I normally share this video from Reason every Thanksgiving.
But this year I’m going to recycle instead a video from John Stossel.
The moral of the story is that societies based on collectivism do not succeed.
People don’t work hard when the rewards of their labor go to others. Even in small communities, that approach does not work.
By contrast, they have a much greater incentive to be productive when the benefits accrue to themselves and their families.
In a nutshell, redistributionism does not work. This is why the original Plymouth Colony was failing. And it’s why places such as Cuba today are so miserably poor.
This is a lesson to keep in mind when people on the left or right try to tell you that bigger government is a good idea.
Let’s conclude with some Thanksgiving-themed humor about libertarians.
There are lots of jokes about a Trump-loving uncle causing discord over turkey, but libertarians have similar abilities.
They even relish the opportunity.
Two more items for our collection.
P.S. This column from the archives shows how politicians might ruin Thanksgiving.
For some reason this post disappeared when I entered my most recent one. I’ll try to put this up again. Hope it doesn’t take down my new one. : ) I’m not going to take the time to put back in the paragraphing that sometimes disappears when posting. I think it’s still readable.
John,
With regard to hunter-gatherer abject poverty, I have supplied you with multiple scholarly opinions which say that they were not living in abject poverty. Here is one more resource: Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the bestselling, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Most of what I quote from him I will put at the end as an appendix so as not to bog down the reading here. But I do want to quote here one sentence that is probably the highlight. Please note that throughout his book he uses the terms forager and hunter-gatherer interchangeably. In any event, here is that sentence: “The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies.”
How do you put a price on those three things? How do you put a price on the close familial relationships foragers enjoyed?
You continue to make your claims about the hunter-gatherers with no scholarly support. You ignore the fact that hunter-gatherers had life expectancies (30 – 40 years) that would not be significantly increased by the human race until the 1800s! And even then, only in the western world. In 1775 in colonial America the life expectancy was 36 years. If the foragers were living in abject poverty, how did they manage to live as long as humans in the 1700s? They would have died of starvation.
With regard to you section titled EQUALITY, I agree with everything you say.
With regard to taxes, you give me no reason to believe your data. What is the source of your information? Furthermore, you spend most of your time on federal income tax (which is progressive, although not as progressive as you think) and only briefly mention in the last paragraph the very non-progressive taxes (or regressive) taxes. These include sales tax, social security tax, medicare tax gasoline tax, and county and municipal taxes, to round out a list which certainly does not include everything.
Everything you say in the first three paragraphs misses the boat because you write only about federal income tax. That’s why you can write something so cruel as “Poor people basically don’t pay taxes.” Oh, they most certainly do. A poor person living in the same state as Bill Gates will pay the same sales tax for a loaf of bread, a pair of shoes, or a television set as will Bill. That same person will, of course, pay many other regressive taxes at the same rate as Bill (country and municipal taxes may differ depending on where the two live, but they will still be regressive) The following data is from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP):
Total Federal, State & Local Effective Tax Rates
2020, by income group
(Note: if you look at the site – you will have to copy and paste the above title, you will see a bar graph. Since I can’t copy and paste that graph here, I will simply provide the all-important numbers)
The bottom quintile has an effective tax rate of 20.4 percent. The second lowest quintile has an effective tax rate of 22.4 percent. The middle quintile has an effective tax rate of 25.5 percent. The fourth quintile has an effective tax rate of 27.8 percent. ITEP divides the highest quintile into three groups. The top 15 percent pay an effective tax rate of 30.2 percent, the top four percent an effective tax rate of 31.0, and the top 1 percent an effective tax rate of 34.4 percent. That paints a vastly different picture than your misleading, cherry-picked, numbers. That a Bill Gates would pay an effective tax rate only 14 percentage points higher than someone in the bottom quintile is something that I think he himself would say is morally wrong.
And it gets worse. From ITEP’s own report: “First, ITEP is not yet able to split out different income groups within the richest 1 percent. If we did, we might find that effective tax rates are surprisingly low for the very, very rich given that much of their income is capital gains and stock dividends, which are taxed at lower rates. Research by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds that the very richest 400 taxpayers in the United States pay a lower effective tax rate than other groups.” Try to get your head around that last sentence.
Who Pays Taxes in America in 2020? – ITEP
Who did you say was getting the biggest breaks over the last 40 years or so? If you copy and paste the link below, you will see a revealing graph titled “Federal Income Tax Rates by Income Group (I believe it’s the second graph on the page).
Just How Progressive Is the U.S. Tax Code? (brookings.edu)
Unfortunately, the graph above doesn’t help us with breaking down the 0-80 percent group. But you can find that information easily enough and it completely busts your misconception that federal income tax brackets have been better for the poor than for the wealthy over the last 40 years. Use the following link:
Historical Income Tax Rates and Brackets, 1862-2021 | Tax Foundation
In the graph below you can see how the wide gap between top and bottom brackets 40 years ago has shrunk drastically. I don’t know how you can possibly say that the last forty years have seen increasing progressivity. Your evidence? The graph only takes us to 2015, but the situation since then has, if anything, only gotten even better for the wealthy. OK, again I have to work around the lack of this site to permit graphs (ironic, considering how many of them Dan prints). You will have to copy and past the following into your browser if you can’t just click on it: Historical Income Tax Rates CHART – Bing – Bing images You’ll then have to click on “Historic Tax Rates Chart” at the top. The “See More.” The chart you’re looking for will be the fourth one over on the second row.
Perhaps you remember the famous story of Warren Buffet saying that his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he did (and that’s only taking into account federal taxes). In 23013, after a tax increase, Buffer updated his story:
“Warren Buffett says even though he and other top earners are paying higher taxes this year, he thinks he’s still paying a lower rate than his secretary.
“In 2013, capital gains for those earning more than $400,000 ($450,000 for couples) will be taxed at 20%, up from 15%. And high-income households also will pay an additional 3.8% in Medicare taxes on their investment income for the first time. The top marginal tax rate also rose for the wealthiest wage earners, but since Buffett’s income is from investment gains, not wages, that’s not a factor.
“But part of the problem is that his secretary’s tax bill also went up since a partial payroll tax holiday ended, raising what she pays for social security by 2 percentage points.
“’I’ll be a fair amount higher, 8 or 9 points higher,’” Buffett said of his own tax rate in an appearance on CNBC Monday. “’But the differential between me and the rest of the office, not just my secretary but the rest of the office, was greater than that. It’ll be closer, but I’ll probably be the lowest paying taxpayer in the office.’”
Buffett says he’s still paying lower tax rate than his secretary (cnn.com)
As for comparing the progressive nature of U.S. taxes to other OECD nations, you have to remember that most of the poor in this country aren’t paying federal income tax (as you correctly pointed out), but they are paying a whole lot of other taxes as described above. At the federal level the Europeans look less progressive (but remember that federal income tax in the U.S. only accounts for about a quarter of all taxes collected at all levels of government), but that lack of progressivity is paying for free quality schools, health care, college education, good mass transit, roughly six weeks of paid vacation and very generous maternity and paternity leave, among other perks. They seem to like it. Even with the VAT.
You write: “The top 10% of Americans pay 71% of all federal income taxes. If this isn’t enough progressivity for you, then what is???” You have to get off your hang-up with federal income tax. It’s a relatively small portion of all taxes paid in this country. As I have shown above, when all taxes are taken into account, the poor really get a raw deal.
With regard to your last paragraph, I don’t believe that liberty and care for the less fortunate are unrelated. But if you think that “small government is good for poor people,” I suggest you read the history of how the poor were treated when government was small. Read about the poorhouses. Many times people are poor because they have been trampled on by the powerful. Small government will be of no help to them. They need a government strong enough to level the playing field (not necessarily produce equal outcomes).
The OECD nations with which we are usually compared are capitalistic nations with stronger social safety nets than we have. Maybe that’s why most of them are happier countries than ours.
Hi John,
Poor is a relative term. It doesn’t matter that you think the hunter-gatherers were poor anymore than it matters that people 30,000 years from now might think you were poor because you couldn’t travel throughout the solar system and live for thousands of years without pain. How can there be an “objective standard of living” when people value different things? Was the richest banker in early 19th century America better off than Henry David Thoreau? You can have an objective standard of material possessions, of course, but not an objective standard of living (if by a “life” we include such things as meaning and happiness). When I write about poverty near the end of this piece, I am referring to people having access to that which sustains “sufficiency” as Harry Frankfurt suggested was the bottom line. During hunter-gather days, poverty was minimal by that standard. Poverty (along with slavery) became prominent for the first time in human history with the advent of civilization.
Zero hunter gatherers in the world today? Well, there are zeroes in the number, but it’s seven of them. The estimate of the number of hunter-gatherers today is 10,000,000.
From: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Google: Hunter-gatherer populations inform modern ecology
Why the move away from the farms to the cities (I’m taking the moves in reverse chronological order)? Well, our old friend Occam did have a good point. The simplest answer is often the best. But not always. It’s easy to think that the peasants just walked off the land because of the bright lights beckoning in yonder cities promising good wages. But that wasn’t the case of our English peasants, about whom we read:
“In the decades and centuries before the 1700s, British farmers planted their crops on small strips of land while allowing their animals to graze on common fields shared collectively. However, in the 1700s, the British parliament passed legislation, referred to as the Enclosure Acts, which allowed the common areas to become privately owned. This led to wealthy farmers buying up large sections of land in order to create larger and more complex farms. Ultimately, this forced smaller farmers off of their land. Having lost their way of life, many of these farmers went to local towns and cities in search of work.” And from multiple sources we know that work was brutal. Sadly, it was that or starve. There was a reason there was a Charles Dickens.
Google: Enclosure Movement – HISTORY CRUNCH – History articles, Biographies, Inforgraphics, Resources and More
I don’t propose to claim that this answers all the movement from the land to the cities in the era when the industrial revolution was beginning, but it does put a dent in your somewhat rosy picture of people picking what was in their own best interests as if choosing whether to be a doctor or an engineer.
Moving backward in time, it is, of course, much harder for specialists to know just why hunter-gatherers became much more domestic. But was it really “choice”? Before turning to the Oxford-trained historian Yuval Noah Harari, from whose work, Sapiens:A Brief History of Humankind, I quoted before, I will give you this quick overview from Wikipedia:
“Following the ASPRO chronology, the Neolithic started in around 10,200 BC in the Levant, arising from the Natufian culture, when pioneering use of wild cereals evolved into early farming. The Natufian period or “proto-Neolithic” lasted from 12,500 to 9,500 BC, and is taken to overlap with the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPNA) of 10,200–8800 BC. As the Natufians had become dependent on wild cereals in their diet, and a sedentary way of life had begun among them, the climatic changes associated with the Younger Dryas (about 10,000 BC) are thought to have forced people to develop farming.” ((from Wikipedia entry “Neolithic”)
Why did they become dependent on wild cereals in their diet (which led them to be FORCED to develop farming), you might ask. Here is Yuval Harari:
“Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity… Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature’s secrets. Enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the gruelling, dangerous, and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers.
“That tale is a fantasy… Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers. Hunter-gatherers spent their time in stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease. The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or mor leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.
“Who was responsible? Neither, kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens rather than vice versa.
“Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within a few shot millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth… How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?
