In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence

[AngryAmish]

"For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.

Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers for both questions.

Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.

Because they grew more common in the centuries before 1800, whether by cultural transmission or evolutionary adaptation, the English population at last became productive enough to escape from poverty, followed quickly by other countries with the same long agrarian past."

Read the whole thing. The author of this article also wrote the wonderful book "Before the Dawn" so I suspect he has a bit of a pro-evolution bias. However there is little doubt that as human we are evolving and definately adopting behaviors allowing for longer and happier lives.

[Myrina]

1. I'm sorry ...

I personally would rather live in a non-corporate, non-combative, mostly agrarian society.
The acquiring of "Wealth" is a construct used to control people.

All this 'keeping up with the Jones' - the culture of mindless consumption, apathy and isolation
(use your Segway instead of walking ... sit at your pc and talk to virtual friends without ever leaving your house, etc) and then trying to pass it off as "progress" that leads to a "longer and happier life" is going to actually be the downfall of this version of 'the Earth', IMO.

[AngryAmish]

2. Mankind in the past was much more violent than today

Hunter gathering societies now and in the past had a much higher level of interpersonal violence than they do now. Honestly, read the book I recommended above because it will open your eyes about a lot of things (or maybe not, because there is a thesis and point of view in the book that may be wrong). Anyway, I liked it because it did challenge some prejudices of mine.

Life expectancy is higher now than ever before. Some people don't like that but I can't think of a better metric than life expectancy for determining mankind's happiness on this globe. Cheers.

[happyslug]

4. The highest interpersonal Violence rates were among herders NOt hunters.

The reason being is that a herder could lose his whole herd in an instance (i.e. someone come by and take the herd, the best way to stop such practice is to be prepared to be as violent as the rustlers). Agriculture, on the other hand, must be harvested and stored and only then is it possible to steal it (and them you have to be able to transport the grain which unlike heading animals an NOT transport themselves, remember we are talking about pre-industrial times so no cars of trains to move things).

Thus areas of the most violence was areas where herding was the most common (Ireland, Wales and Scotland as opposed to England itself). The same occurred in the US, Farmers were rarely violent, through they had more guns then herders in the US. Herders, on the other hand, protected their hears with violence if they thought it was necessary (This is believe to be one of the reason the south was and is more violent than the North, More herding type people settled in the south, while the farmers of Germany and england settled most of Rural American outside the South.

Thus while this writer points to genes, others have pointed out upbring and culture is more of a factor. The recent DROP (since the 1960s) in crime among blacks living in the North reflect this. While still a generation or two from the South, Blacks had the same rate of violence as white Southerns, but after a few generations the rates drop. Among blacks whose ancestors have been in the North for 3-4 generations, the rate of Violence come close ot Northern Levels. while the rates of more recent immigrants from the South is higher (but Declining over time). This shows that the tendency to violence iS CULTURAL not genetic.

[AngryAmish]

5. Not true

Hunter-gatherer societies today (and from archaeological evidence, in the past, had very high rates of interpersonal violence. One article I found in the intergoogles <http://yannklimentidis.blogspot.com/2007/03/mortality-rates-among-hunter-gatherers.html> (HG tribe in venezuela has high violence rates). Another good article here <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n6_v133/ai_6396953>


Bottom line: we have all sorts of noble savage myths (we can't help it - there is a part of our brain/consciousness that wants to think we are people who have fallen from the ideal. It is where religion comes from, even if we profess to have no religious faith.) Science has disproven the noble savage myth, so we must decide if we believe in facts or comfortable myth.

BTW, I do agree with you about the cultural aspect in violence in the US (someone wrote a book about the Scotch-Irish settlement in the south and cultural reasons for the higher violence rate. I wonder if the genes were looked at if there could be a factor there too -- highly violent people being selected for in Scotland, Ireland and US amongst the Scotch-Irish. Hmmm....)

