When the Bernard Madoff pyramid collapsed in late 2008, financial markets were falling and recessionary fears were growing. Over the preceding thirty years, Madoff had constructed the largest pyramid scheme the world has known. When he was no longer able to attract new funds for recycling to his earlier investors, he confessed to his swindle. As the remnants of his pyramid were uncovered, the fraud was estimated to be 65 billion dollars. Madoff investors dotted the map of the United States. Some European banks were drawn in, and one French financier took his own life. None of his participants seemed to realize that Madoff's unvarying returns of 10%–11% per year were improbable, but he carried on for several decades until the December day when his empire collapsed.

Some commentators explained that the scheme was fed by greed. Others thought Madoff's investors failed to observe best practices and were caught up by “irrational exuberance.” I view this “creative destruction” of wealth differently. Situated in Wall Street with threads across the United States and elsewhere, the Madoff event exemplified the early twenty-first century wave of bubbles from housing, to complicated investment vehicles, to illegal deals. It typified the strange economy in which we live.

But I am an anthropologist and think that all economies are strange, including the ones anthropologists traditionally study. Economies are strange because they juxtapose self-interest and mutuality. Many of Madoff's investors wanted to make money and to feel an ethnic relationship with him, which is the strangeness, because the two are different. We live with this tension everyday, however.

In this book, I offer my anthropologist's view of economy but amplify my discipline's terrain to include developed market economies. Anthropologists usually study small-scale economies whether in the South Pacific, Northern Canada, the margins of Asia, or the interior of South America, and they have developed many tools for analyzing their findings. But they have become rather enfolded in their local data, and remain largely speechless in the face of developed market economies. Conversely, economists scarcely look at the strange economies that attract anthropologists, except to proclaim that the people act like us but face constraints, which block their economy's growth. My perspective brings together what people do in their material lives with economists', anthropologists', and everyday views.

Economy has two sides. One is the high-relationship economy that is rooted in the house.