“Wheat did it my manipulating Home sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat. [my note: can you blame them if it was so abundant?] … It wasn’t easy. Wheat demanded a lot of them. Wheat didn’t like rocks and pebbles, so Sapiens broke their backs clearing fields. Wheat didn’t like sharing its space, water , and nutrients with other plants, so men and women laboured long days weeding under the scorching sun… Wheat was attacked by rabbits and locust swarms, so the farmers built fences and stood guard over the fields. Wheat was thirsty, so humans dug irrigation canals or lugged heavy buckets from the well to water it. Sapiens even collected animal feces to nourish the ground in which wheat grew.
“The bodies of Homo Sapiens had not evolved for such tasks… Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin “domus,” which means house. Who’s the one living in the house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.
I have left more from Harari in an appendix so as not to take up any more space here, but I will end this part with this conclusion you will see that he draws from the Agricultural Revolution followed by an observation he makes. First his conclusion: “This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”
And now this insightful observation: “Then why didn’t humans abandon farming when the plan backfired? Partly because it took generations for the small changes to accumulate and transform society and, by then, nobody remembered that they had ever lived differently.”
More to ponder:
“From Hunter-Gatherers to Civilization: What Was Lost in the Transition”
Maria Sanchez (9/11/16)
“Essentially, in the transition between the Paleolithic and Neolithic Eras, human society suffered a loss of social and economic equality and a general respect for all people, and replaced it with a system that required the separation of people based on superficial characteristics such as wealth, power, and gender. The interesting thing about the new class and gender distinctions that accompanied the beginning of the Neolithic Era is that for hundreds upon thousands of years, the human species had managed to exist without the use of class separations. Instead, it was the common practice of communities during the Paleolithic Era that there was no need to cause separation between persons because everyone made an equal contribution to the development and management of their small communities. Ironically, during the Neolithic Era, the rise of agriculture allowed the development of class divisions, as well as the establishment of governments that ruled harshly over society’s non-elites.6
“These changes in social structure that arose during the Neolithic Era as a result of agriculture still persist in our societies today; there are still deep and widespread class divisions; there is still gender inequality, and there is still a sense of excessive elite control over the working class.7 Overall, social changes that occurred during the transition between the Paleolithic and Neolithic Eras exhibited a loss in important practices that we have only recently attempted to restore.”
You write: “In any case, egalitarianism was better suited for small, homogeneous hunter-gatherer groups than it is for modern America.” I have never argued for an egalitarian society (which I think would be impossible to achieve). I have only said that we could strive to be more egalitarian than we are, something a number of other western nations seem to be much more interested in than we are. And, no, it wouldn’t have to come at the cost of reduced national wealth (although even if it did, it might well be worthwhile). There are countries as rich or richer than us which have a more egalitarian society (as measured by the Gini Index). You don’t have to give up wealth to have significantly more egalitarianism than we have. Among western European nations, those with greater GDP per capita and lower Gini Index numbers than us ($76,027 and 41.4) are Luxembourg ($140,694 and 35.4), Ireland ($124,596 and 31.4), Switzerland (84,658 and 33.1), and Norway ($77,808 and 27.6).
Here is the source for the GDP per capita figures: Google: The 20 Richest Countries in the World (yahoo.com)
Here is the source for the Gini Index figures: Google: “Gini Coefficient by country 2022 (world population review)”
Furthermore, all of those countries have lower poverty rates than we have: Google “Poverty rate by country (world population review)”
Appendix:
“The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children, Neither did the early farmer understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases. They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.”
“…the Agricultural Revolution didn’t need every band in a given region to join up. I took only one. Once one band settled down and started tilling… agriculture was irresistible. Since farmers created the conditions for swift demographic growth, farmers could usually overcome foragers by sheer weight of numbers. The foragers could either runaway, abandoning their hunting grounds to field and pasture, or take up the ploughshares themselves. Either way, the old life was doomed.”
“The Faustian bargain between humans and grains was not the only deal our species made. Another deal was struck concerning the fate of animals such as sheep, goats, pigs and chickens.”
Space and time limit me to pointing out the extent to which Harari goes on to write about the growing atrocious manner with which humans treated animals. From slicing off a chunk of a pig’s nose so that they could no longer sniff out food, thereby becoming dependent on their human owners for food to the modern tragic treatment of animals for our
“benefit,” it is hard to disagree with Harari that “This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution… In the following chapters we will see time and again how a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with individual [human] suffering.”
Think slavery for millennia in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Africa, the Americas, and pretty much throughout all the world. True, the western world (and other spots around the world) has changed dramatically for the better since the days of the Enlightenment, but does a couple centuries weigh more in the balance than the millennia of suffering that followed the Agricultural Revolution? Perhaps we will have to wait a few more millennia to answer the question of whether-or-not the Agricultural Revolution was worth the price paid. Maybe Occam could have conceived of a simpler solution to increase material well-being.
Phil,
OK, I’ll admit hunter-gatherers were probably pretty healthy, given all the exercise and lack of junk food. And they may have fared well with disease, given the low density of the population.
But they were very poor. Even the quotes you’ve provided admit hunter-gatherers had little wealth and an objectively low standard of living. You yourself admit you wouldn’t want to give up your modern advantages to go live as a hunter-gatherer. This makes sense by logic and reason.
World population used to be 100% hunter-gatherer. Today it’s zero. Why? People moved from hunter-gatherer to farming (and after that to industrialization). Why did people make these choices? Was everyone forced to stay put and farm (and later, go work in factories)? The Occam’s Razor answer is people chose new lifestyles because they perceived it to be in their own best interests.
We should be glad they did. The result is a modern world with less poverty than ever before. Sure, modernity has also ushered in problems. Nothing on earth is ever perfect. But the good outweighs the bad, which is precisely why you (and I’m sure most people) would rather not live as a hunter-gatherer.
In any case, egalitarianism was better suited for small, homogeneous hunter-gatherer groups than it is for modern America.
Now, taxes. I must complain about this sequence: First, you wrote many sentences complaining about the progressivity of the federal personal income tax (PIT). You spoke only of PIT, and your solution was to raise the top PIT rate. Second, I responded with facts showing PIT is already progressive. My response was PIT-only because your comments were PIT-only. Third, you then criticize me for focusing only on PIT! (I’m “cruel” for saying poor people don’t pay taxes, I have a “hang-up” with PIT, my numbers are “misleading” and “cherry-picked” because they’re only PIT.) Come on, be better.
You should believe my data. It’s from the Tax Foundation and the CBO. Here’s a link to the CBO report (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57404#_idTextAnchor070). I recommend you read it.
Exhibit 11 of that CBO report supports my claim that today’s federal tax code is no less progressive than in the 1980s. Specifically, the effective tax rate for the top 1% has stayed fairly flat over the past forty years, fluctuating around 30%, while the rate for the bottom quintile has dropped from 10-12% to zero. When the effective tax rate for the top 1% stays flat while the rate for the bottom 20% drops by 10-12 percentage points, I’d say that proves my point rather well. Exhibit 16 also proves my point a different way, using share of federal taxes.
By the way, the CBO report also shows effective tax rates for ALL federal taxes (not just PIT). That view yields a tax rate of 30% for the top 1% and zero for the bottom quintile (Exhibit 10). A zero tax rate is pretty good, right?
You need to understand effective tax rates versus tax bracket rates. For this topic of tax fairness, the change in tax brackets you mention is very much less relevant than you think. Looking at tax bracket rates is complicated because different rates apply at different income levels, and because the amounts and types of deductions and exemptions can and do fluctuate. Effective tax rates cut through all this noise and show the average overall tax rate paid.
Regarding the ITEP data, the results look suspect to me. However, I freely admit I cannot positively conclude they’re wrong. It would be difficult or impossible for anyone to do so. One, they don’t disclose their methodology. Two, the complexity of accurately measuring 50 states worth of state and local income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes… with all the different rates and exemptions… and by income level (!!) is truly monumental. Which is probably why ITEP’s approach is atypical. And probably why ITEP doesn’t report actual tax and income data, like the CBO. The ITEP data comes from model projections, not actual data! Their model calculates hypothetical taxes using a dataset of representative taxpayers. The model no doubt involves tons of assumptions by the model builders. It all adds up to a big question mark.
The question mark is further exacerbated by ITEP’s political leanings. They are clearly a very progressive outfit. Some of their comments suggest to me they lean more toward progressive point-making advocacy than meaningful economic policy. Of course, we’re all entitled to our opinions. But combining advocacy with a model based on assumptions certainly entails risk that advocacy will tilt the model in certain desired directions.
These are serious question marks for unbiased accuracy. You can trust ITEP if you want. I will not. I’ll trust the CBO data, published by a nonpartisan federal agency and based on actual data.
However, let’s assume ITEP’s effective tax rates of 20% for the bottom quintile and 34% for the top 1% are correct. Personally, I’m OK with that level of progressivity. The average person of the bottom quintile would pay $4,590 in taxes, while the average one percenter would pay $688,000.
It also brings up some interesting points:
1) Does it make sense to have federal progressivity do even more work to offset state and local regressivity? One, we’re talking about different levels of government. Two, the federal PIT is already “quite progressive” (ITEPs wording, so you can believe me). There are limits to how much redistribution work PIT can do.
2) Since local regressivity is really the problem ITEP is touting, how could that be addressed? Sales taxes already usually exempt food, and sometimes medicine. Rich people usually pay more property tax because they buy more expensive homes, and even second homes. It seems like an unworkable administrative hassle to levy sales taxes and property taxes based on income level. It seems unlikely to even happen because there are 50 different states and many thousands of municipalities, and because many people consider a flat tax rate to be fair.
3) If ITEP is right that ‘the poor’ don’t pay a much lower tax rate than ‘the rich,’ then it seems those who want to help the poor should immediately start pushing for lower taxes and smaller government!
I won’t hold my breath for #3, because government anti-poverty programs are also progressive. Both taxes and govt programs are progressive. The combined impact of taxes and means-tested transfers (as seen in the CBO report) gives the average person in the bottom quintile a net benefit of $15,200. His income before taxes and transfers is $22,500 and his income after taxes and transfers is $37,700, which is 68% higher. Meanwhile, the average one percenter pays a net cost of $606,000 (he pays taxes but receives no transfers). His income before taxes and transfers is $2.0 million and his income after taxes and transfers is $1.4 million, which is 30% lower. The net impact of awards a 68% benefit to the bottom quintile while levying a 30% cost on the top 1%. Is that really not enough progressivity for you?
John,
With regard to hunter-gatherer abject poverty, I have supplied you with multiple scholarly opinions which say that they were not living in abject poverty. Here is one more resource: Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the bestselling, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Most of what I quote from him I will put at the end as an appendix so as not to bog down the reading here. But I do want to quote here one sentence that is probably the highlight. Please note that throughout his book he uses the terms forager and hunter-gatherer interchangeably. In any event, here is that sentence: “The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies.”
How do you put a price on those three things? How do you put a price on the close familial relationships foragers enjoyed?
You continue to make your claims about the hunter-gatherers with no scholarly support. You ignore the fact that hunter-gatherers had life expectancies (30 – 40 years) that would not be significantly increased by the human race until the 1800s! And even then, only in the western world. In 1775 in colonial America the life expectancy was 36 years. If the foragers were living in abject poverty, how did they manage to live as long as humans in the 1700s? They would have died of starvation.