[happyslug]

7. I did NOT say Hunter Gathers were NOT violent, but Herders were MORE Violent

When you look at both groups, the Hunter/Gathers had to control the area they were in, violence wa the way to do it. Herders NOT only had to control the area they were in, they had to protect they heads. This made them EVEN MORE VIOLENT than Hunter-Gathers. That is ALL. As to Genes, I just do NOT see it, such Gene "problems" would show up in the North as while as the South. No the problem is Culture, how one is raised. I see it among the Abuse cases, people who GREW up in a violent household adopt the same level of Violence. They internalized it while quite Young (Probably under age three, definitely under age five). Once a person is REMOVED from such environment, the violence does NOT continue to run in their family (if removed young enough i.e. before age five, when they are young enough to accept a new standard, which is why i believe the Black violent rate has gone DOWN since the 1960s).

My big problem with Genes as opposed to Culture argument is that Gene can only be weeded out via death, while culture can be weeded out by education. As long as it is possible the reason for the high violence rate is Culture (and Culture appears more the reason at present) people will support education as the way to end the blight. If it is genes, hen the solution is NOT education but death and that was the logic behind the Nazi's elimination of the Jews (i.e. The Nazi's viewed the Jews as Genetically criminal and had to be "removed" from society to protect society. I do NOT agree with that position but it is the logical position to take if the problems is Genes NOT Culture).

[AngryAmish]

8. See, there we disagree

Or at least I disagree at present based on the evidence I have. The evidence is that as people came together for agriculture, etc. and even until today there is less and less interpersonal violence (including wars) as we go along. There may be blips within cultures based on demographics and social conditions but civilized mankind, on average is less violent. You have a hypothesis that herders were more violent than H-Gs. I have not seen persuasive evidence of that hypothesis in my reading on this subject. If I am missing it I invite the evidence.

There is lots of evidence of recent genetic changes in humans (lactose tolerance, thinner skulls, etc.)


You seem squeamish about attributing behavior changes to genetic predetermination. Of course, one can only generalize about this unless one knows the specific genetic markers for certain behavior (and even not then because genes can be expressed in certain ways so having a gene or genes for something does not automatically mean one will have the gene expressed.) The science is not there yet.

But I think anyone will agree than many mental processes are effected by genes. A simple example is Down's Syndrome.

If certain people are violent due to their genes and this is not amenable to education, would you continue to support education because it makes you feel better about the implications?

[happyslug]

12. To a degree ALL PEOPLE'S ATTITUDE CAN CHANGE

And education is the key. If people's attitudes are gene based they the attitude can NOT be changed. as I pointed out before blacks within 2-3 generation of moving North see a drop in violent crime. People removed from violent households at a young age also tend NOT to be as violent as people raised in such violent households. Thus the level of violence of a person seems more dependent on his culture than his genes.

Now there are exceptions to this rule, but those exceptions exist in Violent cultures as while as peaceful Cultures. The Classic example is the Vikings "Berserkers" and the more modern situation of the Malaysian concept of "Running amok". Both seems to be people with high rate of violence even for the violent cultures they were in. These are EXCEPTIONS Not the rule, and the general rule is what we must look at.

Some references as to herders and Violence:
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/SJHG-75E9DK?OpenDocument

A comment from a paper I found on the net about how various societies view the afterlife which shows that herding societies have a much higher level of expectations of violence than hunter-Gatherings societies and farming societies:
"vengeance played an important role in the afterlife in societies that practice animal husbandry,
but not in plant-agricultural or hunter-gatherer societies;"

Further in on that paper:

It has been demonstrated that the type of subsistence a society engages in can have a strong impact on the social behavior of individuals within that society and that social behaviors may differ from society to society as a function of types of subsistence. For example, Cohen, Nisbett, Bowdle, and Schwarz (1996) revealed a strong link between the patterns of subsistence and patterns of violence in both the southern and northern United States. Specifically, it was shown that the South, which was originally colonized by herding people, has a much higher incidence of violence in their culture than does the North, which was colonized by farming people. They made the argument that the primary resource of herders, cattle and other types of livestock, are much easier to steal than is the primary resource of farmers, which is land. As a result of this high risk of theft, herders have to protect their cattle with direct violence and aggression against the thieves. This aggressiveness became indoctrinated in the culture of the South and this ‘Culture of Honor’ currently persists, though there are very few herders today. Farmers, on the other hand, are not at risk for losing land to thieves, and thus can live a much more peaceful existence.
http://pigeonrat.psych.ucla.edu/afterlife.pdf

