BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-10-31 Tu
Inheritance of land & cattle & the entrenchment of patriarchy; is Judith Butler insane or merely trying to communicate with the insane?; west European conceptions of the world at the start of the...
Inheritance of land & cattle & the entrenchment of patriarchy; is Judith Butler insane or merely trying to communicate with the insane?; west European conceptions of the world at the start of the imperial-commercial age; Apple Boasts its iphones can substitute for professional video cameras; very briefly noted; & my draft review of Henriques’s Taming the Street, the coming of modern feminism, Marco Becht on divestment as voice, high patriarchy & underdevelopment, & briefly noted for 2023-10-28 Sa…
SubStack NOTES:
Economic History: Alice Evans has a rather elliptical critique of Boserup and of Alesina, Giuliano, & Nunn on the coming of the plough and the entrenchment of patriarchy that I think is important, but that I do not quite grasp:
BD: If I understand <draliceevans.substack.com/p/what-the-in…> your critique of Boserup & of Alesina-Giuliano-Nunn, it is thus: the key is not that plough forces women into domesticity; breastfeeding & pregnancy push domesticity whether plough or hoe; the key is plough makes wheat land valuable. & once boys start inheriting valuable things from their (supposed) fathers, whether wheat land or animals, Big Trouble is highly likely to follow. Have I misread you?
AE: Exactly. It’s hard to know what motivated people to form patrilocal clans thousands of years ago. But looking at global history, I always find that valuable land –> patrilocal clans, unless it’s interrupted by the Catholic Church! The other issue with the Boserup/ Alesina hypothesis is that they think the primary driver of subordination is domesticity. Not really. The main factor shaping female labour supply is whether there’s a cult of female seclusion. That’s not entailed by patrilocal clans either
BD: Patrilocal clans => male inheritance => great concern for paternity => control & seclusion of women?
AE: Partly, yes. But even among patrilocal clans, there’s ENORMOUS heterogeneity. Turkic, Mongols, and Kazakhs were patrilocal, and women were in a junior position, but they did not enforce seclusion. Genghis Khan organised female diplomats/ ambassadors. So Kazakhs only adopted islam superficially, and women seized job opportunities under the soviets. There was very little resistance to secularism.
War: Is my Berkeley colleague Judith Butler insane? Or is she just trying to talk an audience of insane people down from their ledge by starting by meeting them where they are?
There has long been a “debate” on the “left” between those who get a thrill out of the power and cleansing effect of indiscriminate violence, and those who think that civilization is a positive-sum enterprise wherein we seek to maximize the win primarily through persuasion.
That all Judith Butler can do in addressing this question is to vaguely allude to “certain dimensions” of fellow “leftists” Hamas and Hezbollah; and that she classifies Hamas and Hezbollah as “social movements” rather than charismatic-ideological domination gangs—those strongly suggest to me that she should have tapped out of participation in any political enterprise long ago.
ONE IMAGE: West European Conceptions of the World at the Start of the Imperial-Commercial Age:
ONE VIDEO: Apple Boasts Its iPhones Can Substitute for Professional Video Cameras:
Very Briefly Noted:
War: Binyamin Netanyahu (2019): ‘Those who want to thwart the establishment of a palestinian state should support the strengthening of hamas and the transfer of money to hamas. this is part of our strategy…
Economics: Arin Dube: ‘We're seeing… a potentially major shift in the American labor market. We saw it with labor market tightness, leading to wage hike at the bottom. Now we're seeing union strength we've not seen in a long time…
Martin Wolf: Regional policy must be at the heart of any sensible strategy for growth: ‘Decades of failure have led to profound geographical inequality in the UK: The great deindustrialisation of the Thatcher era did not lead to the blooming of thousands of new economic flowers across the country…
Noah Smith: Does the notion of a "Global South" still make any sense?: ‘There are really four…. Industrialized countries… only thought of as “developing” for historical or political reasons… Turkey, Malaysia, and arguably China, Thailand and Mexico…. Rapidly industrializing countries… still poor or middle-income but are growing fast… India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic… Upper-middle-income countries that specialize in resource extraction… Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Iran, Botswana, Namibia, Kazakhstan…. The poor countries…
Sam Bowles & Herb Gintis: The Inheritance of Inequality: ‘While the estimates in Table 3 are quite imprecise… wealth, race and schooling are important to the inheritance of economic status, but IQ is not… and… the genetic transmission of IQ is even less important…
Economic History: Journal of Economic History: Virtual Special Issue: Nobel Prize Winner Claudia Goldin…
Alice Evans: Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy…
Zoomer Antimillenarian: ‘Basically half of DeLong Thought is about how thanks to massive technological growth we finally got the means to let everyone live the life of the mind without needing to screw over other human beings. The other half is how we've managed to avoid collectively realizing this fact. I would argue that we're as much fighting against human nature here as we are against human society. Humans are highly social heterotrophs to whom it is second nature to gang up against an outgroup and extract value from it by force, whether that outgroup is flora, fauna, or human…
Ilari Mäkelä: Why Do We Care About Equality? A Conversation With Primatologist Sarah Brosnan: ‘Equality animates ethics. But why? Is our interest in equality a product of European intellectuals? Or is it something rooted deeper in human nature? Sarah Brosnan joined to discuss…. This reaction is most commonly found in highly cooperative species. Brosnan’s own explanation, coming from economics, is that inequity aversion is a lubricant for win-win cooperation. It is a smoke detector which allows us to notice when cooperation might not be the right path anymore…
CryptoGrifts: Katie Baker: Caroline Ellison Was Supposed to Shock the SBF Trial. Instead, the Defense Team Has: ‘By the end of the week, jurors weren’t the only ones who were wondering when the defense would make it make sense…. The defense has yet to demonstrate any particular competence in this courtroom…
Baker "Ellison said Sam had once claimed that “he would be happy to flip a coin, if it came up tails and the world was destroyed—as long as, if it came up heads, the world would be, like, more than twice as good.”
Wolf: How depressing that such smart guy could not even hint at what regional policy could look like. [This is not snark.]