With regard to you section titled EQUALITY, I agree with everything you say.
With regard to taxes, you give me no reason to believe your data. What is the source of your information? Furthermore, you spend most of your time on federal income tax (which is progressive, although not as progressive as you think) and only briefly mention in the last paragraph the very non-progressive taxes (or regressive) taxes. These include sales tax, social security tax, medicare tax gasoline tax, and county and municipal taxes, to round out a list which certainly does not include everything.
Everything you say in the first three paragraphs misses the mark because you write only about federal income tax. That’s why you can write something so cruel as “Poor people basically don’t pay taxes.” Oh, they most certainly do. A poor person living in the same state as Bill Gates will pay the same sales tax for a loaf of bread, a pair of shoes, or a television set as will Bill. That same person will, of course, pay many other regressive taxes at the same rate as Bill (country and municipal taxes may differ depending on where the two live, but they will still be regressive)
The following data is from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP):
Total Federal, State & Local Effective Tax Rates
2020, by income group
(Note: if you look at the site – you will have to copy and paste the above title – you will see a bar graph. Since I can’t copy and paste that graph here, I will simply provide the all-important numbers)
The bottom quintile has an effective tax rate of 20.4 percent. The second lowest quintile has an effective tax rate of 22.4 percent. The middle quintile has an effective tax rate of 25.5 percent. The fourth quintile has an effective tax rate of 27.8 percent. ITEP divides the highest quintile into three groups. The top 15 percent pay an effective tax rate of 30.2 percent, the top four percent an effective tax rate of 31.0, and the top 1 percent an effective tax rate of 34.4 percent. That paints a vastly different picture than your misleading, cherry-picked, numbers. That a Bill Gates would pay an effective tax rate only 14 percentage points higher than someone in the bottom quintile is something that I think he himself would say is morally wrong.
And it gets worse. From ITEP’s own report: “First, ITEP is not yet able to split out different income groups within the richest 1 percent. If we did, we might find that effective tax rates are surprisingly low for the very, very rich given that much of their income is capital gains and stock dividends, which are taxed at lower rates. Research by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds that the very richest 400 taxpayers in the United States pay a lower effective tax rate than other groups.” Try to get your head around that last sentence.
Who Pays Taxes in America in 2020? – ITEP
Who did you say was getting the biggest breaks over the last 40 years or so? If you copy and paste the link below, you will see a revealing graph titled “Federal Income Tax Rates by Income Group (I believe it’s the second graph on the page).
Just How Progressive Is the U.S. Tax Code? (brookings.edu)
Unfortunately, the graph above doesn’t help us with breaking down the 0-80 percent group. But you can find that information easily enough and it completely busts your misconception that federal income tax brackets have been better for the poor than for the wealthy over the last 40 years. Use the following link:
Historical Income Tax Rates and Brackets, 1862-2021 | Tax Foundation
In the graph below you can see how the wide gap between top and bottom brackets 40 years ago has shrunk drastically. I don’t know how you can possibly say that the last forty years have seen increasing progressivity. Your evidence? The graph only takes us to 2015, but the situation since then has, if anything, only gotten even better for the wealthy. OK, again I have to work around the lack of this site to permit graphs (ironic, considering how many of them Dan prints). You will have to copy and paste the following into your browser:
Historical Income Tax Rates CHART – Bing – Bing images
You’ll then have to click on “Historic Tax Rates Chart” at the top. Then “See More.” The chart you’re looking for will be the fourth one over on the second row.
Perhaps you remember the famous story of Warren Buffet saying that his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he did (and that’s only taking into account federal taxes). In 23013, after a tax increase, Buffer updated his story:
“Warren Buffett says even though he and other top earners are paying higher taxes this year, he thinks he’s still paying a lower rate than his secretary.
“In 2013, capital gains for those earning more than $400,000 ($450,000 for couples) will be taxed at 20%, up from 15%. And high-income households also will pay an additional 3.8% in Medicare taxes on their investment income for the first time. The top marginal tax rate also rose for the wealthiest wage earners, but since Buffett’s income is from investment gains, not wages, that’s not a factor.
“But part of the problem is that his secretary’s tax bill also went up since a partial payroll tax holiday ended, raising what she pays for social security by 2 percentage points.
“’I’ll be a fair amount higher, 8 or 9 points higher,’” Buffett said of his own tax rate in an appearance on CNBC Monday.
“’But the differential between me and the rest of the office, not just my secretary but the rest of the office, was greater than that. It’ll be closer, but I’ll probably be the lowest paying taxpayer in the office.’”
Buffett says he’s still paying lower tax rate than his secretary (cnn.com)
As for comparing the progressive nature of U.S. taxes to other OECD nations, you have to remember that most of the poor in this country aren’t paying federal income tax (as you correctly pointed out), but they are paying a whole lot of other taxes as described above. At the federal level the Europeans look less progressive (but remember that federal income tax in the U.S. only accounts for about a quarter of all taxes collected at all levels of government), but that lack of progressivity is paying for free quality schools, health care, college education, good mass transit, roughly six weeks of paid vacation and very generous maternity and paternity leave, among other perks. They seem to like it. Even with the VAT.
You write: “The top 10% of Americans pay 71% of all federal income taxes. If this isn’t enough progressivity for you, then what is???” Even assuming your numbers are accurate, you have to get off your hang-up with federal income tax. It’s a relatively small portion of all taxes paid in this country. As I have shown above, when all taxes are taken into account, the poor really get a raw deal.
With regard to your last paragraph, I don’t believe that liberty and care for the less fortunate are unrelated. But if you think that “small government is good for poor people,” I suggest you read the history of how the poor were treated when our government was small. Read about the poorhouses.
Many times people are poor because they have been trampled on by the powerful. Small government will be of no help to them. They need a government strong enough to level the playing field (not necessarily produce equal outcomes).
The OECD nations with which we are usually compared are capitalist nations with stronger social safety nets than we have. Maybe that’s why most of them are happier countries than ours. Liberty and care for the poor are not mutually exclusive. I do believe you said something very much like that.
Appendix:
“Members of a band knew each other very intimately, and were surrounded throughout their lives by friends and relatives. Loneliness and privacy were rare. Neighboring bands probably competed for resources and even fought each other, but they also had friendly contacts. They exchanged members, hunted together, traded rare luxuries, celebrated religious festivals and joined forces against foreigners.”
“… Trade was mostly limited to prestige items such as shells, amber and pigment.
“… the average forager had, wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants… at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.
“There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since foraging.
“…varied and constant use of their bodies made them as fit as marathon runners. They had physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of practicing yoga or t’ai chi.
“… but on the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, labourers and office clerks who followed in their footsteps.
“They hunt only one day out of three, and gathering takes up just three to six hours daily… it may well be that ancient hunter-gatherers living in zones more fertile than the Klahari spent even less time obtaining food and raw materials. On top of that, foragers enjoyed a lighter load of household chores.
“The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do…. Thirty thousand years ago, a Chinese forager might leave camp with her companions at, say, eight in the morning. They’d roam the nearby forests and meadows, gathering mushrooms, digging up edible roots, catching frogs and occasionally running away from tigers. By early afternoon, they were back at camp to make lunch.
“In most places and at most times, foraging provided ideal nutrition [he later notes that they ate dozens of different foodstuffs]… Evidence from fossilized skeletons indicates that ancient foragers were less likely to suffer from starvation or malnutrition, and were generally taller and healthier than their peasant descendants.
“Ancient foragers also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles, and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution.
“The wholesome and varied diet, the relatively short working week, and the rarity of infectious diseases have led many experts to define pre-agricultural forager societies as ‘the original affluent societies.’”
Phil,
HUNTER-GATHERER POVERTY: No, I still totally believe hunter-gatherers lived in extreme poverty. Because it’s true. Really, it’s not even controversial. Prior to 1700, 99% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, and for hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago, it was probably 100%. Today, it’s only 9%. (Extreme poverty according to the World Bank definition, about $2 per day per person.)
You keep talking about how people ‘feel’ about poverty. Paraphrased, “Hunter-gatherers weren’t poor because they didn’t desire much.” Well, I’m sure life was more pleasant for those hunter-gatherers who were happy with their poverty, but that in no way changes the objective fact they were poor. When it comes to objectively evaluating wealth or poverty, how people feel about it is irrelevant. A dirt-poor street beggar remains poor even if he thinks he’s rich. Jeff Bezos remains rich even if he thinks he’s poor.
EQUALITY: Of course, I’m fine with some definitions of equality. We all have equal human value. We all have equal rights before the law. We should all try to treat each other fairly. The problem for me is too many leftists have moved away from that view to push ‘equality of outcomes’ and ‘social justice.’ But equality of outcomes is impossible, and social justice necessarily involves an attack on the fair and equal treatment of individuals.
EQUALITY & TAXES: Phil, if you truly believe what you say, that we should not seek to achieve equality of outcomes, then you should be satisfied with the progressiveness of the existing US tax code. For 2019, the top 1% earned 20% of US income, yet paid 39% of federal taxes. The bottom 50% earned 11.5% of US income, yet paid only 3% of federal taxes. The top 1% paid an effective tax rate (taxes divided by income) of 25.6%, while the bottom half paid only 3.5%.
Poor people basically don’t pay taxes. Depending on the year, 40-45% of Americans don’t pay any federal income tax. In fact, the bottom two quintiles (the bottom 40%) have ‘negative’ taxes, meaning Uncle Sam pays them. Your person with $8,000 income would pay zero taxes because the standard deduction is $25,900 for married and $12,950 for singles.
To bust another misconception you have, the tax code today is not less progressive than in the 1980s, and the poor of today get a better deal. During the past forty years, the bottom four income quintiles experienced reductions in their effective tax rate (all federal taxes), and the drop was most pronounced for the lowest quintile. But the effective tax rate for the top 1% and 10% was basically flat over the same period.
US taxes are already more progressive than Europe’s, and the US redistributes more to the bottom 50%. The top 10% of Americans pay 71% of all federal income taxes. If this isn’t enough progressivity for you, then what is??? There are limits to how progressive taxes can get before they become harmful – for everyone.
Including federal state and local income taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc, the top 1% pay 45% to 55% of their income as taxes, depending on location. Personally, I don’t think anyone should pay more than 50%. If more than half your income is taxed away, you are working more for government than for yourself and your family!
LIBERTY AND CARE FOR THE LESS FORTUNATE: You talk about these as if they are two completely unrelated things. That’s not the way I see it. If you think long-term, liberty is the best way to help the less fortunate! Sure, government redistribution has a role to play, but it is a subordinate role to economic growth and prosperity. Government can only redistribute wealth created by the private sector. The wealth creation must come first. And that means ensuring free enterprise isn’t stifled by too much government. In the long run, small government is good for poor people.
