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
My God, yes! You really do disappoint me sometimes, Harry. There are many things on TV that one looks at for 5 minutes and then never ever want to see it again. Crap is hardly the word. Many TV shows reflect a society that has become disembowelled with consumerism. (Now there's a word I use a lot. But "consumerism" doesn't have ad hominem overtones because we are all consumers and we are all taken in to a greater or lesser extent. We need a society in which consumer goods are on tap but not on top.)
Keith
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.
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Harry Pollard
- To: 'Ed Weick' ; 'Keith Hudson'
- Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- 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.
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 -----
- From: Keith Hudson
- To: Ed Weick
- Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- 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
---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.548 / Virus Database: 341 - Release Date: 12/5/2003
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
