Ed,
Another good discussion.
I see little network television, but one I try to see
is Survivor. In it, people are voted out of the tribe. Those that remain try to
"survive" until the final episode when the winner gets $1 million.
(Remember the $64,000 question?)
One member was a good catcher of fish and they enjoyed
the food he supplied. Yet, he was also so good generally that the others
felt they would never win if he remained in the tribe.
So he was voted off. Yet, the worries of the others
centered on the lack of fish that would follow his dismissal. The crucial factor
was that there was only a week or two remaining.
If the tribe had looked to a longer life, I'm sure they
would never have let him go. His "hunter/gatherer" abilities were too
good.
Interesting.
Harry
******************************************** Henry George School of Social Science
of Los Angeles
Box 655 Tujunga
CA 91042 Tel: 818
352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net
********************************************
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ed
Weick Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2003 3:27 PM To: Keith
Hudson Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re:
Slightly extended (was Re: [Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern
Trade
Keith, I don't think we can go much further on
this. You are the product of a stratified society full of Alpha
males. I don't agree that this is necessarily the way societies and males
have to be. I would however like to add a few more comments before I
respectfully withdraw from the field. You say:
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 hierarchy.
Actually, I spent some five years working for
the Council for Yukon Indians (CYI) in the late 1980s and early 1990s and also
spent four years with the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry during the
1970s. While doing that I spent a great deal of time in the Yukon and the
Mackenzie Valley and got to know Native people quite well. Yes indeed I
was an outsider, but also a participant in what was going on. I have to
repeat that in their dealings with each other the people I worked with were
extremely egalitarian. In the case of the CYI, jobs were filled on the
basis of what people could do, and not on the basis of who they were. Many
important jobs were filled by women, including the leadership of the
organization. My boss was an extremely competent woman. She has
now passed on, but her daughter has become active in the Yukon Indian
movement.
You mention that ethnologists and
anthropologists have to live with the people they are studying. I have a
couple of friends that did just that. Hugh Brody, a British anthropologist
and film maker, learned to speak fluent Inuktitut and lived with the Inuit of
North Baffin for many months. One of his books, which I would highly
recommend, The Peoples' Land, came out of that. He also spent
time in Indian communities in northern British Columbia, and Maps and
Dreams came out of that. Another friend, a geographer, lived with the
people of Banks Island while he was doing his doctorate. I'm having lunch
with him on Monday, and will ask him what he thinks about stratification and
Alpha males among the Inuvialuit he lived with. In the course of my
career, I have met and worked with many other social scientists that have
spent time in Native communities. Quite frankly, I don't think many of
them would agree with your views on status, stratification and Alpha
maleness.
I'll try to repeat something I argued
earlier. Hunting and gathering societies are concerned with
survival. Skills in hunting and gathering are important to that. The
best hunters, usually men, and the best gatherers, usually women, are recognized
and emulated, but they are not put on pedestals, nor do they seek special
status. They just do what they have to do for the sake of survival.
Each small group of hunters and gatherers has a leader, but, typically, he or
she does not seek to be a leader. They are followed because they
are recognized as having special qualities important to survival. They
need not be Alpha types. They can be very humble people who don't say very
much but usually do the right thing. And, of course, there are also others
who are recognized as being important to survival, especially healers who have
special powers.
One person who I got to know quite well in the
Yukon was a good example of what I'm talking about. He was a little
guy. If you passed him on the street, you wouldn't notice him. He
had to earn a living, so in the White world he was an aircraft mechanic.
But in the Native world he was a combination of unusual talents
and skills. He had been raised by his grandfather, a medicine man,
and while he was not a healer, he had a very special understanding of
people. I don't know how many meetings I attended in the Yukon that got
absolutely stuck. They simply could not move forward. But when that
happened, my friend, having said nothing till then, would walk up to the
blackboard, pick up a piece of chalk, draw a little diagram, tell us where we
were now, tell us where we had to get to, show us the obstacles we had to cross,
and tell us how we might get across them. I don't recall a time when it
didn't work. I know why he wasn't teaching at the Harvard Business
School; he didn't have the credentials and he probably wouldn't have wanted
to. However, he did travel to Ottawa and Washington on matters important
to the management of caribou on the Yukon/Alaska North Slope and, from what I
heard through the grapevine, was treated with a lot of respect.
I have to end it here. We have to remain
quite far apart on the matter of human behaviour. On the other matter
we've broached, the basic income, I'll do a little more thinking and get back to
you. I think it's possible. If Bush did it for the rich with his
recent tax cuts, why can't it be done for the poor?
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2003 3:10
PM
Subject: Re: Slightly extended (was Re:
[Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
Ed,
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
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