You down with GDC? Yeah, you know me.
even Hickel has disavowed his Guardian headline, saying it was forced upon him by editors.
See, this is bullshit. An editor will often (generally) change the headline on a contributed article, because contributing authors are often (generally) not good at knowing how to write a good headline. But if the author gets in touch and says "this headline is factually wrong! It contradicts what the article says! I don't mind you changing it, but you can't use this one!" the editor will not then reply "tough". It's also noticeable that the article is carefully vague about whether Gates is wrong about poverty declining, or wrong about why, or wrong about what we should do; it simply says that "it's a powerful narrative. And it's completely wrong."
The chart erases the toll of colonialism, particularly in the 1820 to 1981 period. "The world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money," Hickel writes.
I am very sceptical about this. Most of humanity, in 1820, lived in non-monetary societies? The bulk of the human population in 1820 lived in Europe (21%), South Asia (21%) and East Asia (34%). Africa and the Americas together were just 10%.
South and East Asia (and Europe) were not dominated by non-monetary societies! The Chinese Empire had money; the various Indian kingdoms had money; the East India Company (which by this time controlled most of India) used money; and so on.
Maybe the average Khmer or Mahratta peasant didn't use money very much, any more than the average mediaeval English peasant did, but it's still not true to say that they had no need of it at all; nor that they were untaxed.
And talking about absolute numbers rather than percentages is just arrant stupidity. (The same argument was used about Pinker's claim that the world was getting less violent, in percentage terms. It was stupid then as well.)
This is a problem that Europeans have; we tend to massively overestimate the historical significance of Africa and the Americas, because their histories are today given great cultural prominence, and because of their geographical size. But their populations were tiny to the point of irrelevance for most of recent history, compared to the enormous numbers in east and south Asia; societies about which people in Europe and North America are systematically underinformed.
Typo: East/Southeast Asia should be 45%, not 34%, of the world population in 1820.
I thought that population of the Americas was actually really large before the Columbian Exchange.
I am very sceptical about this. Most of humanity, in 1820, lived in non-monetary societies? The bulk of the human population in 1820 lived in Europe (21%), South Asia (21%) and East Asia (34%). Africa and the Americas together were just 10%.
I would imagine that a significant portion of the rural population in South/East Asia were living in situations in which the importance of money was minimal. But I think you're correct to say that it's a stretch to say that a majority of the human population lived in non-monetary societies.
I also think the linked article is correct to point out that non-monetary societies may avoid some problems which exist in cash-based societies but one shouldn't conclude, based on that, that non-monetary societies are necessarily comfortable (to use the word used above).
"Forced on him by editors" does sound like bullshit to me.
There were pockets of almost moneyless economies in Lapland until the 1920s. If you lived on one of the pioneer homesteads just on the treeline, you used money once a year, when you went in to the big fair at Jokkmokk to sell furs and buy salt, cloth, seed and gunpowder. Otherwise, even trade with the Sami was conducted on a barter system. [I may have mentioned this before: it's a way of life that fascinates me]
What broke this system down was hydroelectricity. Building the huge dams required local labour and the young men were paid cash for it, in employment that lasted most of the year. It turned out that they preferred this to subsistence farming in the middle of nowhere.
6: much larger than afterwards, but still not very large. The absence of written records makes estimates very vague. Wiki cites 54 million for the Americas overall, with 37m in what's now Latin America, in 1492 as a "consensus count", with the range of 10-100 million. North America was anything from 2-18 million.
54 million would have been 12% of the world population in 1500; so still tiny compared to East and South Asia.
And, looking at the article, if you write a paragraph which reads, in its entirety
"It's a powerful narrative. And it's completely wrong."
It's a bit off to complain when the sub puts "he couldn't be more wrong" in the headline.
And don't forget West Asia. Baghdad had a population of around a million before the Mongol invasion. And they had a monetary economy from al-Andalus to Central Asia.
They being Islamicate civilization in general.
And there is a real significant difference between "had no need of money at all", which is what Hickel said, and "use it a few times a year and rely on barter the rest of the time". If the latter - and I'm sure this was true of the rural population, just as 7 says - they were not living in a non-monetary society.
And if you only use money to buy seed once a year, that is not the same as money having minimal importance to you! Seed is important!