Hi John,
With regard to the Pilgrims, let me first note that Dan uses a video in which John Stossel simply gets his facts wrong. He says the first Thanksgiving happened after the Pilgrims gave up on communal living, because that had never worked. The truth is, it actually did work the first year the Pilgrims were in the new world. So they had their Thanksgiving Celebration in October of 1621, nearly a year after they had arrived in November of 1620. And, contrary to Stossel therefore, before they changed to private ownership of the land There were only about 50 of them. That low number probably had something to do with why they succeeded. But by 1623 they had more than tripled in population to 180. These were mostly adults, so the growth was not the result of families having children. It was the result of new and, and often quarrelling, groups coming to the colony from Europe. It is easy to understand why communal living failed (and I think communal living would fail with numbers much larger, anyway). Here it is from an expert:
The competing versions of the story note Bradford’s writings about “confusion and discontent” and accusations of “laziness” among the colonists. But Mr. Pickering [a historian of early America and the deputy director of Plimoth Plantation, a museum devoted to keeping the Pilgrims’ story alive] said this grumbling had more to do with the fact that the Plymouth colony was bringing together settlers from all over England, at a time when most people never moved more than 10 miles from home. They spoke different dialects and had different methods of farming, and looked upon each other with great wariness.
But that has nothing to do with the ability of Native Americans to live communally. Their situation was completely different. Growth wasn’t the result of new and different and quarrelling individuals joining, it was the result of families having children.
I don’t think that communal living can work when you get too much beyond 150 (I pick that number not arbitrarily, but because that is the number of people science writer Matt Ridley says was the number of people humans seemed to evolve to be comfortable with). Aristotle said, “When something is owned by everyone, no one owns it.” Of course, Aristotle lived in much larger communities than 150. I’m all for capitalism. It has enriched the world. I’m also for telling the truth.
Dan writes near the beginning of his post that communalism doesn’t work even in small communities. But that is so vague. What does he mean by small?
And then he writes:
“In a nutshell, redistributionism does not work. This is why the original Plymouth Colony was failing. And it’s why places such as Cuba today are so miserably poor.
“This is a lesson to keep in mind when people on the left or right try to tell you that bigger government is a good idea.”
There are so many fallacies here. One, he’s wrong about his Pilgrim history. Two, it’s absurd to compare the Plymouth Colony to Cuba (for reasons of size, if nothing else). Three, the absolute statement “redistributionism does not work” implies that one can’t expect the wealthy to do anything at all for the poor. I don’t know of any country that doesn’t have some safety net, even if only a meager one. And as soon as you take even a dollar from Bill Gates to help the poor you have redistributed. I doubt if even Dan is in favor of a nation in which the poor get zero help. It’s the amount of redistributionism that is the issue. His absolute statement, “redistributionism does not work” is wrong for the reason most absolute statements about the human condition are wrong. And four, his last sentence is a complete non sequitur. You could increase the size of government without increasing redistribution. There is no necessary relationship between the two. One could have a bigger government because you need a bigger military, or because you want more IRS agents to make sure that people aren’t cheating on their taxes, or because you want to increase the number of police officers in order to reduce crime, or for any of a number of reasons that have nothing to do with further redistribution.
Enuf for now. I’ll pick up your other points as time permits.
Hi John,
Hallelujah! You have at least stopped pushing the idea that hunter-gatherers lived in abject poverty. 🙂
We don’t have to live like hunter-gatherers to strive for some degree of egalitarianism. I’ve never claimed that everything had to be perfectly equal. I actually believe that would be an impossible thing to do. Do you know what egalitarianism really means? Here is a short intro to a long discussion on the topic from the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Egalitarianism is a trend of thought in political philosophy. An egalitarian favors equality of some sort: People should get the same, or be treated the same, or be treated as equals, in some respect. An alternative view expands on this last-mentioned option: People should be treated as equals, should treat one another as equals, should relate as equals, or enjoy an equality of social status of some sort. Egalitarian doctrines tend to rest on a background idea that all human persons are equal in fundamental worth or moral status. So far as the Western European and Anglo-American philosophical tradition is concerned, one significant source of this thought is the Christian notion that God loves all human souls equally. Egalitarianism is a protean doctrine, because there are several different types of equality, or ways in which people might be treated the same, or might relate as equals, that might be thought desirable. In modern democratic societies, the term “egalitarian” is often used to refer to a position that favors, for any of a wide array of reasons, a greater degree of equality of income and wealth across persons than currently exists.”
Clearly there is no single “idea” of egalitarianism. I think we can agree on most of the above. Egalitarianism does not necessarily mean equality of outcomes, although some people think it should mean that. I don’t. I agree with the philosopher Harry Frankfurt that the moral imperative is sufficiency, not equality. Better a society in which everyone has all that is needed for a life of quality, even if many have 100 times that amount, than a society in which all are equal but have a substandard quality of life.
But even Frankfurt admits that sometimes achieving sufficiency for all may require some move toward equality. The only way to do that in this day, that I know of, is through the tax code. And that will mean taxing the upper one percent, even the upper ten percent more than we currently do. Now I’m not talking about the kind of confiscatory tax rates that were around 40 years ago when the upper bracket nearly reached, or did reach, 90 percent. That was absurd. But also absurd is the current situation. Take a couple making $450,000. They are well off, but not super rich. Their tax bracket is 35 percent. Now take a couple making ten million, or one hundred million, or more, a year. They are all super rich. And what is their tax bracket? 37 percent. Just two percentage points higher than those making vastly less. We don’t need to jack it up considerably, but somewhere in the low 40s would be appropriate in my opinion. And here’s another absurdity that needs to be corrected. If you make $80,000 (barely middle class, I guess), you are in the 12 percent bracket. But if you make $8,000 (you are very poor) you are in the 10 percent bracket. Just two percentage points lower. Try to wrap your head around that one. There was a long stretch of years in the 1970s and 80s when the bottom bracket was zero. Sadly, that died sometime in the 80s. There is much about our tax code that is unfair. All the above figures are for a married couple filing jointly, but what I see as inequities carry across the other filing status categories.
What is the point of all this? Egalitarianism is hardwired into our brains! It is the result of our evolution as social animals. It doesn’t mean we have to live today as hunter-gatherers. But let’s have a little appreciation for what they taught us (or passed on to us genetically). Even if we don’t get the bracket numbers right (in my opinion), the fact is that we do as a nation buy into the ancient wisdom that “to whom much is given, much will be required.” That’s an example of egalitarianism being hardwired into our brains. It’s why federal and state income taxes are progressive in nature.
And maybe we can better understand now why the nations that always are at the top of the World Happiness Index are not libertarian to any significant degree. They are nations that are willing to pay taxes so that as few people as possible will live in want. I don’t imagine that as flawed human beings we will ever be rid of all poverty. But it’s a goal to strive for just as much as civil rights was a goal to strive for.
Liberty is a worthy pursuit. Libertarians are needed to remind us of that. But care for the less fortunate is also a pillar of morality. Liberals and conservatives are needed to remind us of that. I believe I already recommended in another post Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind, in which he talks about five pillars of morality and how libertarians, conservatives and liberals tend to cluster around certain ones.
Time and space will require that I respond to your other points later.
Hi Phil. I wasn’t going to reply anymore regarding the Pilgrim Post, but here’s some more, for some unknown reason.
I agree our brains are wired toward egalitarianism due to many millennia of years of hunter-gatherer lifestyle. My point is egalitarianism is better suited to the ancient hunter-gatherer world than it is to the modern western world, for reasons I’ve already stated. Maybe our brains need to evolve to changing circumstances.
I don’t care exactly why the Pilgrims tried communal farming, or which exact year they abandoned it, or whether they abandoned it before or after they gave thanks. The point is they tried communal farming, then they abandoned it. You say you don’t know why. Well, here’s what Governor Bradford wrote in his journal:
“… they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” The solution was to stop farming the land communally and instead “assign to every family a parcel of land… This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted… The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.” The previous communal farming “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.” People grew unhappy about toiling for the benefit of other people’s families, doing much more labor than others while getting the same amount of food and clothing. (Full text at https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s1.html)
In other words, Pilgrim communal farming failed for the same general reasons 200 other communes also failed in the US. For the same reasons why the economies of Venezuela, Argentina, and Cuba have stagnated. For the same reasons why North Korea’s economy underperforms South Korea. Etc, etc. You should know the answer. You just don’t like it.
It’s mostly common sense. Will Avg Joe work harder to support other people or to support himself and his family? Will he work harder when taxes take away 70% of his income or 20%? Will he be more likely to over-consume resources when other people are paying or when he is paying? Will he scrutinize the price of goods more when other people are paying or when he is paying?
Yes, collectivism can possibly work in some communities. When the community is so small everyone knows each other. When people love or respect the other people enough to work hard for them. When the population is homogeneous and shares similar values. This might describe hunter-gatherer groups. But modern America? Not even close.
OK, a couple other points. Your Franklin example of kidnaped settlers is less relevant than you think.
First, at the time of European settlers, many Native Americans were not even hunter-gatherers! Many were farmers. Remember Squanto teaching colonists how to plant corn? Furthermore, many of them traded with Europeans to obtain guns, cloth, etc. People who farm and trade for ‘modern’ goods are NOT the ancient hunter-gatherers you originally referenced.
Second, your point falls apart if we widen our gaze beyond a relative handful of colonists who chose to remain with Native Americans. Think about the whole world. If the hunter-gatherer life was so great, why has it disappeared? Humans didn’t have to graduate to agriculture 10,000 years ago. Surely they adopted agriculture because they considered it superior to hunting-gathering.
Third, it’s possible the colonists who chose to remain with Native Americans made that decision for personal reasons completely unrelated to material standard of living. Maybe they were escaping undesirable domestic situations. Maybe they found love. Maybe they preferred looser clothing. Or looser morals about sex. Etc, etc.
It was not an historical gaffe when I said inequality began in earnest after 1800. Yes, there was inequality in ancient Egypt, the Roman empire, etc. Some inequality has existed ever since the hunter-gatherer era. They had basically zero inequality because you can’t have inequality if no one has wealth.
Farming and livestock domestication created more wealth. Not much by our modern standards, but more than hunter-gatherer. Of course, better farmers created more wealth than bad farmers, so inequality grew. With greater wealth came greater incentive for some people to declare themselves ‘elites’ so they could seize the wealth of others. Political elites emerged, adding more inequality. Less inequality than our modern world, but more than hunter-gatherer.
So yes, some people became more unequal in the millennia following the hunter-gatherer era. But the inequality was different than what we see today. The vast bulk of the population was still quite poor. Here are some hypothetical income distributions of the different eras to help you visualize:
Hunter-gatherer: 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,2
Agriculture pre-1700: 2,2,2,2,2,2,2,3,4,10
Modern USA: 16,32,56,76,90,130,150,200,300,500
These are not exact amounts, but illustrative to show the relationships. I’ll take the modern USA inequality. Even Americans who aren’t Jeff Bezos can still have enough food, a decent place to live, running water, electricity, etc.
Finally, poverty levels. The only data that will show the US as having more poverty than so many other countries is some definition of relative poverty. For example, the % of the population with incomes below half the median income. That does not measure true poverty. Under that definition, the modern US might have more ‘poverty’ than the agricultural pre-1700 world or the hunter-gatherer world. Or if we look far enough into the future, a future person with the lifestyle of today’s Jeff Bezos would be considered ‘poor.’ No.
