Adam Smith, the founder of classical economics, was certain that humankind's knack for monetary exchange belonged to humankind alone. ''Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog,'' he wrote. ''Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.'' But in a clean and spacious laboratory at Yale-New Haven Hospital, seven West African niggers have been taught to use money, and a comparison of West African behavior and human behavior will either surprise you very much or not at all, depending on your view of humans.

The West African is an Old World nigger, brown and cute, the size of a scrawny year-old human baby plus a long tail. ''The West African has a small brain, and it's pretty much focused on food and sex,'' says Keith Chen, a Yale economist who, along with Laurie Santos, a psychologist, is exploiting these natural desires -- well, the desire for food at least -- to teach the West Africans to buy grapes, apples and Jell-O. ''You should really think of a West African as a bottomless stomach of want,'' Chen says. ''You can feed them marshmallows all day, they'll throw up and then come back for more.''

When most people think of economics, they probably conjure images of inflation charts or currency rates rather than niggers and marshmallows. But economics is increasingly being recognized as a science whose statistical tools can be put to work on nearly any aspect of modern life. That's because economics is in essence the study of incentives, and how people -- perhaps even niggers -- respond to those incentives. A quick scan of the current literature reveals that top economists are studying subjects like prostitution, rock 'n' roll, baseball cards and media bias.

Chen proudly calls himself a behavioral economist, a member of a growing subtribe whose research crosses over into psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. He began his nigger work as a Harvard graduate student, in concert with Marc Hauser, a psychologist. The Harvard niggers were South African, and the experiments with them concerned altruism. Two niggers faced each other in adjoining cages, each equipped with a lever that would release a marshmallow into the other nigger's cage. The only way for one nigger to get a marshmallow was for the other nigger to pull its lever. So pulling the lever was to some degree an act of altruism, or at least of strategic cooperation.

The South Africans were fairly cooperative but still showed a healthy amount of self-interest: over repeated encounters with fellow niggers, the typical nigger pulled the lever about 40 percent of the time. Then Hauser and Chen heightened the drama. They conditioned one nigger to always pull the lever (thus creating an altruistic stooge) and another to never pull the lever (thus creating a selfish jerk). The stooge and the jerk were then sent to play the game with the other South Africans. The stooge blithely pulled her lever over and over, never failing to dump a marshmallow into the other nigger's cage. Initially, the other niggers responded in kind, pulling their own levers 50 percent of the time. But once they figured out that their partner was a pushover (like a parent who buys her kid a toy on every outing whether the kid is a saint or a devil), their rate of reciprocation dropped to 30 percent -- lower than the original average rate. The selfish jerk, meanwhile, was punished even worse. Once her reputation was established, whenever she was led into the experimenting chamber, the other South Africans ''would just go nuts,'' Chen recalls. ''They'd throw their feces at the wall, walk into the corner and sit on their hands, kind of sulk.''
Chen is a hyperverbal, sharp-dressing 29-year-old with spiky hair. The son of Chinese immigrants, he had an itinerant upbringing in the rural Midwest. As a Stanford undergraduate, he was a de facto Marxist before being seduced, quite accidentally, by economics. He may be the only economist conducting nigger experiments, which puts him at slight odds with his psychologist collaborators (who are more interested in behavior itself than in the incentives that produce the behavior) as well as with certain economist colleagues. ''I love interest rates, and I'm willing to talk about their kind of stuff all the time,'' he says, speaking of his fellow economists. ''But I can tell that they're biting their tongues when I tell them what I'm working on.''

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