"Honor" as One of Eight Modes of Human Social Organization; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-04-03 Mo
modes of human social organization—honor as the brittle one; Bob Reich approaches retirement; Polanyi; Hemingway; Azhar and Ovadya...
FOCUS: Honor as One of Eight Modes of Human Social Organization:
Humans have, I think, eight modes of productively and cooperatively organizing ourselves. Coming out of the mists of the deep past, we have networks of (1) reciprocity and more centralized networks of (2) redistribution. The most recently developed is the still inchoate human technological practice of (3) organization-by-algorithm. There is (4) hierarchy and its cousin (5) bureaucracy. There is (6) propaganda. There is economists' special love, the (7) market economy. Last, there is (8) prestige and honor.
Here today we are very happy to welcome Yiming Cao up from Stanford to talk to us about how a culture of honor goes very wrong:
Yiming Cao, Benjamin Enke, Armin Falk, Paola Giuliano, & Nathan Nunn: Herding, Warfare, and the Development of a Culture of Honor: Global Evidence: [Did] traditional herding… generate… a value system that is conducive to revenge- taking and violence[?] We test this…using a combination of ethnographic records, historical folklore information, global data on contemporary conflict events, and large- scale surveys. The data show systematic links between traditional herding practices and a culture of honor…. The culture of pre-industrial societies that relied on animal herding emphasizes violence, punishment, and revenge-taking…. Ethnolinguistic groups that historically subsisted more strongly on herding have more frequent and severe conflict today…. Contemporary descendants of herders report being more willing to take revenge and punish unfair behavior…. This form of economic subsistence generated a functional psychology that has persisted until today and plays a role in shaping conflict...
Should I separate “honor” and “prestige” into two different modes? Prestige is overwhelmingly acquiring authority of a certain kind by demonstrating your excellence at performing important tasks. However, the power gained is the power to guide others into acting ways that have proven very successful for you: people copy you, listen to you, and do what you say because they think it is a road to success. Honor, by contrast, has nothing of skill-acquisition or direction in it. And yet it is very powerful, as people have observed dating back to Montesquieu, with his declaration that the mainspring of a commercial republic is interest, and of a feudal monarchy honor.
Is it, perhaps, that the other most important difference (besides prestige’s focus on useful-skill acquisition) between prestige and honor is that there is no way for honor to adjust to changing circumstances? All of the other modes of human organization have either the potential for conscious direction and adjustment or have built-in equilibrating mechanisms of some sort that react to change.
But not honor.
ONE VIDEO: Þis Is þe Last Year Bob Reich Will Teach His “Wealth & Poverty” Course Here at UC Berkeley:
ONE IMAGE: Karl Polanyi:
MUST-READ: Few Authors Have Ever Broken My Heart wiþ Þeir Words…:
Ernest Hemingway has:
Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls: ‘He looked down the hill slope again and he thought, I hate to leave it, is all. I hate to leave it very much and I hope I have done some good in it. I have tried to with what talent I had. Have, you mean. All right, have. I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it. And you had a lot of luck, he told himself, to have had such a good life. You’ve had just as good a life as grandfather’s though not as long. You’ve had as good a life as any one because of these last days. You do not want to complain when you have been so lucky. I wish there was some way to pass on what I’ve learned, though. Christ, I was learning fast there at the end…
Very Briefly Noted:
Jonathan B. Baker: The best books to read before—or after—you learn antitrust law: ‘…
David Rovella: US Inflation May Be Slowing Again…
Matthew Yglesias: Don't overthink poverty in the United States: ‘Our welfare state programs work well, but they are relatively stingy…
Dean Baker: SVB Was Donald Trump’s Bailout: ‘There are two key points that people should recognize about the decision to guarantee all the deposits at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB): It was a bailout, [and] Donald Trump was the person responsible…
James Livingston: The Sense of an Ending: ‘Combin[ing] theoretical sophistication and historical method… re-imagin[ing] the future of democracy…. The most searching of the three calls into question whether that future is compatible with capitalism…. Martin Wolf, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism…. Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents…. Pranab Bardhan, A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries…
Lars Sandberg: The Case of the Impoverished Sophisticate: Human Capital and Swedish Economic Growth before World War I…
Dave Karpf: How Much Longer Can Twitter Last, Really?: ‘Two financial time bombs…. My hunch is that Elon will file for bankruptcy as soon as one… self-detonates…. The first financial time bomb is all the pending employment lawsuits…. Time bomb #2: The fines…. FTC…. European regulators…. Europe has a stronger regulatory state than the U.S. It does not mess around…
Economist: What does the ideal university look like?…
Noah Smith: Repost: Interview with James Medlock: ‘The future winner of Balaji's million-dollar bet talks about taxes, cash benefits, and other fun stuff…
Hugo Mercier: ‘“The Enigma of Reason” and “Not Born Yesterday”…
Glenn Fleishman: Authory Provides Writers a Permanent Record of Their Articles…
Kevin Kelly & Gary Wolf: You Can Kiss Your Web Browser Goodbye: ‘Welcome to the radical future of push media, where information cascades to you—and doesn’t need your clicks…
Simon Willison: Think of language models like ChatGPT as a “calculator for words”: ‘Summarization…. Question answering: given these paragraphs… answer this specific question…. Fact extraction…. Rewrites… more “punchy” or “professional” or “sassy” or “sardonic”…. Thesaurus…. Fun, creative, wild stuff…. A calculator for words is an incredibly powerful thing.…
Kirk McElhearn: Apple Music Classical (Mostly) Plays the Right Chords: ‘Apple Music Classical shows that Apple is trying and is committed to supporting classical music in the future…
Duncan Black: My Side/Your Side: ‘When a prominent Democrat appears to be guilty of something, most Democrats fall all over themselves to condemn them…
¶s:
Azeem Azhar: After AI, where will the jobs come from?: ‘I look at the insightful research note from Goldman Sachs, titled “The Potentially Large Effect of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth”, in which the authors explore the labour market's future. The study posits that global productivity could see an impressive uptick, ultimately boosting global GDP by 7%. In the U.S., economic growth could leap from the anaemic range of 1% to 1.5% to a more robust 2.5% to 3%, reminiscent of the booming 1950s and 60s…
Aviv Ovadya: When we change the efficiency of knowledge operations, we change the shape of society: ‘Publishing and broadcasting are ‘distribution’ knowledge operations…. Summarization is a ‘processing’ knowledge operation…. Changes to the “efficiency of knowledge operations” have led to societal phase changes—dramatic shifts in structures and power dynamics of nations, organizations, and movements…. We have some—albeit limited—ability to influence the context, timing, and method of the introduction of new technologies. We need to make sure that we use this influence wisely—and time is of the essence…. AI advances are now enabling communications to be automatically summarized, refactored, & integrated—and will reshape our collective cognition…
One of the most haunting things that I have ever read was a comment which Robert E. Lee made during Grant's Wilderness Campaign. He recognized that if three federal aren't reached the James river, Richmond would be besieged. After that it would just be a matter of time. This was in the Spring of 1864. Why fight on then? Honor. Thousands died in the ensuing months for honor not military objectives. Source off the was a book about the Wilderness Campaign, Bloody Roads South. It's a good read if you have the time and inclination to read about America's Civil War.
"I wish there was some way to pass on what I’ve learned, though. Christ, I was learning fast there at the end…" Not your end, I trust, but yeah, you pass it on. That's why subscribed!