11: a bit before 1820, but yes! Heck, there were silver dirhams (I think dirhams? Coins from the Muslim world anyway) circulating and being minted in Anglo-Saxon England. I've seen them.
"Pre-colonial East Asian societies had no need of money after they broke from IBM; instead they formed little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages".
I wonder if the need for paying the religious taxes (zakat for Muslims, and jizya for non-Muslims) maintained the need for a monetary economy throughout Muslim ruled territories.
The Aztecs used human sacrifice to avoid the need to use taxation without representation.
14: so you saw the BL exhibition too!
I think in the Swedish case they could have lived without money and traded their furs directly for the other stuff. It would have been inconvenient but there probably was some rate of exchange. I have a memory of reading what that was at Uppsala in the 19th century but am sitting in an office now a long way from my books. I do know that the Norwegian kings taxed the Sami entirely in kind for centuries. In fact I don't know when they stopped.
Probably the best definition of a society where money is essential is one where the taxes are collected in it. We ought to be able to trace that process in Mediaeval England, at least. Who here last read the Domesday book? What were most manors there expected to pay their dues in? Fighting men, obviously, they being the essence of the feudal system* but what else?
* and still exchangeable for money at many banks, if you have a fast enough getaway driver
I think in the Swedish case they could have lived without money and traded their furs directly for the other stuff. It would have been inconvenient but there probably was some rate of exchange.
In those situations you generally end up inventing money anyway. A relative of mine was a fur trader for the Hudson Bay Company back in the 1930s, in a hut up in the Canadian Arctic. He started the summer with a hut full of stuff (tools, hunting equipment, cooking pots, clothes, food, etc), and over the course of the year gradually transformed it into a hut full of furs. Then a ship arrived (his one contact with the outside world each year), took away the furs and delivered more stuff. But if I remember correctly there was a system of Company tokens; he wouldn't swap the furs for the stuff directly, he'd give the hunters a negotiated quantity of tokens, which they could then use to buy stuff at a later date. That's basically money.
Barry got there first, from a different angle. But were those Muslim taxes always paid in coin? Genuine, ignorant question.
Who here last read the Domesday book? What were most manors there expected to pay their dues in? Fighting men, obviously, they being the essence of the feudal system* but what else?
Domesday Book didn't list taxes, I think; it was solely a record of population and land. Scutage (monetary payment in lieu of military service) came in not long after the Domesday Book, as far as I know. Payment was in pounds sterling; so, silver coins.
Scutage wildly outdated in the modern world of course. Entirely replaced by heel spurs, or service in the Texan National Guard.
Eric Hobsbawm is pretty good on the qualitative shift in the type of insecurity and immiseration that confronts you when you move from being subject to the natural scarcities of traditional societies (bad things when the environment doesn't deliver what's needed materially) to the artificial scarcities of modern societies (bad things happen when I can't trade my labor power for what's needed materially). See if I can dig up a quote later.
An editor will often (generally) change the headline on a contributed article, because contributing authors are often (generally) not good at knowing how to write a good headline. But if the author gets in touch and says "this headline is factually wrong! It contradicts what the article says! I don't mind you changing it, but you can't use this one!" the editor will not then reply "tough".
Maybe "forced" by editors is the wrong word, but it may well be the case that the editor says "sure, we can get rid of the clickbait headline to something more accurate but dull. But, from experience, we can tell you that the boring title will only get a fraction of the clicks. Does it matter how good your article is if nobody decides to read it? Also, don't forget we evaluate your worth to us by the number of clicks your articles get."
20 Not always, they could be paid in livestock if one owned livestock, or grain if one were a farmer. But professionals were salaried and paid in coin.
Hickel makes a lot of good small points in service to a larger, dishonest point. (Maybe "dishonest" is too strong? He's trying to pull a fast one, though.) The $2 per day versus $7.40 per day is irrelevant -- for most cutoffs for extreme poverty the percentage is down. For some reason $2/day became a conventional benchmark.
The point about colonialism pushing standard of living below subsistence levels is interesting, but both working the mines at Potosi and subsistence are both extreme poverty, so they have nothing to do with the decline of extreme poverty. Also the argument about the quality of data -- we're not going to suddenly discover that the Iroquois were a middle-income economy by modern standards.
The argument that we should use absolute values instead of percentages is obviously embarrassing.
