At 10:29 06/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:
Hi Keith,
I just consulted my dictionary to see what it says about "status". It says two things that seem to fit what we are talking about. One is position or rank [of a person] in the eyes of others. The second is the position or rank [of a person] in a hierarchy of prestige. I would agree that the first definition is universal. Among hunters and gatherers, the most effective hunters or gatherers are recognized and emulated by others. Among agricultural people, good farmers are given similar recognition. No hierarchy is required. Good is good, and that's about it.
Here's a thought experiment. If, say a government project were announced and, in a particular district, it was necessary for the agricultural scientists to meet the best half dozen farmers in a particular district and then you asked all the farmers individually to list the farmers in order of excellence, I think you would agree that the lists would be very similar indeed. I have never said that we walk around with invisible rank labels pinned to us. But ask any psychologist what strangers (within the same culture) do when they meet for the first time -- they are looking for every possible clue (clothing, bearing, tone of voice, etc) in order to "place" them relative to themselves. That is absolutely the first thing that people do. It was absolutely imperative in hunter-gatherer times when meeting a member of another group. You had to sum him up as accurately as you could, and as quickly as you could, just in case you had to fight him. The higher the status of the person you meet the more dangerous he would be -- not only because being clever and agressive would have brought him high status, but also because having high status his hormone levels would be very high. The Matthew concept -- "To those that hath shall be given ....". This happens in every single social mammal species also. It happens with sheep, cows, dogs, primates, etc. When my dog sees a dog in the distance she's never met before she will decide (they will both decide) from small clues from 100 yards' distance whether they are going to be friendly or whether they're going to fight. Even when a sheep meets its own shepherd it will examine the face of the shepherd very carefully to see what mood he's in. I really think you are very much neglecting the whole area of rank ordering and status -- it is all around us all the time. This is not to say that it impinges on everything we do. For most social purposes it is not important. The most ferocious alpha male baboon will groom a lowly member of the pack when they are all relaxed but once that alpha baboon stands up and walks around then every other member of the pack is watching carefully in varying degrees of fear. We are absolutely no different in principle, except that it doesn't impinge most of the time.
The second definition requires a hierarchy and a ranking system. Whether they have done something well or not, some people are placed on prestigious pedestals while others march around them. Perhaps there is a universal tendency toward such behaviour once a society reaches a certain level of complexity, but there may be an almost equal tendency to do away with rankings and hierarchies of the pedestal kind. The discussion about Hobbes seems relevant here. People merge their interests into societies of their own free will because it is rational to do so.
When an individual reaches mature adulthood -- say at about 25-30 -- most individuals know their approximate rank ordering in society and will accept it. More importantly for them they know that they are accepted -- they're part of the group and can bed protected if necessary. But some are far more ambitious than the norm -- fortunately, not very many or else society would be anarchic -- and they are particularly to be found in large organisations and political parties, etc, etc. And there you will see rank ordering still going on, sometime brutally and nakedly, sometimes craftily. Indeed, this is one of the most dangerous features of our highly centralised societies that it is these rank ordering fights -- yes, even with males in their 50s and 60s and 70s -- which can cause bad decisions that affect us all. It's happening all the time in politics!
They appoint or elect people to govern because that is necessary if society is to function. Yet the people that are appointed or elected have no special rights under the law and can be removed if need be. Some people may still want to put them on pedestals, but that is not the intent of the society as a whole.
Generally, people do want to put their leaders on pedestals because, evolutionarily, leaders are supposed to keep the peace and they want them to be strong. Look at the adultation given to Bush -- why does he wear war gear sometimes? -- look a t the role of Putin (every single coimmentator from Russia says that it's because he strong that he's going to be elected. I think you're quite wrong in your last sentence and I wonder (I'm not being sarcastic nor cfritical) whether it's your lifetime immersion in the civil service that causes your viewpoint. Most people are credulous and deferential for most of the time.
In any event, complexity seems to be the important thing. The people I dealt with in northern Canada followed the first definition, and did not have rankings and hierarchies until we imposed them by making them follow our system of governance.
Once again, your Indian tribes would certainly have had hierarchies, all sorts of heirarchies depending on the skills that was the current context. But they wouldn't have been obvious and, I suggest, they would have been invisible to you as an outsider unless you got to know them very well indeed. Listen to what ethologists, anthropologists, animal behavioural researchers say -- they all say that they have to live with the group (animal or human) they're studying all day long, month after month and sometimes for several years until they understand the dynamics of a group and the heirarchy. (This is where some of the early sociologist and anthropologists went badly wrong. Mostly, they got totally the wrong impression. Very often the group being studied would adopt the social traits that the observer was expecting.)
What we did was complicate their lives and their societies to the point that rankings and hierarchies became a necessity. Once they were in place, status in the sense of pedestals gradually crept in.
No! No! Civilised society only exaggerates (and often enhances with badges and hats and uniforms, etc) rankings that are already instinctive.
