Tag Archives: Farmers

Beware Extended Family

By Robin Hanson · May 11, 2013 9:30 am · Comments (24)

In the last few weeks I’ve come across many sources emphasizing the same big theme that I hadn’t sufficiently appreciated: our industrial world was enabled and has become rich in large part because we’ve reduced the power and importance of extended families. This post ends with a long list of quotes, but I’ll summarize here.

In most farmer-era cultures extended families, or clans, were the main unit of social organization, for production, marriage, politics, war, law, and insurance. People trusted their clans, but not outsiders, and felt little obligation to treat outsiders fairly. Our industrial economy, in contrast, relies on our trusting and playing fair in new kinds of organizations: firms, cities, and nations, and on our changing our activities and locations to support them.

The first places where clans were weak, like northern Europe, had bigger stronger firms, cities, and nations, and are richer today. Today people with stronger family cultures are happier and healthier, all else equal, but are less willing to move or intermarry, and are nepotistical in firms and politics. Family firms do well worldwide, but by having a single family dominate, and by being smaller, younger, and less innovative.

Thus it seems that strong families tend to be good for people individually, but bad for the world as a whole. Family clans tend to bring personal benefits, but social harms, such as less sorting, specialization, agglomeration, innovation, trust, fairness, and rule of law.

All those promised quotes: Continue reading "Beware Extended Family" »

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What Predicts Growth?

By Robin Hanson · February 28, 2013 2:10 pm · Comments (4)

I just heard a fascinating talk by Enrico Spolaore of this paper on what predicts local growth rates over the very long run. He considers three periods: before the farming revolution, from farming to 1500, and from 1500 to today. The results:

  1. The first regions to adopt farming tended to equatorial non-tropic coastal (but not island) regions with lots of domesticable animals (table 2, column 1).
  2. The regions that had the most people in 1500 were those that first adopted farming, and also tended to be tropical inland regions (table 2, column 4).
  3. The regions that were richest per person in 2005 had no overall relation to populous 1500 regions (table 3, column 1), yet were places of folks whose ancestors came from places where farming and big states first started. Rich places also tend to be cool (i.e., toward poles) coasts or islands (table 5) filled with people that are more related culturally and genetically to the industry-era leaders of US and Europe (tables 6,7).

These results tend to support the idea that innovation sharing was central. The first farming innovations were shared along coasts in mild environments, i.e., not too cold or tropical. During the farming era, sharing happened more via inland invasions of peoples, which tropics aided. Industry first thrived in islands better insulated from invasion, industry travel and trade was more sea-based, and sharing of industry was more via people who could relate more to each other.

Changing technologies of travel seem to have made a huge difference. When travel was very hard, it happened first along coasts in mild climates. As domesticated animals made long-distance land travel easier, inland invasions dominated. Then when sea travel made travel far easier, and invasions got harder, cultural barriers mattered most.

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Goldilocks Disruptions

By Robin Hanson · February 25, 2013 12:00 pm · Comments (6)

A society’s history of climatic shocks shaped the timing of its adoption of farming. Specifically, as long as climatic disturbances did not lead to a collapse of the underlying resource base, the rate at which foragers were climatically propelled to experiment with their habitats determined the accumulation of tacit knowledge complementary to farming. Thus, differences in climatic volatility across hunter-gatherer societies gave rise to the observed spatial variation in the timing of the adoption of agriculture. ….

Conducting a comprehensive empirical investigation at both cross-country and cross-archaeological site levels, the analysis establishes that, conditional on biogeographic endowments, climatic volatility has a non-monotonic effect on the timing of the transition to agriculture. Farming was adopted earlier in regions characterized by intermediate levels of climatic volatility, with regions subject to either too high or too low intertemporal variability systematically transiting later. Reassuringly, the results hold at different levels of aggregation and using alternative sources of climatic sequences. (more)

For the industrial revolution, the analogous disturbance might have been war and invasion. Were the first adopters of the industrial revolution the places that suffered an intermediate level of war and invasion? Enough to keep folks from getting too comfy in their old ways, but not so much that everything gets destroyed all the time. I’m not sure, but it sounds plausible.

Today the main disruptions are economic; societies rise and fall due to changes in the economic fortunes of particular industries or economic styles. Thus a lesson for the next great revolution might be that it will first benefit the societies that have adapted to dealing with an intermediate level of economic disruption. Which ones are those?

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Farmers’ New Rituals

By Robin Hanson · February 23, 2013 10:35 am · Comments (8)

A theory of ritual says the calm bookish kinds of rituals we are most familiar with started with farming; forager rituals were much more intense. There seems to be lots of supporting data:

Whitehouse believes rituals are always about building community — which arguably makes them central to understanding how civilization itself began. … Whitehouse’s theory [is] that rituals come in two broad types, which have different effects on group bonding. Routine actions such as prayers at church, mosque or synagogue, or the daily pledge of allegiance recited in many US elementary schools, are rituals operating in what Whitehouse calls the ‘doctrinal mode’. He argues that these rituals, which are easily transmitted to children and strangers, are well suited to forging religions, tribes, cities and nations — broad-based communities that do not depend on face-to-face contact.

Rare, traumatic activities such as beating, scarring or self-mutilation, by contrast, are rituals operating in what Whitehouse calls the ‘imagistic mode’. “Traumatic rituals create strong bonds among those who experience them together,” he says, which makes them especially suited to creating small, intensely committed groups such as cults, military platoons or terrorist cells. “With the imagistic mode, we never find groups of the same kind of scale, uniformity, centralization or hierarchical structure that typifies the doctrinal mode,” he says. … Continue reading "Farmers’ New Rituals" »

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