The argument that we should use absolute values instead of percentages is obviously embarrassing.
Doesn't it make sense if you're a negative utilitarian? My friend used to believe that the evil of suffering was by far the most morally significant fact -- and that more people not suffering or even having continuous orgasms was relatively of virtually no moral significance. So, if in the modern world there are more people suffering, even if they are a smaller percentage of the total number of people, it would be a worse situation.
(I haven't read any of the article, so it is quite possible I'm missing the point)
Hickel makes a lot of good small points in service to a larger, dishonest point. (Maybe "dishonest" is too strong? He's trying to pull a fast one, though.)
Can you elaborate on that, because in some ways, I have a surprisingly difficult time distinguishing the small points and the larger points.
My impression, prior to reading the article was that, globally, over the last 20 years there has been a sharp reduction in extreme poverty, and significant increases in literacy and life expectancy. Nothing in the article changes that impression.
There's also a political debate about whether that fact is a demonstration of the benefits of a globalized economy. My baseline assumption is that, yes, it does reflect a benefit of globalization (which isn't to say that globalization is without costs as well).
In my reading of the article Hickel is overly reluctant to acknowledge that but, at the same time, makes some important arguments about why the political argument doesn't necessarily flow from the underlying economic data (and that the economic data is oversimplified). But I don't know to what extent that represent goalpost moving on Hickel's part.
Robert Allen's "Global economic history: a very short introduction" is great. One thing that was new to me was the extent to which Mexico, India, and others *de(proto)industrialized* in the 18th/19th century; I hadn't realized the extent of pre-industrial revolution manufacturing there, and how thoroughly it was destroyed by European imports.
Continuing the train of thought in 28 . . .
... it made me want to throw up my hands and suggest that maybe it's better to measure access to fresh food, adequate housing, and safe working conditions than get into the weeds about cut-off numbers.
The article quotes Hickel as follows:
"Yes, of course I agree that life expectancy has increased and child mortality has decreased," Hickel wrote in an email to me. "Those data are not controversial, although I differ from Gates and Pinker in my assessment of the causes of those improvements. ... As for the graphs on literacy and years of schooling: the data are accurate, but I believe these are very narrow indicators of education, and that a broader, more holistic view reveals a more complicated story."
...
In his letter to Pinker, too, Hickel agrees that life expectancy and education have seen gains. "In your work you have invoked gains in life expectancy and education as part of a narrative that seeks to justify neoliberal globalization," Hickel writes. "But ... that's intellectually dishonest. What contributes most to improvements in life expectancy is in fact simple public health interventions (sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines), and what matters for education is, well, public education."
That makes me think of a recent comment at CrookedTimber
I think the present retreat into Left nation-statism is at least partly driven by the perception that one can do nothing about such supranational structures as the EU and the international financial order created and operated by the United States ruling class. Whereas on a nation-state level, at least some countries might (at a long shot) be able to move toward different social arrangements.
If there's a tension about globalization on the right, between the desire for free international flow of goods and money while limiting immigration, there's a tension on the left between recognizing that problems like inequality (and climate change) are global and demand global solution and the fact that existing transnational entities are poorly constructed to protect quality of life concerns. In the quoted passages Hickel argues that gains in education and health should be attributed to national governments engaging in public spending/investment rather than international trends. Which is an interesting argument. On one hand, it's clearly false to say that international trends are irrelevant, on the other hand I think he's right to say that there is a political judgement involved in casting it as a non-national narrative.
"There are more Indians now, more Indonesians, more Nigerians, more Kenyans. That's not a bad thing. Using absolute numbers risks confusing reducing poverty with preventing poor people from existing."
Seems like this should be considered to be throwing serious shade at Hickle who is basically advocating return to a malthusian society.
It's so nice to come late and find other people have already done your curb stomping for you. Small details to add on monetarization:
Maldivian cowrie money has turned up deep in the central African interior*; long-distance trade certainly wasn't central to those economies, but it was there (and often disproportionately important, economically and politically).
Broadly, monetization doesn't necessarily show up the way we know it. In the late 19C Europeans starting selling iron hoe blades into Mozambique. Those were intrinsically valuable as tools, but soon came to be used as currency as well; there were literally shiploads of hoe blades circulating as money all over the region. We know about this from documentary sources, but if archaeologists just found those blades in situ would they be able to tell? An unworn tool, maybe. But what if the currency was perishable? Like a bolt of cloth, say, sometimes used in China when cash was scarce*. Things like coins and cowries stick out because they're durable and don't have practical uses, but any number of things don't.
