The Great Affluence Fallacy

[Sarpedon]

Agricultural societies won out over nomadic societies because they were more powerful, not because the people were happier. The trouble is our happiness was evolved to match the successful lifestyle human beings led over the longer period of our history: that is tribal nomadism. By inventing a new sort of society that completely overwhelms our old one, we've rendered happiness obsolete.

 

[Elixir]

Yes, modern technology can make a better canoe and cure dangerous diseases, but access to these requires a certain degree of participation in the system.
There's a lot preventing me from leading a neolithic lifestyle. You can't just plop down on a piece of land and begin building farming, hunting, fishing, lumbering, &c. Land is owned by someone, and these subsistence activities are regulated, game and fish are scarce, water is polluted, then there is compulsory education, vaccination, &c. Nor do people have the skills today to lead such a life. How many native Americans know how to make a bow, tan a skin or make a wigwam or tipi?

Some do. I believe we should treasure them.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

In a world of abundant wealth, why can't we live a life where we value kith and kin over profit and loss? What is it about living today that demands people work the hours they do, own all the stuff they do, and spend so little time just being with one another? Not only don't we spend time just being people, but we are developing a peculiar morality that looks at working longer hours as a worthy goal and time spent sitting on a porch just talking to your kids is waste of talent and treasure.

now I get it. Some who post here have no family, few if any friends and generally are frightened of being hurt so they limit their interactions with others. But trust me, the hurt you fear isn't worth the isolation you live in.

Actually when looking at how parents spend time with kids we spend a lot more time with our kids today, especially dads.

No. You don't. that is not true BECAUSE is PRE-INDUSTRIAL America, kids spent their days working (and yeah, playing) along side their parents, pretty much all day.

We're just guilted into feeling that we don't spend enough time.

How many people do you think lay on their death beds, or languish in nursing homes with no visitors for months at a time, lamenting how they didn't spend enough time at work?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In a world of abundant wealth, why can't we live a life where we value kith and kin over profit and loss? What is it about living today that demands people work the hours they do, own all the stuff they do, and spend so little time just being with one another? Not only don't we spend time just being people, but we are developing a peculiar morality that looks at working longer hours as a worthy goal and time spent sitting on a porch just talking to your kids is waste of talent and treasure.

now I get it. Some who post here have no family, few if any friends and generally are frightened of being hurt so they limit their interactions with others. But trust me, the hurt you fear isn't worth the isolation you live in.

If you ignore profit and loss you find yourself overspending and it's no longer a world of abundant wealth.

 

[Derec]

No. You don't. that is not true BECAUSE is PRE-INDUSTRIAL America, kids spent their days working (and yeah, playing) along side their parents, pretty much all day.

And a great deal of them did not get to see adulthood, and many not even their first birthday. But hey, you can't have everything, right.

How many people do you think lay on their death beds, or languish in nursing homes with no visitors for months at a time, lamenting how they didn't spend enough time at work?

And yet work is necessary.

 

[DBT]

Work is necessary, but the questions being, how much work, how many hours per week to earn a decent living, what rate of pay....and what is actually necessary work and what is frivolous and wasteful in terms of products and 'make work' projects.

 

[J842P]

Perhaps it is the rise of Trump and his Alt-Right, Neo-Confederate, Proto-Nazi acolytes or perhaps it the fact that he has gone through his own divorce, or maybe he just had some really good pie, but at least for the time it took to write this piece, something was awakened in David Brooks that made me agree with him.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence-fallacy.html?_r=0

There's a flaw:

If all (or most) Whites/non-Indians were to flee to the Indian tribes and live there instead of in the capitalist culture, most Americans, including the Indians, would starve.

-- or, that would be the best outcome?


There's another flaw:

Everything here is about the 18th century. What about today? Do White or non-Indian Americans still want to stay with the Indian tribes? And no Native Americans prefer to live in the White Capitalist culture today, given a choice?

Nothing in the article says this continued into the 19th and 20th centuries.

Colonial life was the Stone Age compared to today.

Don't most Native Americans on the reservations today enjoy refrigerators and micro-waves and TVs etc. etc.? Don't they enjoy their cheap Chinese imports from WalMart?

Wow. That flew right over your head, didn't it?