Another paper on Culture and genes:
http://www.uchicago.edu/aff/mwc-amacad/biocomplexity/conference_papers/richerson.pdf
Quote from that paper:
For example Tomasello’s group used human demonstrators of a raking technique to test the social learning of juvenile and adult chimpanzees and 2-year-old children. The demonstrators used two different techniques of raking to obtain otherwise unreachable, desirable objects. Control groups saw no demonstrator. The demonstrator had a big effect on the use of the rake by both children and chimpanzees compared to control groups, but the interspecific difference was also large. The children tended to imitate the exact technique used by the demonstrator but the chimpanzees did not. In similar experiments with older children Whiten and Custance report rapid increase in the fidelity of imitation by children over the age range 2-4 years, with adult chimpanzees generally not quite achieving the fidelity of 2 year old humans. Human children already at quite young ages are far more imitative than any other animal so far tested, although a very few other animals, such as parrots, are also about as good as chimpanzees at imitative tasks (Pepperberg 1999).

The above support my point, Culture is very important to how people think and act, often more important then genes (It is from the genes people have the ability to LEARN their culture, thus you have so much interaction between the two).

[The2ndWheel]

9. Just a different kind of violence really

Targeted at a different object. Also at a different scale. It would also depend on what you define as violence.

We're not really less violent today, we're just more efficient at it.

Another thing being that all the violence of the past led to winners and losers. To the victor went the spoils, and so the victorious way of life continued. Whoever won became more powerful, centralized control, and went on to fight the next war. Those wars eventually led to an actual world war, then another, which again allowed the victorious group to consolidate power, and the planet increasingly lives under one integrated system. That will end up in fewer wars, since there is less diversity. That's what war and violence are really about anyway, the destruction of something different, or something that stands in the way of your power expanding. America wouldn't even exist if not for violence.

[AngryAmish]

10. The definiition of violence used is people killing people

Killing for any reason, be it war, religious (ritual) or murder. That said, HG violence was much more prevalent than nowadays. If people killed each other at the rate of HG societies, the 20th century (including WWII, gulags, killing fields, final solution et al) would have ended up with 3-5X as many people dead. Many people died but the population was much larger. Rate, not gross numbers.

[The2ndWheel]

11. Yes, we're more efficient

We figured out the only way to actually grow as a civilization was to have more people pumping energy into it. That's why we came up with slavery. Then we found oil, no longer needed slaves(at least in the northern part of the Western world), and were able to slowly allow women and black people to have all the rights they wanted. As long as each group became part of the dominant culture. As long as they wanted to be CEO's, and propaganda...media celebrities, and didn't want to create their own world, they could have their rights.

That's also a narrow definiton of violence, but if we're using that, then yes, we're much more peaceful.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. Why is everything Darwinized these days?

Darwin does not deserve the ignominy.

A Farewell to Alms sounds like a kinder, gentler Bell Curve. But each book is a tile in an ugly mosaic.

Evolutionary theory, popularly held, has itself evolved into a monstrosity that bears only superficial resemblance to Darwin's work. It has run amuck. And even human thought is bound to the Procrustean bed of rump Darwinism in the pseudoscience of the Meme. The intellectual world is in the thrall of evolution, and has ventured far beyond the data from which it emerged.

Natural Selection may be a powerful force in nature, but it is not everything, and trying to force-fit our whole universe into its mold is itself an act of unscientific faith and intellectual vandalism. It is time to disentangle scientific thought from intellectual superstition.

--p!

[ThomWV]

6. Now I know where the phrase "happy horseshit" comes from

Grin and bear it.