*I'm sure the 'tariat can multiply examples.
"the evil of suffering was by far the most morally significant fact"
I think this, insofar as humans generally adjust to positive shocks and noone is happy all the time, but there are many varieties of suffering, some that pays off in happiness (exercise, making new friends, going to work) and some which is pure loss, like death of a child, starvation, torture, etc. Avoiding the latter is essential.
30: I'm not going to bother reading Hickel. If he says it's wrong to conflate 20C gains with neoliberalism, he's right; but if as he appears to do he conflates neoliberalism with free trade, he's wrong. Public spending is paid for in part with trade. AFAIK essentially all economic progress everywhere has been bootstrapped with trade.
You can conflate neoliberalism with anything.
28: Rather than having argument against globalization, he's just trying to change the subject. (I think globalization is too vague of a term, though. It is export-led growth, which means selling on global markets, but it doesn't mean that people like Bill Gates deserve any credit for it.)
"Pre-colonial East Asian societies had no need of money after they broke from IBM; instead they formed little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages".
I laughed.
28: Rather than having argument against globalization, he's just trying to change the subject.
Right, that's what I was trying to get at when I asked whether it was a large point or goalpost moving.
To (potentially) step on my own thread, I have an unrelated question about economics statistics, that I all ask here in case somebody (or Someguy) knows the answer.
A friend recently cited a statistic from this article by Robert Reich.
Around 60% of America's wealth is now inherited. Many of today's super-rich have never done a day's work in their lives.
I was trying to figure out where that statistic came from. I believe it's from this paper by Piketty/Zucman (I can't find the specific numbers for the US in that paper, but it is in these lecture notes by Zucman).
I'm skimming their methodology section and it makes sense, but there is such a wide range of estimates available, that I get the impression that the question "what percentage of America's wealth is inherited" can be answered multiple ways, and that the different answers are partially caused by people answering different questions. I'd be curious to know if that's true. For example, in 2011 Dylan Mathews wrote this (links to research are paywalled unfortunately).
New York University economist Edward Wolff has done the best work I've seen on the contribution of inheritance to wealth inequality, and his latest paper, coauthored with the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Maury Gittleman, is chock full of relevant data on the matter. In 2007, the last year Wolff and Gittleman look at, wealth transfers (mainly inheritances, but also including gifts) made up, on average, 14.7 percent of the total wealth of the 1 percent (more specifically, the top 1 percent in terms of wealth). Interestingly, inheritance's share has declined over time. In 1992, 27 percent of the wealth of the top 1 percent came from wealth transfers.
Wolff and Gittleman also find that because wealth transfers generally make up a bigger portion of the wealth of poor and middle-class people, they actually reduce wealth inequality, in aggregate.. . .
That's such a different conclusion that I'm not sure how to compare the two findings.
I assume there is a difference between "Alice inherited $100 million" and "Bob inherited $50 million and earned $50 million in interest on that money over the years."
Did Alice inherit more than Bob? Yes. Is more of Alice's wealth due to inheritance than Bob's? No.
Eric Hobsbawm is pretty good on the qualitative shift in the type of insecurity and immiseration that confronts you when you move from being subject to the natural scarcities of traditional societies
Even if you don't have time to dig up a quote, I'd be grateful for a suggestion of which book (paper?) to start with.
39: The Wolff paper uses the Survey of Consumer Finances, which I think is worse at measuring the very top end of the wealth distribution.
Seems mostly about who should get credit for the huge gains in China, with a lot of people trying to avoid the answer: "communism".
Dang was a communist like Hitler was a socialist.
As in: that's what it said on his letterhead. Nothing more.
A publically professed communist for over 70 years and a life long member of the worlds largest communist party, would seem to be one of the most communist people you could be. But as I said, a lot of people want to avoid that answer.
Why would Hitler spell out "National Socialist" on his letterhead?
I guess maybe before he was Chancellor.
Yep, and Hitler was a professed National Socialist until the day he died.
