Back to the Sandbox

July 3, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

Things that we think of as “natural” or part of human nature are often the product of human invention. That was the point of the previous post, “Culture Masquerading as Nature.” I took that title from something anthropologist James Suzman says in his interview with Ezra Klein.

The Ju/’hoansi, the hunter-gatherer tribe Suzman ran with, were, like all hunter-gatherer societies, “fiercely egalitarian.”  But while the Ju/’hoansi assume that humans are by nature sharing and egalitarian, to Klein, thinking sociologically, it’s obvious that their egalitarian society is possible only because of their “extraordinary” practices like “demand sharing” and “insulting the meat.” Their equality is a product of culture, not nature.

But when it comes to his own society, Klein discards this sociological perspective. Immediately after Suzman makes his “masquerading” comment, Klein says

I was thinking when you were saying that the Ju/’hoansi see it as strange when somebody doesn’t share as unnatural, I mean, I’ve got a two-year-old. There’s definitely something natural about not wanting to share.

Is selfishness natural? Or is it the product of extraordinary cultural practices? I blogged about this question in 2010. Obviously, Ezra Klein did not read that post, and most likely, neither did you. So here’s a briefer version.

The title was  “Sandbox Sociology,” inspired by a conversation with another parent at the playground when my kid was just a few years old. In the sandbox, a child of two or three was strenuously holding on to a ball or truck or some toy that another child wanted to play with. I don’t recall how strenuous the tussle was or whether it involved tears. But I do remember the comment of the woman I was chatting with: “They’re just so possessive about their toys at this age. I guess it’s human nature.”

I nodded, but then I thought of how much effort we parents spent on inculcating in our children a concept totally alien to the Ju/’hoansi but crucial to our own society: private property. Of course, we liberal parents didn’t think of it this way, but how many times had I heard parents say things like

•     That’s Cody’s truck. If you want to play with it, you have to ask him.
•     That’s not your doll, that’s Emma’s doll.
•     Yes it’s your backhoe, but it would be nice to let Alex play with it too.

Many parents had written their child’s name in permanent marker on toys just so their would be no confusion about ownership.

We encouraged our kids to share. Boy, did we. But the whole concept of sharing was premised on the prior principle of private ownership. And while ownership was taken for granted, sharing was voluntary.  I never saw a parent force a kid to share. What parent would dare take a toy out of the hands of their own tearful child and offer it to another toddler? After all, the toy did belong to the kid. It was her property — hers and not the parent’s  — and property rights prevailed. It was her possession to do with as she pleased.

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I know nothing of how Ezra and his wife Annie interact with their son. But I would guess that the Klein household is not much different from those on Manhattan’s Upper Left Side. I would also guess that the Ju/’hoansi would see all these practices based on the concept of individual autonomy and ownership as “extraordinary” customs designed to make selfishness so basic and universal that it seems like human nature.

Culture Masquerading as Nature

July 2, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the previous post about the arrogance of economics, I said that economists seem to treat ethnographic evidence as an inferior form of knowledge, an interesting diversion but not really necessary to understanding what people are all about. Now anthropologist James Suzman, in a recent interview with Ezra Klein,* says that the basic assumptions of economics, assumptions that economists and most of the rest of us take as universal truths, are merely arbitrary, a matter of cultural construction.

Central to those economic assumptions is scarcity. One definition of economics in fact is that it is the study of the distribution of scarce resources. But what if there is no scarcity? What if scarcity is a social and cultural construction?

We now have a fair amount of evidence about a variety of hunter-gatherer societies, and it turns out that people in these societies act as if there is no scarcity. One reason for this is that they have enough food. Food production — hunting and gathering — occupies about 15-20  hours of their week and provides a rich and varied diet. Hunter-gatherers are well-nourished.