John,
Did you miss this? I’ll put it at the beginning this time since it was at the end last time: What’s really fascinating, using the website you supplied, is that the infant mortality rate among ancient hunter-gatherers was virtually identical to rates for the better-off nations as recently as 200-250 years ago. That’s what should have caught your eye. Maybe you need to rethink some of your assumptions about hunter-gatherers. In any event, the rest of this post will give you ample opportunity to do so. I might add also that 30,000 years ago life expectancy numbers among hunter-gatherers significantly increased (past the age of 30 or so). This is the same life expectancy one would have found in ancient Greece and Rome just a couple thousand years ago. In fact, from about 1500 until the year 1800, life expectancy throughout Europe hovered between 30 and 40 years of age.
Life Span and Life Expectancy From Prehistory to Today (verywellhealth.com)
You didn’t like my countering Dan’s post with observations about hunter-gatherers? It seemed appropriate to me since we have evolved as social animals and our brains are in part hard wired by the egalitarian practices over hundreds of thousands of years by our predecessors. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. So, let’s go back to Dan’s original post with the video of the always smug John Stossel. What the post (and video) clearly misses is that the Pilgrims arrived in November of 1620 and apparently did quite well (there were only about 50 of them), because the first Thanksgiving was nearly a year later, October of 1621. And they did well that first year as a communal community (and continued to do well as the system was not dropped until 1623, and not because people were starving – see below from the deputy director of a about the Pilgrims). So Stossel’s “socialism” worked pretty well. Before going any further, can we stop this idiotic conflation of modern “socialism” with 1620 communal living that both Dan and Stossel engage in? They are far from being the same thing. And Dan writes something really off the mark almost at the start: “The moral of the story is that societies based on collectivism do not succeed. People don’t work hard when the rewards of their labor go to others. Even in small communities, that approach does not work.” But even you admitted that it can work in small communities. And many of the Native American communities were much larger than the roughly 50 people who finally left the Mayflower to take their chances in the new world.
Why did the Pilgrims eventually give up on communal living? I don’t know. For such a small group as they were, there was no reason in principle why it couldn’t work. We do know, however, that there were groups among those few dozen Pilgrims who distrusted each other. Therein may lie the answer. The Native Americans, in larger numbers, seemed to have managed quite well with such a communal system for a long time. And they would have continued to do quite well had it not been for the atrocities they fell victim to at the hands of European forces. I don’t live with any misconceptions about Native Americans being saintly figures (the “noble savage” myth). I know they warred with each other and could, at times, be quite brutal. But there is no denying that communal living worked well for them (even for those who were relatively sedentary) and so I can understand why Dan and Stossel don’t trouble themselves to deal with that reality.
From Joshua Keating in Slate (11-25-14): “The People’s Republic of Plymouth: the strange and persistent right-wing myth that Thanksgiving celebrates the pilgrim’s triumph over socialism.”
“Communal farming arrangements were common in the pilgrims’ day. Many of the towns they came from in England were run according to the “open-field” system, in which the land holdings of a manor are divided into strips to be harvested by tenant farmers. As Nick Bunker writes in 2010’s Making Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World, “Open field farming was not some kind of communism. All the villagers were tenants of the landlord.”
“There was no local baron in Plymouth, but it was a commercial project as much as a religious one, and the colonists still had to answer to their investors back in England. It was this, not socialist ideals, that accounted for the common course. Bunker writes, “Far from being a commune, the Mayflower was a common stock: the very words employed in the contract. All the land in the Plymouth Colony, its houses, its tools, and its trading profits (if they appeared) were to belong to a joint-stock company owned by the shareholders as a whole.”
And from the New York Times (Nov. 20, 2010): Kate Zernike, “The Pilgrims were socialists…?”
Historians say that the settlers in Plymouth, and their supporters in England, did indeed agree to hold their property in common — William Bradford, the governor, referred to it in his writings as the “common course.” But the plan was in the interest of realizing a profit sooner, and was only intended for the short term; historians say the Pilgrims were more like shareholders in an early corporation than subjects of socialism.
“It was directed ultimately to private profit,” said Richard Pickering, a historian of early America and the deputy director of Plimoth Plantation, a museum devoted to keeping the Pilgrims’ story alive.
The arrangement did not produce famine. If it had, Bradford would not have declared the three days of sport and feasting in 1621 that became known as the first Thanksgiving. “The celebration would never have happened if the harvest was going to be less than enough to get them by,” Mr. Pickering said. “They would have saved it and rationed it to get by.”
The competing versions of the story note Bradford’s writings about “confusion and discontent” and accusations of “laziness” among the colonists. But Mr. Pickering said this grumbling had more to do with the fact that the Plymouth colony was bringing together settlers from all over England, at a time when most people never moved more than 10 miles from home. They spoke different dialects and had different methods of farming, and looked upon each other with great wariness.
“One man’s laziness is another man’s industry, based on the agricultural methods they’ve learned as young people,” he said. Bradford did get rid of the common course — but it was in 1623, after the first Thanksgiving, and not because the system wasn’t working. The Pilgrims just didn’t like it. In the accounts of colonists, Mr. Pickering said, “there was griping and groaning.”
The experience of whites won over by Native American ways, and Native Americans failing to be won over by whites (this was not the concern of only Benjamin Franklin), must be a bit embarrassing to your cause. You had no meaningful response. To say that there wasn’t much difference between Philadelphia in Franklin’s time and manner of living of Native Americans was a non-starter. I pointed out a number of significant differences. You might want to take a look at Jim Fergus’s book, One Thousand White Women. These are women who traveled west to marry among the Native Americans and “discovered that there is beauty, value, and promise in Native American life.” And this story takes place 100 years after Franklin (i.e. the late 1800s). Are you going to tell me there were little differences then?
You wrote earlier, “When economic growth started to pull some people out of poverty, starting in earnest around 1800, by definition some people became better off than others. Thus inequality entered the scene.”
I responded, “Whoa… I beg to differ. Inequality did not enter the scene around 1800. There was inequality in the Egyptian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, etc., etc. etc.”
You have nothing to say about your historical gaffe?
You write: “I’m sorry, but I think it’s foolish to say it’s a good idea for us to learn egalitarianism from ancient hunter-gatherers.” Well, I’m sorry, but that cat’s out of the bag. We don’t have to learn egalitarianism from ancient hunter-gatherers, because they made it easy for us: they hard-wired it into our brains. You were born with it. Perhaps you remember this from my first post: “’Suppressing our primate ancestors’ dominance hierarchies by enforcing these egalitarian norms was a central adaptation of human evolution,’ argues social anthropologist Christopher Boehm. ‘We have evolved as social animals and a part of that is the innate tendency toward sharing.’”
Of course, some are more open than others to the idea of sharing, but if egalitarianism is only the practice of some ancient humans, then why is it such a hot topic today? And how do you explain the astonishingly equal Gini coefficients between Denmark, lowest in the world, or at least in the developed world, at the time of the article and that of hunter-gatherer communities as seen in the last paragraph of the material from the journal Current Anthropology at the end of this post?
There is a woman with a PhD in anthropology in my church who taught at the university level for decades. I asked her a few days ago if the ancient hunter-gatherers lived in abject poverty. Without a moment’s hesitation she said “No.” But you don’t have to take her word for it. Here is the abstract from an article by an anthropologist at the University of Chicago:
From the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information
“The Original Affluent Society”
Author: Marshall Sahlins, University of Chicago, June 1, 1974
Abstract
Wants may be easily satisfied either by producing much or desiring little. The Galbraithean way states that human wants are great, but their means are limited. The gap can be narrowed by industrial productivity. Hunters and gatherers have an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective and given their adequate means of production, all human material wants can be easily satisfied. The world’s primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Hunter-gatherers created the original affluent society. The dismal concept of modern economics-the market-industrial system that institutes scarcity-is contrasted with the in-fact affluence of primitive hunting-gathering societies. (3 photos)
And following up from Wikipedia:
The basis of Sahlins’ argument is that hunter-gatherer societies are able to achieve affluence by desiring little and meeting those needs/desires with what is available to them. This he calls the “Zen road to affluence, which states that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate” (Sahlins, Original). This he compares to the western way towards affluence, which he terms as the “Galbraithean way” where “man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited…” and “the gap between means and ends can eventually be narrowed by industrial productivity”.[3]
Thus Sahlins argues that hunter-gatherer and western societies take separate roads to affluence, the former by desiring little, the latter by producing much. Through this comparison Sahlins also stresses that hunter-gatherer societies cannot be examined through an ethnocentric framework when measuring their affluence. For example, one cannot apply the general principles of economics (principles which reflect western values and emphasize surplus) to hunter-gatherers nor should one believe that the Neolithic Revolution brought unquestioned progress.”
And an abstract from an article in The National Library of Medicine:
Hunter-gatherers have less famine than agriculturalists
J Colette Berbesque 1, Frank W Marlowe, Peter Shaw, Peter Thompson
Abstract
The idea that hunter-gatherer societies experience more frequent famine than societies with other modes of subsistence is pervasive in the literature on human evolution. This idea underpins, for example, the ‘thrifty genotype hypothesis’. This hypothesis proposes that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were adapted to frequent famines, and that these once adaptive ‘thrifty genotypes’ are now responsible for the current obesity epidemic. The suggestion that hunter-gatherers are more prone to famine also underlies the widespread assumption that these societies live in marginal habitats. Despite the ubiquity of references to ‘feast and famine’ in the literature describing our hunter-gatherer ancestors, it has rarely been tested whether hunter-gatherers suffer from more famine than other societies. Here, we analyse famine frequency and severity in a large cross-cultural database, in order to explore relationships between subsistence and famine risk. This is the first study to report that, if we control for habitat quality, hunter-gatherers actually had significantly less–not more–famine than other subsistence modes. This finding challenges some of the assumptions underlying for models of the evolution of the human diet, as well as our understanding of the recent epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus.
Contrary to what you imply, I did not try to assess the standard of living of hunter gatherers based solely by imaging what they would say about it were we able to ask them. I gave you plenty of evidence of advances they made in material well-being (a variety of tools, jewelry, huts made of stone, wood and bone, intricate knowledge of plant life, control of fire, etc.). By the way, why would you build a hut if you weren’t planning to stick around for a while? I shared with you the data about their greater amount of leisure time. You missed the entire point of my suggesting that you ought to be careful about judging them lest you be judged by people tens of thousands of years from now. I wrote that to point out the fallacy of thinking that because they didn’t have our standard of living, they lived lives of abject poverty. This fallacy of thinking goes by the name “presentism.” I made the argument myself that that hunter gatherers didn’t live lives of abject poverty and now I have supplied you above, and will supply you below, with arguments from experts making the same point.
Economics will always be tied to morality. Otherwise, we could justify using people in any way we wanted to if it proved to be economically profitable. The father of economics and the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, was first and foremost a moral philosopher. While he is most famous for The Wealth of Nations, the book he wrote first and was most proud of was The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
For whatever reason, the nations of Western Europe along with such countries as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have seen that connection more clearly than Americans have. There is no reason to think that the debt we owe to the egalitarian ideas of the hunter-gatherers has been grasped equally by all. The nations just mentioned are all capitalistic (which I think is a good thing and said so from my very first post) but they understand their social obligation to the less fortunate. They are capitalistic nations with strong (not perfect) safety nets. We are a capitalistic nation with less strengthy safety nets and less of a national fervor to do something about it.