Or I suppose you could define communism as a commitment to privatisation, opening up your country to foreign trade and foreign investment, radically cutting back state benefits, and giving far more autonomy to the financial sector. In which case Deng was indeed a communist and communism was indeed responsible for the huge gains in China.
Margaret Thatcher, also, was a communist.
I think that the John Birchers had a book with that title.
Mao had the same title but affected Chinese wellbeing differently. After Deng stopped being chairman of the party, his titles changed but he was still influential. You are welcome.
I'm not going to google "Hitler's Letterhead" because I don't want to know what ads I get after that.
Trump sends be emails calling me "friend," which is basically the same thing as "comrade."
the Question of is Deng a communists? On one side: Deng himself, every single person that has ever been close to him, and essentially every exsisting communist, on the other, a bunch of people that hate every communist government. We promise you this is not a hillarious attempt to avoid giving communism any credit. Next up: was Hugo Chavez a Hitler, or a double Hitler.
54: Interestingly, Deng was never Chairman of the Communist Party. He let the title lapse after Hu Yaobang. Instead, he had various less important official roles (Chairman of various committees) but was known to be an informal "paramount leader." Since him, the chief leader has been President of the People's Republic and General Secretary of the (Central Committee of) the Communist Party.
The functional definition of communism, desire to starve Ukrainian farmers, is going to be tough to assess in a Chinese leader. Maybe we should go with self-reported communism
Most people lived on farms in traditional societies. They paid their rent / taxes in kind. If they lived near a town, they'd be part of the cash economy, but cash would only be involved in a handful of transactions. (BTW Traditional farmers don't buy seeds. They retain seeds for the next year.) Colonialism discouraged this kind of farming. The rulers wanted cash crops, not food crops, so they could sell them on international markets. This was true of much of China and India until fairly recently as urbanization has proceeded apace.
In the movie, I Know Where I Am Going, the wealthy city girl makes a radio call to her fiance from one Scottish isle to another. She offers to pay with a five pound note. One of the others points out that the radio operator and her general store probably didn't see five pounds from year to year. This was set in the 1940s. They were talking about the town's general store. It was a fishing village. People ate what they caught, what they shot and what they could grow.
The classic example is the Congo. It was probably never much of a paradise, but people could get by. Then Leopold imposed a head tax that had to be paid in cash. That led to horrific exploitation, the kind even hardened European colonialists blanched at.
The natives are to be forced to make a living by selling their labor. To this end their traditional institutions must be destroyed, and prevented from re-forming, since, as a rule, the individual in primitive society is not threatened by starvation unless the community as a whole is in alike predicament. Under the kraalled system of the Kaffirs, for instance, "destitution is impossible: whosoever needs assistance receives it unquestioningly." No Kwakiuti "ever ran the least risk of going hungry." "There is no starvation in societies living on the subsistence margin." The principle of freedom from want was equally acknowledged in the Indian village community and, we might add, under almost every and any type of social organization up to about the beginning of sixteenth century Europe, when the modern ideas on the poor put forth by the humanist Vives were argued before the Sorbonne. It is the absence of the threat of individual starvation which makes primitive society, in a sense, more human than market economy, and at the same time less economic. Ironically, the white man's initial contribution to the black man's world mainly consisted in introducing him to the uses of the scourge of hunger. Thus the colonists may decide to cut the breadfruit trees down in order to create an artificial food scarcity or may impose a hut tax on the native to force him to barter away his labor. In either case the effect is similar to that of Tudor enclosures with their wake of vagrant hordes. A League of Nations report mentioned with due horror the recent appearance of that ominous figure of the sixteenth century European scene, the "masterless man," in the African bush.
During the late Middle Ages he had been found only in the "interstices" of society. Yet he was the forerunner of the nomadic laborer of the nineteenth century. Now, what the white man may still occasionally practice in remote regions today, namely, the smashing up of social structures in order to extract the element of labor from them, was done in the eighteenth century to white populations by white men for similar purposes.
61: Not to detract from your point--many Scottish islands were isolated and subsistence was most of their economy--but £5 in 1940 is worth £275 now. Baller move.