Anyway, your implication is absurd. You can't compare Indians on the reservations today - that isn't exactly a tribal state in the sense Junger is talking about, but an unfortunate state of affairs brought upon by centuries of extermination, forced relocation, and cultural destruction - the tribal way of life way systematically destroyed by the Federal government.

 

[J842P]

Obviously we should all go back to a neolithic lifestyle. Note that today, not even Indians live that way. When they fish, they use fiberglass boats with outboard motors instead of tree-trunk canoes with oars. When they hunt, they use pickup trucks, snowmobiles and hunting rifles instead of going on foot with bows and arrows. And yet they protest every oil development, and every pipeline, close to their areas - what hypocrites!
When they get sick they go to a physician instead of a traditional witch doctor. And so on.

Sure, pioneer life in the 18th century was difficult and there is a certain sense of romanticism in the Indian neolithic way of life. That does not make it desirable to live that way in reality. Especially not in 21st century (as opposed to 18th).

Again, that lifestyle was purposefully destroyed in North America. It has survived in the deep jungles of South America. Even today, you can't get those natives to switch to a modern lifestyle.

- - - Updated - - -

If people today experienced a communal society, like the renegade colonials mentioned in the article; and were free to choose without outside pressure, I expect you'd get a similar exodus from 'civilization'.

There is nothing stopping you from going into the woods and starting a commune.

Do you really believe this is a rebuttal?

 

[J842P]

I wonder if the colonial era wasn't a golden age for the NA lifestyle. Metal tools, weapons, cookware, domestic animals all would've made life easier.

Would all those captives have remained in true Stone Age conditions?

Don't forget the plagues and constant warfare with a technologically advanced enemy that is relentlessly expansionist. But other than that, I'm sure it was a golden age.

 

[J842P]

You might get to enjoy a little bit of community if you can survive continuous WWII levels of violence:

In the 1960s, cultural anthropologists led by Marvin Harris argued that conflict among prestate people was mostly over access to scarce protein. Dr. Chagnon disputed this, arguing that Yanomamo Indians' chief motive for raiding and fighting—which they did a great deal—seemed to be to abduct, recover or avenge the abduction of women. He even claimed that Indian men who had killed people ("unokais") had more wives and more children than men who had not killed, thus gaining a Darwinian advantage.

...

Recent studies have confirmed that mortality from violence is very common in small-scale societies today and in the past. Almost one-third of such people die in raids and fights, and the death rate is twice as high among men as among women. This is a far higher death rate than experienced even in countries worst hit by World War II. Thomas Hobbes's "war of each against all" looks more accurate for humanity in a state of nature than Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "noble savage," though anthropologists today prefer to see a continuum between these extremes.

What studies concerning what societies? Note, the original article doesn't cite any. The only work specifically referenced was that of Chagnon, regarding the Yanomamo. If I had to guess, what Matt Ridley is referring to is the oft-recycled graph from Keeley’s (1996) War Before Civilization, which was propagated by Stephen Pinker at his TED talk, which is a very biased sample of societies, and is hardly representative of all "small-scale societies" today or in the past. What most anthropologists will tell you, the ones who don't make a living selling popular science books, is that violence and war exist on a spectrum in such societies, and can range from very belligerent to almost idyllic.

 

[Canard DuJour]

You might get to enjoy a little bit of community if you can survive continuous WWII levels of violence:

In the 1960s, cultural anthropologists led by Marvin Harris argued that conflict among prestate people was mostly over access to scarce protein. Dr. Chagnon disputed this, arguing that Yanomamo Indians' chief motive for raiding and fighting—which they did a great deal—seemed to be to abduct, recover or avenge the abduction of women. He even claimed that Indian men who had killed people ("unokais") had more wives and more children than men who had not killed, thus gaining a Darwinian advantage.

...

Recent studies have confirmed that mortality from violence is very common in small-scale societies today and in the past. Almost one-third of such people die in raids and fights, and the death rate is twice as high among men as among women. This is a far higher death rate than experienced even in countries worst hit by World War II. Thomas Hobbes's "war of each against all" looks more accurate for humanity in a state of nature than Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "noble savage," though anthropologists today prefer to see a continuum between these extremes.

..which, if anything, reinforces the point. Even given the danger from other tribes, people still apparently have a natural preference for tribal community over alienation from their immediate peers. Ditto the British civilian WWII thing I mentioned earlier.

 

[Canard DuJour]

It has haunted me since. It raises the possibility that our culture is built on some fundamental error about what makes people happy and fulfilled.