It is rather sad, I think, that neither Dan nor John Stossel would likely be bothered by the latest Word Population Review figures showing that the U.S. (one of the three or four wealthiest nations in the world depending on how you are measuring it) has a higher poverty rate than developed nations such as Luxembourg, Sweden, Portugal, Israel, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Switzerland, Japan, Poland, Germany, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Austria, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Australia, Hungary, Finland, Canada, Czech Republic, and Iceland. Of course, it will take higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans (many of whom say that is exactly what should be done) to reduce poverty rates, sacrifices our fellow developed nations seem more willing to make than we do. These other countries seem to have better absorbed the ancient wisdom, “To whom much is given, much is required.” Do I think dollars alone will be sufficient to significantly lower poverty” No. But it won’t happen without them.
According to the OECD, our poverty rate is 30th (highest) among the 41 countries they surveyed.
Inequality – Poverty rate – OECD Data
Maybe these numbers help us to understand why so many of the Western European nations along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand rank above us year-in and year-out in the World Happiness Index. Perhaps they also help to explain why one of the three or four wealthiest countries on earth ranks 46th in life expectancy (leaving us behind even some second world countries).
Below are the excerpts from the Current Anthropology article mentioned above.
Current Anthropology Volume 51, Number 1, February 2010 19 Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and Inequality in Premodern Societies Wealth Transmission and Inequality among Hunter-Gatherers by Eric Alden Smith, Kim Hill, Frank W. Marlowe, David Nolin, Polly Wiessner, Michael Gurven, Samuel Bowles, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Tom Hertz, and Adrian Bell
“As detailed in Bowles, Smith, and Borgerhoff Mulder (2010, in this issue; see also Borgerhoff Mulder et al. 2009), we define wealth as any attribute of an individual that contributes to a flow of valued goods or services. This broad definition is subdivided into “wealth classes” (embodied, material, and relational wealth), each encompassing various “wealth types” (e.g., hunting success, household goods, and sharing partnerships), as detailed below.
“Most adults in hunter-gatherer societies actively contribute to food production and processing as well as tool manufacture and maintenance. In addition, child care and provisioning are generally parental duties. Most of these forms of labor require considerable strength and stamina, visual acuity, and other aspects of good health. As a result, we expect somatic wealth to be of prime importance to success and well-being. On the other hand, those who suffer periodically from suboptimal somatic endowments can usually rely on aid from others in the form of food sharing, assistance with child care, and protection in disputes.
“In contrast, two populations are very sedentary and (for foragers) of high density: Lamalerans (coastal sea hunters) and Meriam (coastal fisherhorticulturalists), each inhabiting one large village. It is noteworthy that the two high-density populations are characterized by high reliance on marine resources, a pattern found in larger samples of forager populations (tables 6-2, 6-4 in Kelly 1995; figs. 4, 5 in Marlowe 2005). However, even the Lamalerans and Meriam display relatively low levels of socioeconomic inequality, compared to some other sedentary coastal foragers, such as Northwest Coast Indians, Chumash, or Calusa. Ache Ethnographic background. The Northern Ache lived as isolated hunter-gatherers in the tropical forests of eastern Paraguay until peaceful contacts with outsiders in the 1970s. At first contact the population contained 557 individuals, scattered in a dozen or more residential bands of flexible composition roaming a region of about 20,000 km2 . The traditional economy was based on hunting medium-sized mammals (about 80% of all calories came from armadillos, paca, white-lipped peccaries, capuchin monkeys, and tapir) with bow and arrow, extracting palm starch and hearts (about 10% of all calories), and collecting larvae, honey, and fruits (about 10% of all calories). Residential bands were highly cooperative, with individuals regularly adopting complementary roles in food acquisition through the day (Hill 2002) and sharing all game and a good portion of other foods among most band members (Kaplan and Hill 1985). Band members also regularly cared for each other’s children and freely exchanged or provided a variety of goods and services. Only mate acquisition was markedly competitive rather than cooperative.
“Men usually hunt alone. Once an animal is hit, the hunter may return to camp and get other men to help him track the wounded animal. When men bring honey back to camp, it is often shared with those present, but unlike larger game, it can sometimes be concealed and directed to a man’s household (Marlowe 2003). When men bring medium-sized and large game into camp, it is shared widely across households (Hawkes, O’Connell, and Jones 2001a; Woodburn 1998), but even small game and honey are often shared widely. Despite the widespread sharing, on average the portion of a hunter’s catch retained in his household is larger than the share given to each other household (B. M. Wood and F. W. Marlowe, unpublished manuscript). Hadza have no land or property inheritance or accumulated material wealth. Even though the group is extremely egalitarian, men who are the best hunters have slightly more prestige as well as more surviving offspring (Hawkes, O’Connell, and Jones 2001a, 2001b; Marlowe 1999, 2003). They achieve the latter not by having more wives over time but by having a higher chance of marrying young women upon divorce (Marlowe 2000). Hadza women usually acquire a great deal of food well into their seventies
“Ethnographic background. The Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert are one of the most thoroughly egalitarian societies known in the ethnographic record, enforcing both “equality of opportunity” as young people start out in life and “equality of outcome” throughout the life cycle. Those who seek to possess more material goods, food, or status are leveled by other group members (Lee 1979; Wiessner 2005)
“Spatial and temporal variation in resources, including the availability of water, was high. To buffer themselves from environmental and social risks, the Ju/’hoansi engaged in a system of exchange called hxaro, a delayed exchange of gifts indicating an underlying relationship of commitment to mutual support in times of need.
“Success in turtle hunting plays an important role in status differences among Meriam men. Hunting of green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) occurs throughout the year but particularly during the nonnesting season (May–September). Hunting is a cooperative, entirely male pursuit with distinct roles: younger men serve as crew members or “jumpers” (arpeir le) under the direction of the hunt leaders (ariemer le), who are generally older, with more skill and experience, and are ultimately held responsible for the success or failure of hunts. Typically, turtles obtained through hunting (as contrasted with turtles collected on the beach during the nesting season) are distributed to multiple households or to islandwide feasts, and the hunters receive no material recompense (Bliege Bird, Smith, and Bird 2001; Bliege Bird et al. 2002; Smith and Bliege Bird 2000; Smith, Bliege Bird, and Bird 2003)
“Table 5 lists the Gini coefficient for each wealth type in our sample. We use the Gini because of its wide usage, unit-free definition, and intuitive meaning: the coefficient can range from 0 (complete equality) to 1 (virtually all wealth held by a single household). For comparison, Ginis of monetary income range from about 0.25 in several Scandinavian countries to more than 0.6 in some poor countries, with the United States at about 0.41 (UNDP 2009). Most Ginis for our 11 wealth types are in the moderate range, few being less than 0.1 or greater than 0.4 (table 5); the lowest Ginis are those for weight (both !0.1), and the highest is for Lamaleran boat shares (0.47). There are too few measures of material and relational wealth to discern a pattern by wealth class (but see Smith et al. 2010). To characterize an overall measure of wealth inequality for the sample populations, we weight the average Gini coefficient for each wealth class (table 5) by the average a (importance for well-being) of that wealth class (table 4). The resulting estimate equals How much wealth inequality actually exists in these populations? The Gini coefficients listed in table 5 are low, compared to those of contemporary societies and even those of agricultural and pastoral populations (see other papers in this special section), but they are far from negligible. Excluding the low coefficients for weight, the Ginis range from ≈0.2 to ≈0.5, and even when weight is included the a-weighted average is 0.25 (table 5). This value is the same as the income inequality in contemporary Denmark (0.25), the country with lowest such value in recent years (UNDP 2009). Thus, to the extent that our measures for this set of foragers are representative, wealth inequality is moderate: that is to say, very low by current world standards but far from a state of “primitive communism” (cf. Lee 1988)0.25, the same as the simple arithmetic average of the Ginis in table 5.”
We can, indeed, try to have both material comforts and happiness. But until we do all we can to enable all to have material well-being, we won’t have both.
Phil,
I’m not dodging anything. As I’ve said before, I don’t respond to everything you say. I typically respond when you make an initial comment I believe is wrong. But when you expand Topic A to include Topics B, C, D with thousands of words, I’m simply not interested in addressing all of it. Dan wrote a post on how property rights saved the people of Plymouth colony, and your counterpoint was ancient hunter-gatherers were egalitarian. That’s all I’m addressing, not whether modern Europe is more egalitarian than modern America, the brain studies of monks, the virtue of Bhutanese politicians, etc.
I’m sorry, but I think it’s foolish to say it’s a good idea for us to learn egalitarianism from ancient hunter-gatherers. Things were very different back then and their lifestyle was more conducive to egalitarianism. Hunter-gatherers created such little wealth that their populations were necessarily small. Both factors lean toward egalitarianism. Lack of wealth meant everyone was pretty equal. Small population meant they banded together in small groups (like a dozen people up to a few dozen). It’s easier for people in a small group to know each other, align on goals and be egalitarian. The lack of wealth also meant there was little incentive for anyone to lord it over his fellow tribe members for the purpose of seizing wealth.
On top of all that, hunting large animals with primitive technology was conducive to collective action, and sharing the meat collectively made sense because an individual couldn’t eat it all or preserve the excess.
Hunter-gatherers didn’t avoid the concept of private property because they were nobly superior, but because it simply wasn’t relevant. Land was so abundant relative to a tiny population of nomads that there was need to treat land as property (just as we don’t talk about air as property). In addition, there was little property besides land because very little was created.
On all these points but one (modern capitalism still involves lots of cooperation) the situation is very different in modern America.
Yes, the ancient hunter-gatherer standard of living was wretched. I can’t believe you keep saying it wasn’t so bad. I won’t repeat the list of material improvements I’ve already mentioned, but I will address your theory of assessing standard of living based on what people think of it at the time. I don’t accept this theory. Sure, hunter-gatherers didn’t yearn for improvements they couldn’t conceive of, and the same is true of us today. So what? That point will apply to virtually every era of human existence, past and future. Based on that logic, no one would ever be able to compare the living standards of different eras. No. We can look back and know the hunter-gatherer era was worse. That is objectively true. And if standards of living continue to improve (not a given), people thousands of years from now will look back and consider our standard of living primitive, because that too will be objectively true.
The point is, evaluating standards of living can’t be so subjective. By your logic, a standard of living involving constant near-starvation, cannibalism, and a third of the population perishing each winter is fine and dandy, as long as people aren’t aware of anything better. No.
You seem to unnecessarily combine or conflate mental mindset and material wellbeing. You prefer the mental (the happiness you keep mentioning) and pooh-pooh the material. But they’re different things. A mindset of happiness is achievable regardless of material wellbeing. A modern person can choose to be happy with what they have. They can choose to avail themselves of as many or as few modern conveniences as they wish. I know Americans who choose simpler lives because they prefer it. Wanting everyone to be poorer so they’ll be happier doesn’t make much sense for an economic system (what Dan blogs about). Maybe psychology, or morals and values. But why can’t we try to have both material comforts and happiness?