Hobbes' grotesque vision of the State--a human Leviathan whose vast body was made up of an infinite number of human bodies--was dwarfed by the Ricardian construct of the labor market: a flow of human lives the supply of which was regulated by the amount of food put at their disposal. Although it was acknowledged that there existed a customary standard below which no laborer's wages could sink, this limitation also was thought to become effective only if the laborer was reduced to the choice of being left without food or of offering his labor in the market for the price it would fetch. This explains, incidentally, an otherwise inexplicable omission of the classical economists, namely, why only the penalty of starvation, not also the allurement of high wages, was deemed capable of creating a functioning labor market. Here also colonial experience has confirmed theirs. For the higher the wages the smaller the inducement to exertion on the part of the native, who unlike the white man was not compelled by his cultural standards to make as much money as he possibly could. The analogy was all the more striking as the early laborer, too, abhorred the factory, where he felt degraded and tortured, like the native who often resigned himself to work in our fashion only when threatened with corporal punishment, if not physical mutilation. The Lyons manufacturers of the eighteenth century urged low wages primarily for social reasons. Only an overworked and downtrodden laborer, they argued, would forgo to associate with his comrades and escape the condition of personal servitude under which he could be made to do whatever his master required from him. Legal compulsion and parish serfdom as in England, the rigors of an absolutist labor police as on the Continent, indented labor as in the early Americas were the prerequisites of the "willing worker." But the final stage was reached with the application of "nature's penalty," hunger. In order to release it, it was necessary to liquidate organic society, which refused to permit the individual to starve.
I can't tell if we have a new, really wordy, commenter or if somebody is being quoted.
23, 42 - I can't find exactly what I am looking for, but his books "The Age of Revolution (1789-1848)" and "The Age of Capital (1848 - 1875)" have chapters that include interpretations of the lived experience of moving from participating in traditional to modern economies. What Karl Polanyi (dropping in from the dead) is saying in the thread is generally consistent with the tenor of Hobsbawm. This is from "The Age of Revolution"(pp. 158-159):
But even where the peasantry actually received the land, or were confirmed in its possession, as in France, parts of Germany, or Scandinavia, they did not automatically, as hoped for, turn into the enterprising class of small farmers. And this for the simple reason that while the peasantry wanted land, it rarely wanted a bourgeois agrarian economy.
For the old traditional system, inefficient and oppressive as it had been, was also a system of considerable social certainty and, at a most miserable level, of some economic security; not to mention that it was hallowed by custom and tradition. The periodic famines, the burden of labour which made men old at forty and women at thirty, were acts of God; they only became acts for which men were held responsible in times of abnormal hardship or revolution. The legal revolution, from the peasant's point of view, gave nothing except some legal rights, but it took away much. Thus in Prussia emancipation gave him two-thirds or half the land he already tilled and freedom from forced labour and other dues; but it formally took away: his claim to assistance from the lord in times of bad harvest or cattle plague; his right to collect or buy cheap fuel from the lord's forest; his right to the lord's assistance in repairing or rebuilding his house; his right in extreme poverty to ask the lord's help in paying taxes; his right to pasture animals in the lord's forest. For the poor peasant it seemed a distinctly hard bargain. Church property might have been inefficient, but this very fact recommended it to the peasants, for on it their custom tended to become prescriptive right. The division and enclosure of common field, pasture and forest merely withdrew from the poor peasant or cottager resources and reserves to which he felt he (or rather he as part of the community) had a right. The free land market meant that he probably had to sell his land; the creation of a rural class of entrepreneurs, that the most hardhearted and hard-headed exploited him instead of, or in addition to, the old lords. Altogether the introduction of liberalism on the land was like some sort of silent bombardment which shattered the social structure he had always inhabited and left nothing in its place but the rich: a solitude called freedom.
I assume they are quoted from Karl's book "The great transformation".
impoverished people in lombok are not in a cashless economy by any means, but lots of families making even less than $2 per day are pretty healthy since food is very easy to grow, rice is cheap, and everyone fishes. a small amount of labor spent fishing is enough to feed everyone. the villages are also meant to look out for their poorest members, and even urban areas are divided into notional villages. however, the government is crap at providing schooling in sasak, fuel costs have been rising as they phase out subsidies, and tourism is not an unmixed blessing--you sell your land and make money, but probably need to divide it up, and then the jobs available are short term since balinese people who've been to hospitality college and speak english take the front of the house jobs at hotels. still it's interesting to see what people who feel they don't need to work hard to feed their families do: just chill out a lot, eat fried fish with tomato and chilis, drink beer, and smoke clove cigarettes. (they mostly belong to a heretical sect in which allah is cool with beer. if mobes can work out some kind of kavan'allah joke that's not offensive and is actually funny then go for it. I'm at a loss.)