On the matter of a basic income, I don’t think a government could proceed without giving a lot of thought to why it was doing it. Would it be a mechanism to facilitate adjustment to economic change, or would it be a universal anti-poverty measure? It would also have to take a thorough look at the costs and benefits. On the cost side, a basic income would put an additional strain on government finances
you bet it would!
and might require a more progressive tax system or some reallocation of existing expenditures. The benefits could include matters such as a healthier population, kids who are more able to cope with school, and probably a significant reduction of the social costs associated with crime and the need to incarcerate people. There would be problems, a major one being that the financial costs would be perceived as being immediate while the benefits would only accrue in the longer run. Equity would be another problem - how to design a system that is basically fair to both those who pay and those who receive payments. And we all know people cheat, so a policing system would have to be devised.
Personally, I think a basic income program is feasible in a rich country and may even be possible to initiate by reallocating existing expenditures. In Canada we already have a variety of programs, such as employment insurance, the Canada Pension Plan, the Child Tax Benefit, and various Provincial welfare/workfare programs, that might be rolled into a basic income. If the object were the facilitation of adjustment to economic change rather than universal anti-poverty, a system of premiums scaled to salary might be utilized. It would take a lot of work and planning, but I believe it could be done.
I doubt it very much. For a start (if we are to talk about Canada) you have a budget debt of 45% of your GDP. This would take strict financial policies for at least 5 years to recover from. Then, on top of that, your long term commitments (pensions, health, etc, etc) already amount to 420% of your GDP. With the strictest of taxation, planning, budgetary control and whatnot if you were able to reduce thse implict debts by, say, 3% per year compound without fail yearf after year, this would take a whole generation (at least) to achieve. If you were to have a BI, I don't think you'd have the slightest chance without loading up your implicit future debt even more than now -- and the ultimate neglect of most of your old and poor (which is surely coming anyway in all developed countries) (in fact, it's already happening in England -- the degree of neglect and cruelty in government approved nursing homes in this country is severe and sometimes it makes your heart break when some cases are exposed -- it's getting worse and worse from year to year because there are insufficient staff and they are insufficiently trained -- we can't afford decent nursing for a sizeable proportion of our old folk already!!).
Sorry! I think you are being far too optimistic. Almost all developed countries are already at the limit of their achievable tax rates. It wouldn't take much more before there would be demonstrations equal to those that faced Bush's visit, or the Chartist riots of 150 years ago, or the collapse of Soviet Russia or, only a few days ago, the collapse of the Georgian government. I'm not suggesting this will happen because a developed country has enough channels of communication by which the middle class will make their anger about further taxation known long beforehand. Two of the major developed countries in the world, France and Germany, have virtually stopped growing economically because employers don't want to take on any more workers because they have to pay too high insurance costs. These countries have absolutely no chance of recovery unless taxation and insurance payments are reduced significantly. Germany is already trying to do so but with nothing much to show yet because of fierce resistance from the unions..
Keith
Keith, sorry, but you say the damndest things with utter certainty! Human society is about all kinds of things, depending very much on what people want it to be and agree that it should be. Status may be very important in American and European society, but I've dealt with small societies in northern Canada in which a person's importance depended on what he or she could do for the community. There were no contests around who could do the most for the community and therefore had the most status.
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Keith Hudson
- To: Ed Weick
- Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 4:09 PM
- Subject: Re: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
- Ed,
- At 14:31 05/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:
- Keith:
- A BI sounds wonderful but it is a theoretical solution that runs absolutely counter to human nature. Human society is about relative status. Not only human society, but primate society. And not only primate society but any social mammalian society. We really need to understand this first before we can suggest quite new social structures that will satisfy our basic instincts -- and, if possible, basic incomes also. But not before then. Extending welfarism beyond what we have now in most developed countries, desirable though it might sound (and I don't object to it on moral grounds), is already running itself into the ground.
You are misinterpreting me. I didn't say there always had to be contests! You've just admitted above that some people have "importance". If that's not status I don't know what is.
Native land claims negotiators were guys who had a better command of English than most others in the community. But it wasn't a status thing. It was because they had a better chance of understanding what the whiteman was saying with his forked tongue. Regrettably, once a land claim had been negotiated, those societies became stratified because people had to fill jobs at various levels and different rates of pay. That's when status began to move in and longstanding egalitarian principles began to come apart.
Notions of fairness are as deeply in our genes as notions of status. (Perhaps not quite as deeply but certainly deeply enough to be very obvious and useful.)
I mentioned the cooperative movement in an earlier posting. In that movement, people cooperated because it was in the interests of their communities and themselves to do so. There were no contest around who was the best cooperator.
Of course, people cooperate. It's one of the chief characteristics of man. Have I ever written anywhere that they don't?
There are many historic examples of people who gave away everything to deliberately unstatisfy themselves, people like Francis of Assisi and Peter Waldo in the 12th and 13th Centuries, who gave away everything, but for spiritual reasons, not because they were in any kind of race to the bottom.