John, actually, my first comments said that I believed in free market economics but that I also like to read things that challenge my points of view (it is helpful to try to avoid the trap of confirmation bias). I then cited authorities on the topic who spoke (realistically, not “glowingly”) about hunter-gatherer societies. As the anthropologist Christopher Boehm argues, enforcing egalitarian norms was a central adaptation of human evolution and “was likely crucial to our survival and success. Zeroing in on that I wrote the following which you completely ignored: “There may be something to be said for the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherers from which we could learn. Western Europeans have grasped more of this than we have and, by most measures, seem to be happier for it.”
There is wisdom in these words from James Suzman (which you also seem to have ignored):
“What do you think of this idea that the hunter-gatherer way of living makes people the happiest they can be? Is there anything that suggests this to be the case?
“Look, the Bushman’s society wasn’t a Garden of Eden. In their lives, there are tragedies and tough times. People would occasionally fight after drinking.
“But people didn’t continuously hold themselves hostage to the idea that the grass is somehow greener on the other side — that if I do X and Y, then my life will be measurably improved.
“So their affluence was really based on having a few needs that were simply met.”
To say hunter-gatherers had a wretched standard of living is poppycock. If we could go back in time and talk to them, I doubt that they would consider their standard of living to be “wretched.” Do you consider your material standard of living to be wretched? I suspect not. Yet thousands of years from now people will look back with pity on those who lived in 2022 with such wretched material standards of living. So who is right? Are you right because your material standard of living exceeds that of the hunter-gatherers? Or are the people thousands of years from now, when life expectancies are in the hundreds and hunger and cancer and heart disease are virtually unknown throughout the world, the ones who are right?
It’s infantile to think that because we have advanced in many ways that those before us are ipso facto wretched by comparison. It’s infantile to think that they could not have known happiness and fulfillment. They learned to control fire for various uses. They invented many tools (including the bow and arrow), built the first residential structures out of wood, rock, and bone (allowing them to move out of caves), buried their dead, created ornamental objects, and devised ways of setting aside vegetation for later consumption. And they had more free time (a point made in my post which you also ignored) to engage in games or hobbies or time with family and friends.
Do I want to live as they did? No. I don’t want to give up the advantages that I have. But I am not so close-minded as to think that just because inequality accompanied industrial growth it was a necessary component of such growth, or, if it was, that we cannot choose to ameliorate it. That there is still so much poverty in a country as wealthy as ours is a moral failing. And don’t tell Dan, but taxes would have to play a role – I’m only saying a role – in doing something about it. Sadly, you seem to want to have nothing to do with science that threatens your treasured values.
From the New Scientist article by Deborah Rogers (cited in my first post):
“Many theories about the spread of stratified society begin with the idea that inequality is somehow a beneficial cultural trait that imparts efficiencies, motivates innovation and increases the likelihood of survival. But what if the opposite were true?
“In a demographic simulation that Omkar Deshpande, Marcus Feldman and I conducted at Stanford University, California, we found that, rather than imparting advantages to the group, unequal access to resources is inherently destabilising and greatly raises the chance of group extinction in stable environments….
“Counterintuitively, the fact that inequality was so destabilising caused these societies to spread by creating an incentive to migrate in search of further resources. The rules in our simulation did not allow for migration to already-occupied locations, but it was clear that this would have happened in the real world, leading to conquests of the more stable egalitarian societies – exactly what we see as we look back in history.
“In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural – or physical – extinction of egalitarian societies. Indeed, in our future research we aim to explore the very real possibility that natural selection itself operates differently under regimes of equality and inequality. Egalitarian societies may have fostered selection on a group level for cooperation, altruism and low fertility (which leads to a more stable population), while inequality might exacerbate selection on an individual level for high fertility, competition, aggression, social climbing and other selfish traits.
“So what can we learn from all this? Although dominance hierarchies may have had their origins in ancient primate social behaviour, we human primates are not stuck with an evolutionarily determined, survival-of-the-fittest social structure. We cannot assume that because inequality exists, it is somehow beneficial. Equality – or inequality – is a cultural choice.”
Just because I first mentioned the topic of ancient hunter-gatherers doesn’t mean I can’t move on to speak of more recent cases. First, I would ask, what is your evidence for the following claim: “The few hunter-gatherers in the 1960s were likely influenced and helped somewhat by the trappings of the modern world around them…”?
As for the Franklin case, Philadelphia in Franklin’s time had schools (including college), libraries, impressive architecture, theaters, museums, paved roads, lighted roads, newspapers, and trade with nations around the world. The University of Pennsylvania was founded the year after Franklin died. An individual gave up a lot to go and live with the natives. Yet, much to Franklin’s chagrin (and he was not alone in fretting about this), even those white people who were taken captive by the Natives, but later ransomed back, were often inclined to return to the Natives after spending some time back among white people and seeing how empty such life seemed. Perhaps you should reread Franklin’s piece and then see if you can come up with some coherent explanation. Franklin was well aware of the vast materialistic differences between the two options. I don’t believe your argument would have gotten anywhere with him.
You write: “When economic growth started to pull some people out of poverty, starting in earnest around 1800, by definition some people became better off than others. Thus inequality entered the scene. But if growth and inequality had never entered the picture (by moving away from hunter-gatherer), then today we wouldn’t have many conveniences like running water and toilets inside the house, vaccinations, machines to wash and dry our clothes, vacuum cleaners, central heating and air, computers and cellphones, etc, etc, etc.”
Whoa… I beg to differ. Inequality did not enter the scene around 1800. There was inequality in the Egyptian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, etc., etc. etc. Furthermore, if such inequality is necessary to material conveniences as you suggest, then how does one explain all the material progress made by hunter-gatherers, as mentioned above? To quote Deborah Rogers again, “We cannot assume that because inequality exists, it is somehow beneficial. Equality – or inequality – is a cultural choice.”
I don’t believe my comments about infant mortality were hypocritical. You are right that infant mortality rates in the U.S. are not as bad as they first appear when compared to other developed nations (because of counting procedures). But if you look on the Wikipedia entry “Infant Morality” you will find a map that shows deaths up to the age of one and we still lag behind most developed nations. Furthermore, they give a reason:
“…the report concluded that the primary reason for the United States’ higher infant mortality rate when compared with Europe was the United States’ much higher percentage of preterm births.[130]”
In previous discussions I had tried to use infant mortality rates to demonstrate the superiority of the developed world in at least one key category. You would have nothing to do with it. To the best of my memory (it’s been a while), you never once admitted that this was a point against the U.S. Yet now when you see some infant mortality numbers, namely those of people tens and hundreds of thousands of years before the age of modern medicine, who obviously would have much higher infant mortality rates, now you want to make a big deal of it. So just who is the hypocrite?
I wrote, “The mortality rate (infant and otherwise) that troubles you much is much higher here than it is in most western European nations” simply as a reminder that that was an issue that previously you had ducked. It makes sense to compare the infant mortality rates of nations which all have access to modern medicine. It makes absolutely no sense to compare the infant mortality rates of such nations with people living tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago. What’s really fascinating, using the website you supplied, is that the infant mortality rate among ancient hunter-gatherers was virtually identical to rates for the better-off nations as recently as 200-250 years ago. That’s what should have caught you eye.
Are you ready to talk neuroscience, the brain studies of monks, and other topics you have dodged?
Phil,
Your first comments here spoke glowingly about the hunter-gatherers. They were so egalitarian, they wisely avoided warfare, and they empowered their women. I don’t yearn for that because hunter-gatherers had a wretched standard of living. To think otherwise is nostalgic, romantic poppycock.
I’ve been talking about the hunter-gatherers living in the ancient era, not your 1960s or 1700s Franklin examples. First, because that’s the initial topic YOU raised. Second, because the only meaningful comparison here is ancient hunter-gatherers versus modern capitalism. The few hunter-gatherers in the 1960s were likely influenced and helped somewhat by the trappings of the modern world around them, so that’s likely a faulty comparison. It’s also a faulty comparison to compare lifestyles of the European settlers in the early 1700s versus the local hunter-gatherers because at that time the lifestyles of the settlers were not yet that much better.
In case you don’t know, the history of humanity is unrelenting poverty for thousands of years. Yes, there was much equality, but it was equality of poverty! When economic growth started to pull some people out of poverty, starting in earnest around 1800, by definition some people became better off than others. Thus inequality entered the scene. But if growth and inequality had never entered the picture (by moving away from hunter-gatherer), then today we wouldn’t have many conveniences like running water and toilets inside the house, vaccinations, machines to wash and dry our clothes, vacuum cleaners, central heating and air, computers and cellphones, etc, etc, etc. Maybe you don’t value these conveniences, but I assure you most people do.
If your real point is to convince people to adopt a simpler and less materialistic lifestyle, OK. But you don’t have to resort to extremes like saying we should be more like hunter-gatherers. Also, that discussion is more about morals and values, not private property and the economic system.
Finally, I must point out your hypocrisy about infant mortality. You have previously pointed out multiple times how the US is worse than Europe on this point. There are two problems with this. First, the US is not as bad on infant mortality as you think. As I told you at least once, “…the discrepancy between the U.S. and other countries appears largely due to country-to-country differences in the way infant mortality statistics are compiled…” For example, see this website: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/infant-mortality-rate-by-country. Second, I mentioned the hunter-gatherer infant mortality because you had previously touted that as a metric you found significant. But when I mention here the horrific hunter-gatherer infant mortality rate that’s 50-100 times worse (!!!) than modern US or European rates, your only response is to say the US is worse than Europe. Come on!
I’m not looking back with misty eyes at some lost golden age. I began this whole thread by writing, “And then there’s the other side of the story (and I write this as a centrist who believes in the free market; I am not some progressive ideologue… but I do like to read things that challenge my own views).”
I do believe that there are lessons to be learned from history, however. There may be something to be said for the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherers from which we could learn. Western Europeans have grasped more of this than we have and, by most measures, seem to be happier for it.
The mortality rate (infant and otherwise) that troubles you much is much higher here than it is in most western European nations.
You write, “Basic living was so difficult and time-consuming they had little leisure time….” Did you not see in my 12:07 p.m. post the following: “A study back in the 1960s found the Bushmen have figured out a way to work only about 15 hours each week acquiring food and then another 15 to 20 hours on domestic chores. The rest of the time they could relax and focus on family, friends and hobbies. Just because those hobbies weren’t the same ones you might have picked, and not full of modern gadgetry, doesn’t mean they were any less meaningful.
What Dr. Suzman said about time and living in the present moment reminded me of much of what I have learned about meditation practice. Such practice is all about living in the present moment. Few people in our world live simpler lives than lifelong monks. Yet when neuroscientists watch their brains with their modern technology, they discover that the section of the brain associated with happiness is off the charts.
From the BBC article. “The key to Bhutan’s happiness”:
Though Rinpoche [leader of Bhutan] asserts that Bhutan is “incredibly peaceful and has this majestic and pristine natural environment”, he also recognises that the Kingdom has its issues, just like everywhere else. Inflation continues to rise, with the overall consumer price index up by almost 9% in the past year. Food insecurity is also a reality (Bhutan imports about 50% of its food) and the country has seen a nearly 15% hike in food costs. The impact of closing its borders from March 2020 through August 2021 also meant that and at least 50,000 individuals working in the tourism industry lost their jobs and livelihoods, like Dozi.