The Hanafi school's thought that the Koran only bans grape based drinks is a venerable one. Also sounds like those people need 12 hour sweat-shop shifts.
"Notes on a Balinese Cock Fight" was so misleadingly titled that it turned me against anthropology and Indonesia.
The transition from the traditional system into the modem system can be so fraught that it takes close to a millennium before food security is sufficiently advanced that even the elite can just throw away moldy jam.
Not to be a downer but its going to be a real problem for those people when the oceans boil and kill off the fish.
15 made me laugh too, O anonymous one. Not least because I was thinking of Graber (& LB's take-down) too.
44-60 (or so): The phrase "with Chinese characteristics" somehow did not make it into the discussion. It's what the Germans call a "dehnbarer Begriff."
61: On "I Know Where I'm Going" - it is a fictional film set in an extremely romanticized version of the Western Isles, and I doubt very much that Scottish islanders in the 1940s were quite as cashless as that. They bought oil for lighting, petrol for vehicle engines, imported goods like tea, whisky, beer and tobacco, clothing (you can't dress in tweed alone), cloth for making clothes, travel, books, medical care, school fees. There was an extensive sea/rail transport net around the whole West Coast centred on Glasgow.
Here's a film clip: note telegraph lines, motor vehicles, etc. https://movingimage.nls.uk/film/0549
The idea that a village shop could keep going on a cash turnover of £5 a year is a bit silly.
I can believe that the village shop didn't see £5 In a single note from year to year. Most shops in central London today probably don't see a £50 note from year to year. I've never seen a £100 note in my life.
re: 78
Yeah, I've seen a £100 note maybe once. My grandmother had some as part of a criminal injuries pay out.
My boss had a £50 note at work the other day, and needed to buy lunch.* He commented that it was the first time he'd had a £50 in years. I can't remember the last time I had one. Years and years.
* which turned out to be fine. The market stalls could easily break a £50, as their lunch time turnover is pretty high.
Because Deng continued to call himself a communist, China became rich without any 12 hour sweat-shop shifts. All those stories you've heard are lies.
China's so communist right now that the government is disappearing student communists. https://www.ft.com/content/fd087484-2f23-11e9-8744-e7016697f225
To be fair, "disappear lots of communists" is a legit communist-government thing to do, judging by history.
70 is a good example of a point that rather undercuts Hickel; if you are a part-subsistence farmer (like most people on Lombok, and indeed most people in the Western Isles in the 1940s) then your actual lived experience will be better than your reported income suggests, because so many of your basic needs are being met outside the cash economy, through barter or through self-sufficiency.
I bet big bills, relatively speaking, were more common back then because they didn't have cards.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a $50 bill that didn't come from a bank in Germany. Have I seen a $100 bill in the last year? I don't remember it. Lots of people use them, just not anyone in my circle.
I carry one, for emergencies while traveling.
And by "emergency", I mean, bars with broken credit card readers.
Dude. Paper trail. Be a professional.
Actually, I try to pay cash at the bar or liquor store. I figure if they can track everything I spend on a card, I should hide things from them.
Maybe Mossy differs but I find having a lot of cash in large denominations essential to security in living overseas in regions that have a better than small chance of going suddenly off.
Or I did back when I was going to the bar more. My stomach is really getting in the way drinking lately so I mostly save drinking for when I really need it to get through something (family holiday, school concert, that kind of thing).
29: This shouldn't be surprising. The Industrial Revolution began because industrial producers outcompeted traditional ones *in Yorkshire*.
The surprise - at least in my case - wasn't that the traditional producers were outcompeted, but that there were quite so many of them in the first place.
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I'm embarrassed by this but also want camaraderie, so this is probably the right place for it.
Anybody else have a tic-like recollection of a rather gross pick-up line every time they hear the title of Michelle Obama's biography? (Becoming) Moby? Anyone? (If not, now you will. Sorry.)
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I haven't heard it, but reasoning my way to it, does it start with "That dress is very becoming on you..."?
does it start with "That dress is very becoming on you..."?
Yep. I'm sorry.
"That dress is very becoming on you. Can I be coming on .... it?"