I don't want to discuss exceptional examples (sometimes of very idiosyncratic motives). Economics is about ordinary people.
So give us a break and allow us our complexity of motives.
The ordinary person also has complexity of motvies and I have never written otherwise.
And besides, I feel that a Basic Income is entirely feasible economically and would probably pay off.
Well, you may do so if you wish. I have have read very few economists who believe this. I have certainly not read any economists who can show how it can be achieved in a practical way without a revolt from the middle class.
Any money received by the poor would likely be spent immediately, and not be put into long term investments. It's a question of political will. As long as we have neo-con governments, it's far less likely to happen than Bush's tax breaks for the rich.
Ed
I imagine that the closest any country has come to a Basic Income has been the Soviet Union. Even the poorest could live very cheaply indeed with very low expenditures on food, transport and houswing. Even the poorest in Stalinist times had savings (but nothing to spend them on). But the system collapsed nevertheless because there were no goods available -- except status goods for the nomenclatura (the chocolatura is what they called them when in shopping mode, I believe).
Keith
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Keith Hudson
- To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 1:35 AM
- Subject: RE: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
- Arthur,
- At 16:16 04/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:
As my colleague who was born in India says, the first picture of a Canadian child dying with a distended belly will be the spark that ignites governments to end this current (farcical) set of activities. There will be no starvation in Canada. There will be panhandlers on street corners and panhandlers using the food banks. Dignity is lost all around: Those who receive and those who give (although they feel mighty righteous at the moment.) We can end poverty. There can be a basic income. Somehow there is little incentive to change.
We live in a democracy. As Amartya Sen said, there is no history of starvation in democracies. As I said in my earlier posting, the current system may be remarkably stable. arthur -----Original Message----- From: Ed Weick [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 1:12 PM To: Cordell, Arthur: ECOM; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Caveman Trade vs. Modern Trade
So what if all the righteous middle class people stopped sending their unused canned goods to the food banks? Well the hungry people might just vote in a government that promises radical change. Right now everyone wins: political parties promise change and don't; middle class feels good about sending food to the food bank; working poor can supplement their foodstock by heading to the food bank. The system may be quite stable. Maybe there really is no wish to change. arthur
I'm on the Board of a downtown foodbank and have spent a little time there. The people who came to pick up food fell into several groups. There were older men, fifty plus, who had migrated to Ottawa because there was nothing for them in the valley communities. Their education and skills were limited, so there was nothing in Ottawa either. There were young mothers, some with children, who gave you every impression that they didn't want to be there; they hurried in and they hurried out. There were a number of cocky young people, some perhaps students, some living at the "Y", who acted as though they were indulging the foodbank with their presence. None of these people acted as though they wanted to change the system. All they wanted was the food - except for the older guys who also seemed to want to hang around and talk a little. There's an aura of powerlessness about it. The churches that operate the foodbank know that if they didn't do it, nobody would. So they keep doing it and their members keep bringing the cans of tuna and the packages of pasta. The churches might want to take an advocacy position, but that might infringe on their charitable status. The politicians get themselves elected and their promises become mere promises, not commitments. Most of the people who use the foodbank hate doing it, but they need to eat. Watching it without having to depend on it, I wish it would all go away. But it won't. It's what the world is like and how it will stay. Perhaps Canadians, as people who live in the developed world, should feel fortunate that they can afford foodbanks. Ever so many parts of the world can't, and people starve.
Ed -----Original Message----- From: Ed Weick [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, December 4, 2003 9:08 AM To: Thomas Lunde; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Caveman Trade vs. Modern Trade
Thomas, very good posting. Ontario has just raised the minimum wage from peanuts to peanuts. Many of the poor are working full time and even double time, but are still unable to meet the rent or buy enough food, let alone get their kids the kinds of in toys ("status goods") that are going around. They can try eating freedom and justice, but they don't taste very good when you can't make ends meet. Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Thomas Lunde To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 3:36 AM Subject: Re: Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Caveman Trade vs. Modern Trade They don't need money, Thomas. They need justice and the freedom to enjoy it. Harry Thomas: In a way, you are right. Being poor and working with the poor as customers and neighbours let's me see the many ways the poor are lacking justice. A recent article in the paper made the outstanding statement that 37% of workers in Canada are not covered by the Labour Code and laws. When wages for the poor are kept artificially low, then the only way to compensate to maintain a survival standard is to work more. Of course, there are about 4 to 5% who are mentally incapable, or physically disabled or in the case of single mothers, family challenged. However, the work more solution has only produced the working poor, who still have to use food banks and subsidized housing, if thet can get it. Not only that, as you suggest, they do not even have the freedom to enjoy what little they have. I would agree, that justice and freedom would go a long way to compensating for money - or as you might suggest, make the earning and spending of money a by product of an effective system of justice and the freedom and thereby create a surplus to enjoy. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