What is it about that sentiment that is driving all these ridiculous straw men about reducing the economic standard of living to the mid 1800s? The OP is about the feeling of inclusion within a community which may be jeopardized by a single focus on the creation and acquisition of wealth.

^^^ that

Yep, that.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

In a world of abundant wealth, why can't we live a life where we value kith and kin over profit and loss? What is it about living today that demands people work the hours they do, own all the stuff they do, and spend so little time just being with one another? Not only don't we spend time just being people, but we are developing a peculiar morality that looks at working longer hours as a worthy goal and time spent sitting on a porch just talking to your kids is waste of talent and treasure.

now I get it. Some who post here have no family, few if any friends and generally are frightened of being hurt so they limit their interactions with others. But trust me, the hurt you fear isn't worth the isolation you live in.

If you ignore profit and loss you find yourself overspending and it's no longer a world of abundant wealth.

Where did I say anything about IGNORING profit and loss? Either reference the words actually used or just be quiet.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

And a great deal of them did not get to see adulthood,

And yet enough did survive to grow the nation and for many of us to be here now.

and many not even their first birthday. But hey, you can't have everything, right.

Did I say I wanted to return to the days of Plague and Yellow Fever? Like I said before, "Either reference the words actually used or just be quiet." You see, unlike other people here, I have no intention of following you down rabbit holes

How many people do you think lay on their death beds, or languish in nursing homes with no visitors for months at a time, lamenting how they didn't spend enough time at work?

And yet work is necessary.

Again, where did I say it wasn't?

Driverless cars are here. The automation technology to run entire manufacturing plants with five people instead of 500 is already here. In many states in the US the number one occupation among men is driving, be it a semi, pickup, or car. How long before driverless tech makes those jobs obsolete? As cheap and hardworking as labor is in the developing nations, people still need sleep, and breaks, and safety provisions that slow the lines down. And don't get it twisted, the markets is NOT what has kept the all out use of tech from happening, but politics. But even politics won't keep tech at bay much longer.

Another way of living is not a pipe dream, it's a necessity.

 

[barbos]

Yes, American Indians were pretty affluent back in the days.

 

[untermensche]

Yes, American Indians were pretty affluent back in the days.

It all depends on how affluence is defined.

How can a society say it is affluent if it is not sustainable?

That's not affluence. It's insane gluttony.

A bubble that will burst one day.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Yes, American Indians were pretty affluent back in the days.

Yea, there are so many false assumptions of Indians in the past! They were all happy running around in their loin clothes trading beads! Balony. If you study the typical tribe, they were in constant war for most of their existence. Their existence was brutal and miserable. It's no wonder they turned to so many wacky beliefs.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Yes, American Indians were pretty affluent back in the days.

Yea, there are so many false assumptions of Indians in the past! They were all happy running around in their loin clothes trading beads! Balony. If you study the typical tribe, they were in constant war for most of their existence. Their existence was brutal and miserable. It's no wonder they turned to so many wacky beliefs.

so natives were never happy? then why didn't they run to join white folk in town? why didn't the white folk who lived among them runaway as soon as possible?

 

[Harry Bosch]

Yea, there are so many false assumptions of Indians in the past! They were all happy running around in their loin clothes trading beads! Balony. If you study the typical tribe, they were in constant war for most of their existence. Their existence was brutal and miserable. It's no wonder they turned to so many wacky beliefs.

so natives were never happy? then why didn't they run to join white folk in town? why didn't the white folk who lived among them runaway as soon as possible?

I'm proud of the tribe that I'm from. But again, this fantasy that Indians were so happy is just false. My tribe was in constant warfare for a 1,000 years before the white man came to the US. Life was brutal then. People were constantly on the run and scared.

 

[iolo]

Agricultural societies won out over nomadic societies because they were more powerful, not because the people were happier. The trouble is our happiness was evolved to match the successful lifestyle human beings led over the longer period of our history: that is tribal nomadism. By inventing a new sort of society that completely overwhelms our old one, we've rendered happiness obsolete.

They provide for hugely more people - about fifty times as many, as I recollect. Those people, if the archaeologists are to believed, were several inches shorter than the hunter-gatherers, had far more disease, and lived several years less, but they were easily bossed and paid useful tribute/tax to any gang of thugs who came round and became an aristocracy. You can't argue with progress!