Yet, good governance, one of the cornerstones of GNH, has been crucial to Bhutan’s survival throughout the pandemic. The government’s swift response to coronavirus’ socio-economic impact has been lauded by the international community, as it deferred the payment of taxes and issued financial aid to citizens. Parliament members donated one month’s salary to the relief efforts. The government also prioritised the vaccination of its citizens and currently 90.2% of the eligible population is fully vaccinated.
“What is so special about being Bhutanese is that there is always a united sense of gratitude, communal well-being and national identity,” added Thinley Choden, a social entrepreneur and consultant.
Choden believes that part of the reason why the Bhutanese view happiness differently than other cultures is because of their ability to reconcile past and present. “Bhutanese culture is strongly rooted in our traditions and spiritual values, but we are a very progressive and practical society. Generally, our culture and religion is not prescriptive, and not a black-and-white choice, but rather navigating the middle path in everyday living.”
If there was one piece of advice Rinpoche could share with the world it would be this: “Always remember that the most important thing is to live life in the present moment, and that happiness is not a by-product of external factors, but the result of positively conditioning your mind. Happiness is at the grasp of everyone.”
Can you imagine members of the U.S. Congress giving up a month’s salary to COVID relief efforts?
I leave you to also respond to the dilemma about which Benjamin Franklin pondered (my 12:28 p.m. post).
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Phil,
People in every era nostalgically look back at prior eras with misty eyes and lament the loss of the Golden Age. And you are free to do that. You’re also allowed to prefer any lifestyle you want. In fact, you can probably make this happen for yourself. Just give up all your modern conveniences and go live in the wild. But it may not be as great as you think. I suspect if you had to live in a hunter-gatherer world for one month, you’d run screaming for the exits.
Yes, hunter-gatherers didn’t have the latest iPhone. But it was a lot worse than that. They also had bad food of uncertain supply. They had bad, itchy, dirty clothing. Their caves or tents didn’t have central heating or air conditioning… but they did teem with vermin. They lacked most medical answers for diseases or tumors. The ‘good’ news is tumors were less of an issue because people usually died before tumors became a problem. If they had a baby, there was a one in four chance it would die immediately, or in the first year. And if it survived the first year, there was still a 50/50 chance it wouldn’t survive to adulthood (https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past). Basic living was so difficult and time-consuming they had little leisure time for reading, watching TV, writing poetry, or whatever. Of course, they didn’t read or write, and had no electricity, so maybe they didn’t miss those things.
Let me describe the modern equivalent of what you desire. Somehow, you magically reduce world wealth so much that everyone now earns the same annual income of say, $500. There, everyone is equal. But no one has automobiles, electricity, TV, computers, books, good medical treatment, and all the rest because they were never invented, and no one can afford them anyway. Is this really your idea of nirvana?
I’m totally on board with the idea that money and material possessions are very inadequate measures of success or happiness. There are many other virtues that make our lives worthwhile, and we lose our souls if we pursue material success at the expense of those virtues. However, I don’t like the idea of yearning for everyone to be poor hunter-gatherers so we also don’t incur some of the negative side-effects of materialism. How about we try to walk and chew gum? That is, how about we enjoy the life-giving and enjoyable comforts of modern food, clothing, medicine, electric lights, and transportation and ALSO keep those modern conveniences in perspective while striving to live virtuous lives?
John, another point to ponder:
“Captive-taking by Native Americans was surprisingly common in Colonial times.
“It was also common for captives to choose their Native communities over their Colonial families.
“This puzzled the European Americans to no end.
“They came to America believing that conversion would be easy once Natives saw the superiority of the Europeans’ religion, clothing, agriculture, dwellings, and every comfort known so far to man.
Yet there were very few Indians who converted to English culture, while large numbers of English chose to become Indian. Even Benjamin Franklin pondered why:
“’When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.’”
From: https://www.bing.com/search?q=ben+franklin+on+native+americans+not+wanting+to+live+in+white+society&aqs=edge..69i57.52032j0j1&pglt=297&FORM=ANCMS9&PC=W018
John, poor… as in you mean they didn’t have the iphone 14? Of course they seem dirt poor compared to us, just as we will seem dirt poor compared to the people tens of thousands of years from now.
However, they may have been happier, and I agree with Aristotle that happiness is the ultimate end of human existence (not wealth). Furthermore, even you seem to disagree with Dan who wrote: “People don’t work hard when the rewards of their labor go to others. Even in small communities, that approach does not work.” The anthropological evidence, however, suggests that it did work.
“[Anthropologist James]Suzman has spent the past 25 years visiting, living with and learning from one of the last groups of hunter-gatherers left on Earth — the Khoisan or Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia.
“A study back in the 1960s found the Bushmen have figured out a way to work only about 15 hours each week acquiring food and then another 15 to 20 hours on domestic chores. The rest of the time they could relax and focus on family, friends and hobbies.
“In Suzman’s new book, he offers rare glimpses of what life was like in this efficient culture — and what life was like for the vast majority of humans’ evolution.
“What we think of as “modern humans” have likely been on Earth for about 200,000 years. And for about 90 percent of that time we didn’t have stashes of grains in the cupboard or ready-to-slaughter meat grazing outside our windows. Instead, we fed ourselves using our own two feet: by hunting wild animals and gathering fruits and tubers.
“As people have diverged so widely from that hunter-gatherer lifestyle, maybe we’ve left behind elements of life that inherently made us happy. Maybe the culture of “developed” countries, as we so often say at Goats and Soda, has left holes in our psyche.
“Suzman’s experiences make him uniquely qualified to address such philosophical questions and offer suggestions on how to fill in the gap. So we spoke to him about his new book.
“What do you think of this idea that the hunter-gatherer way of living makes people the happiest they can be? Is there anything that suggests this to be the case?
“Look, the Bushman’s society wasn’t a Garden of Eden. In their lives, there are tragedies and tough times. People would occasionally fight after drinking.
“But people didn’t continuously hold themselves hostage to the idea that the grass is somehow greener on the other side — that if I do X and Y, then my life will be measurably improved.
“So their affluence was really based on having a few needs that were simply met. Just fundamentally they have few wants — just basic needs that were easily met. They were skilled hunters. They could identify a hundred different plants species and knew exactly which parts to use and which parts to avoid. And if your wants are limited, then it’s just very easy to meet them.
“By contrast, the mantra of modern economics is that of limited scarcity: that we have infinite wants and limited means. And then we work and we do stuff to try and bridge the gap.
“In fact, I don’t even think the Bushman have thought that much about happiness. I don’t think they have words equivalent to “happiness” like we think of. For us, happiness has become sort of aspirational.
“Bushmen have words for their current feelings, like joy or sadness. But not this word for this idea of “being happy” long term, like if I do something, then I’ll be “happy” with my life long term.
“The Bushmen have a very different sense of time than we do in Western culture. In the book, you say we think of time as linear and in constant change, while they think of it as cyclical and predictable. Do you think that makes them happier?
“This is one of the big, big differences between us and hunter-gatherer cultures. And I’m amazed that actually more anthropologists haven’t written about it.
“Everything in our lives is kind of future-oriented. For example, we might get a college degree so we can get a job, so that we can get a pension. For farmers it was the same way. They planted seeds for the harvest and to store.
“But for hunter-gatherers, everything was present-oriented. All their effort was focused on meeting an immediate need.
“They were absolutely confident that they would be able to get food from their environment when they needed it. So they didn’t waste time storing or growing food. This lifestyle created a very different perspective on time.
“People never wasted time imagining different futures for themselves or indeed for anybody else.
“Everything we do now is rooted in this constant and enduring change, or our history. We look at ourselves as being part of our history, or this trajectory through time.
“The hunter-gatherers just didn’t bother locating themselves in history because stuff around them was pretty much always the same. It was unchanging.
“Yes, there might be different trees sprouting up year after year. Or things in the environment change from season to season. But there was a systemic continuity to everything.
“I think that it’s a wonderful, extraordinary thing. I think it’s something we can never get back — this different way of thinking about something as fundamental as time.
“It manifests in very small ways. For example, I would ask them what their great grandfather’s name was and some people would just say, “I don’t know.” They just simply didn’t care. Everything was so present-focused.
“Today people [in Western societies] go to mindfulness classes, yoga classes and clubs dancing, just so for a moment they can live in the present. The Bushmen live that way all the time!
“And the sad thing is, the minute you’re doing it consciously, the minute it ceases to be.
“It’s like making the perfect tennis shot. You can know all the theory in the world about how to play tennis. But to make the perfect shot, it’s a profoundly physical thing. It’s subconscious.
“So the Bushmen held the secret to mindfulness and living in moment. Is that key to their happiness?
“There is this supreme joy we get in those moments, you know, when time sort of disappears.
“I felt that way when I was younger, and I used to go clubbing and dancing. Time disappeared. There was no earlier that day and no tomorrow.
“So is there a way people can get this hunter-gatherer sense of time back? To live in the moment subconsciously?
“I think there are some things in modern life that can fill in the gap left by not connecting with nature the way hunter-gatherers did.
“I think sports can help fill this void or going on long hikes. You can also lose sense of time by doing activities which give you a great sense of purposed fullness and satisfaction, such as crafts, painting and writing.
“After spending so much time with the Bushmen, does Western society just seem crazy?
“Ha, ha. When I was younger, I was angry about “us,” you know about the way people in our society behave.
“But over time, I realized, that if I’m open-minded about my Bushmen friends, I should be open-minded about people here.
“So over time, the experiences have really humanized everybody. I’ve come to realize that all types of people — and their cultures — are just as clever and just as stupid.”
Link to full article: https://www.kcur.org/2020-01-06/are-hunter-gatherers-the-happiest-humans-to-inhabit-earth
Phil, I suspect that is why so many humans have an inbred desire for socialism or redistribution. It makes more sense with small groups, when there is zero economic growth. When you kill a big animal, you better share it with others because you can’t preserve it and it will go bad. But those hunter-gatherers were dirt poor. Equality in poverty is not something I admire.
And then there’s the other side of the story (and I write this as a centrist who believes in the free market; I am not some progressive ideologue… but I do like to read things that challenge my own views):
FOR 5000 years, humans have grown accustomed to living in societies dominated by the privileged few. But it wasn’t always this way. For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread. And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organised ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.*
Decision-making was decentralised and leadership ad hoc; there weren’t any chiefs. There were sporadic hot-blooded fights between individuals, of course, but there was no organised conflict between groups. Nor were there strong notions of private property and therefore any need for territorial defence. These social norms affected gender roles as well; women were important producers and relatively empowered, and marriages were typically monogamous.
Keeping the playing field level was a matter of survival. These small-scale, nomadic foraging groups didn’t stock up much surplus food, and given the high-risk nature of hunting – the fact that on any given day or week you may come back empty-handed – sharing and cooperation were required to ensure everyone got enough to eat. Anyone who made a bid for higher status or attempted to take more than their share would be ridiculed or ostracised for their audacity. Suppressing our primate ancestors’ dominance hierarchies by enforcing these egalitarian norms was a central adaptation of human evolution, argues social anthropologist Christopher Boehm. It enhanced cooperation and lowered risk as small, isolated bands of humans spread into new habitats and regions across the world, and was likely crucial to our survival and success.
For the full article: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22071-inequality-why-egalitarian-societies-died-out/
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