Demand Sharing and Insulting the Meat

In addition, these societies are, in Richard Lee’s phrase, “fiercely egalitarian.” Suzman, who  has been studying the Ju/'hoansi hunter-gatherers in Namibia/Botswana, describes two customs that sustain their equality. One is what anthropologists call “demand sharing.” (Suzman notes that “one anthropologist who didn’t like it much called it ‘tolerated theft.’”)

Demand sharing means that pretty much anybody in a society can go to anybody else and demand something from them. So if, for example, I have a bag of tobacco, somebody else is perfectly entitled to come and demand some of that tobacco from me. And it would be considered extremely rude — in fact, it would be considered offensive — if I don’t give him some of that tobacco. At the same time, it’s not considered at all rude to make that kind of demand.

The other important mechanism dampening inequality is “insulting the meat.” Meat is much prized, and it is scarce. It might be a source of competition, jealousy, and anger. After all, some men are just better at hunting. They are the ones who can bring in a large animal — a giraffe of bull eland. Such a man might acquire more social capital or power. In our society, people like this reap huge material and social rewards.

We might expect that the  Ju/'hoansi would  praise the best hunter and try to ingratiate themselves. Instead, they do just the opposite.

The hunter is mocked and insulted. And it’s done in a kind of lighthearted way, but also with a little bit of an edge. And the hunter for his part is expected to behave with great humility. They’ll say, “the meat smells like urine. Ah, it’s not enough to even feed my mother-in-law.” They do this to avoid the hunter accruing any unnecessary hierarchy and any socially destructive authority over others.

Their Customs are Extraordinary. Ours Are Natural

At this point in the interview, Ezra Klein comments that demand sharing and insulting the meat are “extraordinary structures” for maintaining equality. “What you have in hunter-gatherer societies is a pretty extraordinary system for keeping people’s desires under control.” Klein assumes that the desire to have more for oneself is “natural” — a built-in element of human nature.

You talk about it as extraordinary because you’re looking at it from the perspective of the United States. They [the Ju/'hoansi] don’t view it as extraordinary. They found* it extraordinary that people want to accumulate wealth, that people might not want to share. They responded with that same kind of visceral surprise that others respond to them. This is the telling thing about how the power of culture and experience really shapes our sense of what is normal, what is natural, what is good. As far as Ju/'hoansi are concerned, not sharing is something that is unnatural. . . . What we often assume is nature is just culture masquerading as nature.

The Ju/'hoansi live in a world with no scarcity and much equality. They do not see what is obvious to us — that their ideas about the world and the structure of their society are cultural creations.

Though we obviously have much more than do the Ju/'hoansi, we live in a world of scarcity. We compete over everything because everything is scarce, not just material goods but less tangible “goods” like recognition, pleasure, even love. We are constantly made aware that others have more, so of course we want more as well. We do not see that our desires and our assumptions about the world are sustained by, in Ezra Klein’s phrase, “a pretty extraordinary system” that rewards striving, aspiration, and inequality just as extraordinarily as the Ju/'hoansi discourage them.                

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* You can listen to the interview here or get it from any podcast site. It runs to more than an hour but is well worth listening to. If you’re in a hurry, the transcript is here.

** Suzman uses the past tense because the Ju/'hoansi have seen our world, flown in our planes, worn our clothes, and drunk our delicious cold sodas, and they still think we’re nuts. You can see this in the trailer for the 2016 documentary “Ghostland.”

Economics — Monarch of All Its Surveys

May 27, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the 1950s,, psychoanalysts ruled. Whatever the social issue, writers for high-brow journals could easily find at least a few psychoanalysts eager to assess the problem, its causes, and perhaps its solutions.. Seems hard to believe now. After all, aside from the occasional patient, they had little experience with juvenile delinquency or comic book readers or racial discrimination. Yet psychoanalysts could apply their theories and techniques to any area of human behavior. 

Today, the same can be said of economists.

The Niskanen Center, which is concerned mostly with public policy, recently posed three questions on crime to a panel of sixty-six academics they designate as experts. [UPDATE: Niskanen did not conduct this survey. They did publish it on their Website. See Greg Newburn's clarification in the comment below.] They were asked their level of agreement or disagreement.

