as well as the ability to keep a record of the credits involved. And once trade begins, the benefits are hard to resist.

Ancient local coastal people in northern Australia traded fish hooks, along a chain of trading partners, with people living 400 miles inland, who cut and polished local stone to make axes (斧子).     3     Finally, both groups of “producers”, by concentrating on things they could produce and exchanging them for other things they needed, benefited as a result.

Trade in the necessities of life, such as food and simple tools, is not really surprising, considering the link between these basic items and survival. What is surprising, though, is that our taste for unnecessary expensive objects also goes back a long way.

In South Africa, 100,000-year-old decorative dyes (染料) have been found in an area where none were produced.     4     Small round pieces of glass 76,000 years old were also found at the same place. The earliest jewellery known to us were not just random findings — they were grouped together in size and had holes like those used for threading onto a necklace.

Archaeologists argue that trade prepared the way for the complex societies in which we live today.     5     However, their modern equivalents — fast cars and expensive clothes — hold the same attraction for us as “trade goods” did for people 100,000 years ago.

2 . In 1885, the Republic of France, important friend during the American Revolution, donated the largest statue in the world, Liberty Enlightening the World, to the United States of America. The statue would celebrate its century of independence. To ship it, the statue was broken down into 350 pieces. And now, spread across Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbour, it sat in 214 wooden packing boxes. The problem was that New York had no money to re-assemble it. Six other cities, less affected by the recent economic decline, had the money and bid to build it.

But a Hungarian immigrant, Joseph Pulitzer, the owner of America’s biggest newspaper called the World, wouldn’t let “Liberty” go. When he heard that the Statue of Liberty was about to die from lack of funds, he saw his chance.

Pulitzer set the fund-raising goal of the World at $ 100,000. In its pages he laughed at the rich, thus increasing the paper’s appeal among working-class people, and firmly planted the idea that the statue was a monument not just for New York City but, indeed, for all of America.

Perhaps Pulitzer’s cleverest trick was the promise 10 publish the name of every single contributor in the pages of the World, no matter how small the contribution. The editorial that opened the fund-raising campaign set its tone. He wrote: “The World is the people’s paper and it now appeals to the people to come forward and raise the money for the statue’s base.” The statue, he said was paid for by “the masses of the French people. Let us respond in like manner.” The circulation of the World increased by almost 50,000 copies.

African American newspapers joined in the effort, encouraging their readers to contribute to a monument that would, in part, celebrate the end of slavery. So the money poured in, as single-dollar donations from grandmothers and pennies from the piggybanks of schoolchildren.

On August 11, 1885, the front page of the World announced, “ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS!” The goal had been reached, even slightly beyond, thanks to more than 120,000 contributions.