Harry, don't even mention the show 'Survivor' to
me. I see it as absolute American crap, like the "Stench of
America". There's nothing in it that even remotely bears any resemblance
of the reality of hunters and gatherers.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 5:15
PM
Subject: RE: Slightly extended (was Re:
[Futurework] David Ricardo, Cavema n Trade vs. Modern Trade
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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