And that's why he plays the saxophone, folks.
Sex is like eating tomato soup. It's probably going to create some dirty laundry but if it sends you to the dry cleaner, you're being careless.
94 distressingly led me to imagine Alec Baldwin giving a variant of the "Always Be Closing" speech to a "pick-up artist" club.
(I know the ABC doesn't actually "work" but switching the overall speech to that context most certainly does.)
...And you can't play in a man's game. You can't close them. And you go home and tell your wife your troubles masturbate. Because only one thing counts in this life! Get them to sign on the line which is dotted to go home with *you*! You hear me, you fucking faggots?
I never saw whatever movie that speech was from, so I always picture it as being from Thomas and the Magic Railroad.
I actually watched that clip before a day in my ill-starred sales career. Turns out I can't play in a man's game.
70, 83, indeed 66 itself; it's never clear to me when historians are talking about an amount of money as a population's average wage whether they're including rights and resources that we have to buy replacements for now. Inshore fishing or mast browsing or even an easy and safe several deer a year, whichever.
It's not that easy to keep deer safe. Lots of people shoot them.
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So, uh, can any Pittsburgh people explain what's up with this?
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106: I read about that! It's almost as weird as my two weirdest personal newsroom stories, and I think it might even beat the one about the mysterious woman who kept wedging coathangers down the toilet and smearing her own crap on the walls. (Someone's crap anyway. Presumably her own.)
Inherited wealth is a problem for society.
Inherited wealth is not nearly as big a problem for society as inherited poverty. Discuss. (20 marks)
107 Have you told those stories here and, if not, will you or do I have to wait until the next meet up?
Anyway, "Guy who runs racist editorials on MLK Day is also a huge asshole" isn't exactly a surprise.
111: the other two would be the news editor who used to fling journalists around the newsroom, and the time that someone tried to blow up the office building on moral grounds.
Why were they allowed to construct a building on moral grounds?
Not having a building would have been cruel to the people in it.
My primary reaction to that story was great relief that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is still owned by scions of the family that owned it 100 years ago, instead of a private equity firm. Although this family is not sending its best scions.
The scary thing is that they might be.
No time to read the whole comment thread, but thought I'd throw this in re: Heebie's comment about measuring living conditions directly rather than arguing about cutoff dollar amounts. The MPI (Multidimensional Poverty Index) also uses cutoffs and adds the complication of assigning weights to categorical values (you can, for instance, have 1/3 of a decent floor in your dwelling). This is out of necessity, because the concept of poverty implies 'not enough', and therefore you need to define what 'enough' is -no matter whether it's money, sanitation facilities, work conditions, or education. Having a single metric (the headcount index at 1.90 PPP USD, or the MPI) is useful from a monitoring point of view because, once you define what 'enough' is, it gives some sense of the direction of travel in the quest to end 'not enough'. I suspect it also has something to do with the news cycle and the need for sound-or text-bites to catch (increasingly shorter spans of) attention to mobilize funds and votes and, in a minority of cases, inspire action.
My reaction was similar to 112. This is very much in character. Robinson Block has been taking a much more active role over control of the Post-Gazette (and presumably the Toledo Blade) in the past two years, proudly flying his reactionary shithead flag. Coverage has gotten worse, editorials have been more conservative in an idiotic way, a beloved liberal cartoonist was fired, etc. The Post-Gazette is the only media that I routinely work around the paywall because the local coverage is still occasionally useful, but I have no desire whatsoever to provide the institution money. I feel awful for the workers, though.
Please, reactionary shitheads prefer to be called "high class", as opposed to journalists and other employees who are "low class".
Does anyone here know whether the situation in 70 would generally be described as "subsistence farming"? I recently realized I have an unexamined assumption that subsistence farmers are just barely getting by with maximum effort, but it seems not unlikely that some people don't grow enough food to sell much because they don't really need to, and end up with lots of leisure instead of lots of extra food or cash. Using the same term "poverty" to describe this situation and e.g. people barely scraping by working long hours in high-rent areas seems uninformative.
Subsistence farming is when you grow all (or nearly all) you consume, and vice versa. There isn't really a rigorous definition of whether you are a subsistence farmer or not. These guys will be buying clothes and other luxuries by selling surplus fish.
Subsidence farming is when your garden is sinking.