1: Increasing police budgets will improve public safety.
2: Increasing social service budgets (e.g. housing, health, education) will improve public safety.
3: Increasing accountability for police misconduct will improve public safety.

The report, “Policing and public safety: What do the experts think?” is here. The panel of experts is dominated by economists, Forty-eight of the sixty-six have a Ph..D. in economics. The other degrees come from departments like public policy, criminology or criminal justice, government, and sociology.

The experts include no ethnographers or anthropologists and no cops.

Several of the experts added comments to their Likert-scale agreement or disagreement. Many of the comments say, it depends. That is, it depends on what really goes on. It depends on how the policy is actually put into practice on the ground

Would increasing police budgets matter? 

 “I think increased funds going to the right places could help, but blanket increases are unlikely to do so.” (Jillian Carr, Ph.D, Economics, Texas A&M)

Increasing social service budgets? 

“My hunch (based on existing research) is that we dramatically underinvest in such programs from a public safety perspective. But not all programs are effective, so we still have a lot of work to do to figure out exactly which programs should get more funding and how to scale them.” (Jennifer Doleac , Ph.D, Economics, Stanford)

It reminded me of an article by Robert Martinson that was influential back when I was in the crim biz. The title was “What Works?” (1974). It was a sort of meta-analysis of prison rehabilitation programs. Many people misread the article as saying that the answer was Nothing. Nothing works. But what Martinson actually found was that some programs did work, and others did not. The trouble was that nothing in the structure or method of a program predicted its success or failure.

To understand why programs worked or not, you had to get inside the program. You had to look at how the people involved actually did their jobs. In short, you needed an ethnographer watching and listening, not an economist running the regressions.

The sixty-six Niskanen experts are all really smart people — the universities where they got degrees and are currently employed are all top tier — and they know a lot. But I would guess that few of them, especially the economists, have a thorough street-level knowledge of cops, communities, or criminals.

A wise comment by Jens Ludwig (Ph.D, Economics) says, indirectly, the same thing.

“There are good conceptual reasons for thinking that improved accountability (if we can figure out how to do that) could improve community trust in police, which would have all sorts of public safety benefits. We don't have a lot of rigorous studies documenting that at this point in time but we do have some suggestive case studies.”

I wonder how many of the people who did those case studies were considered experts whose opinions were worthy of the Niskanen Center.

Gender and the C-word

May 26, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

The C-word is back in the news thanks to a retweet by Rep.Marjorie Taylor Greene.  Greene had likened vaccination and mask policies to the forced wearing of yellow stars by Jews under the Nazis. Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy had said that her comparison was wrong. A Greene supporter came to her defense on Twitter:

Look you moron, nobody supported Israel in their recent conflict with Hamas more than MTG,. Her analogy may not have been perfect but you seriously need to get a grip you feckless c**t. Pelosi is the villain here.

@AsimplePatriot was alluding to Samantha Bee’s use of “feckless cunt” three years ago to describe Ivanka Trump. At the time, I blogged about the different ways that cunt is used in the US and the UK. For Brits, cunt does not explode the conversation the way it does here. In the US, uttering (or tweeting) cunt changes the question from who is a moron to who used that word.

What’s different this time is that an American used it to characterize a man (Kevin McCarthy). As I pointed out in the earlier post, Brits have been calling men cunts for at least a few decades. As an example, I embedded a Monty Python sketch from the 1960s. It’s still funny. (The post is here.)

We Americans have imported some Britishisms. One-off is now common, and I see gobsmacked coming through customs. But I doubt that @AsimplePatriot’s tweet signals the start of a trend towards making cunt less taboo and less gender-specific.*

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* I remember a dorm-room discussion long ago, mostly Jewish guys in the room, where someone characterized a girl as a schmuck. “You should never call a girl a schmuck,” said another guy, and after a pause added, “Unless she’s a real schumck.”