h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

SWL: "Why has the guy who lived a few doors down from me spent his life in and out of prison and on benefits while I haven't?"

The point is not that starting poor makes it impossible to succeed, it's that it makes it much more difficult and less likely. Social mobility - moving from one class to another - exists, but is very low. In an equal society, if you started from a family in the richer 50% you'd be equally likely to end up in the top or bottom 50%, but it's not like that, not by a long way. A very few people born into well off families become poor, and a very few people born into poor families end up well off.

At the lower end, there are simply more hurdles to be jumped. You, SWL, have been fortunate in being able to jump them.

re the last para quoted by lanababy...

I think this is where the concept of 'Affluenza' comes in:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jan/27/booksonhealth.society


Hmmm. I wonder how this relates to 'Anomie'?

I'm hearing the phrase

'Rags to Riches and Back Again in 2 Generations' being quoted here. Meaning people who have made their own money, and who then have offspring who think they deserve to be rich by the mere fact of birthright, but have no visible means of support except mummy and daddy.

<> SWL


If inequality in itself is the bad thing, and people actually suffer from being bottom of the heap (and like dogster said, it's stats we're talking here so it doesn't mean *everyone* from any social grouping has their life determined by it), then have all those measures you mention actually got anyone *off* the bottom?

There's nothing in what you reeled off their that would improve their *relative* position in society. A youth centre won't do much to bridge the gap between people who leave school with one standard grade and those who graduate from Oxbridge, will it?

People do make bad choices, but why do the poorest 10% of Swedes make better choices than the poorest 10% of Scots? One reason, we're being shown, is simply because our society is more unequal than theirs.

And why don't we do anything when we all suffer for it?

How do you change generations of attitude, motivation (or lack of) and opinion? Money doesn't do it...

Hi Ed, This from yesterday,

>Did you know, for instance, that there was no racism in human history until the capitalist bosses invented it to keep the workers divided?rolleyes

Well...there's a certain grain of truth in that. Marxist theorists have proposed that racism is fundamentally a *class* problem.<<

There is a grain of truth in it, but I don't think I made my point. It's certainly true that capitalism exploits human nature, I can't accept that it forms it.

Where I worked there was great animosity between different groups. We were all of the same 'class' but formed up into sides anyway. We had a good Union to contend with the bosses but couldn't otherwise cohere. The bosses didn't create that situation, it happens spontaineously.

The Serbs and Croats could spot and hate each other on sight. I can't tell them apart. Can you tell the Hutus from the Tutsis in Northern Ireland? Fear of strangers is such a finely tuned human thing, it occurs in places and times where there is no economy, that it must be an evolved thing.

>>Fear of strangers is such a finely tuned human thing, it occurs in places and times where there is no economy, that it must be an evolved thing.

Oof! I had a 'racism is natural' discussion only recently.

No - it's socio-economic, not biological. Let me explain.

Consider two adjacent populations of early human. If they came in contact with a neighbouring group, or even if they were in competition for resources with it, members of the two groups would have looked pretty much the same. They would have been able to recognise 'my family' vs 'stranger' - but that would have been the the sorts of combination of subtle clues that we all use to recognise faces - i.e. not by any kind of generalised characteristic. There would be no advantage in evolving a capacity to pick out such generalised features.

Over time, the physical characteristics of human populations diverged between local populations (into black, blonde, curly-headed, slightly wider noses than others - the last, I believe, being a marker between Hutus and Tutsis). Thse populations next encountered one another when they started migrating (eg building empires; travelling the world by sea). In such circumstances, there would have been economic competition between diverged populations, recognisable by gross characteristics.

*But* the timescales over which this has occured - and the fact that populations have largely been more stable than migratory - mean that humans are very unlikely to have developed biological mechanisms for recognising the gross characteristics of their human competitors.

>>it occurs in places and times where there is no economy

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Can you give an example?

(Or even better - ask pedro to tell us both about paleo-economy. )



Hutus and Tutsis:

While they are distinguishable ethnic and, to a lesser extent, cultural groups - my understanding was that this only became an issue when Belgians turned up with an obsession with ethnographic classification. They went around measuring peoples' noses etc. and suddenly everyone found out, by looking in their ID card, whether they were Hutu or Tutsi.

I should check the details of this. We've a lovely Rwandan lady at work and it will give me an excuse to talk to her.

Also:

>>It's certainly true that capitalism exploits human nature, I can't accept that it forms it.

Well...not just Capitalism. Isn't it true, though, that human nature is formed by the circumstances in which we find ourselves? We are shaped as much by societal forces as biological/psychological.

This idea was a significant contribution by Marx to human thought. I don't think there would have been such a thing as sociology without Marx. It so happens that he mainly presented his ideas within the context of the Capitalist dynamic - but that's because it was (and is) the primary dynamic in our society.

pedro:
>>People do make bad choices, but why do the poorest 10% of Swedes make better choices than the poorest 10% of Scots? One reason, we're being shown, is simply because our society is more unequal than theirs.


This is an extremely significant point.

One view of poverty alleviation is that if only we can change poor people, they can get themselves out of their mess. And hence we have educational programmes, help with job seeking, drug treatment, youth clubs, teaching parents too cook...etc. etc. Whether our attitude is 'We should help the disadvantaged to help themselves' or 'The poor should get of their arses', the implicit attitude is that individuals are ultimately responsible for their socio-economic position.

There is also a danger in taking the wrong message from Affluenza-type thinking, ie 'if only people would be less materialistic, they'd be happier'. ie all we need to do is change our attitudes. This type of view was expressed by a Buddhist on R4's 'Anodyne Homily of the Day' this morning - which mentioned what was presumably the Wilkinson/Pickering research: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/thought/documents/t20090318.shtml)
Oliver James himself (author of 'Affluenza') is a trenchant critic of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy as a sticking plaster which may help people think differently but bdoesn't address the structural reasons for unhappiness.

*However*...Wilkinson and Pickering demonstrate that the benefits seem to come about through economic circumstances, rather than individual actions. It would be difficult, I think, to argue that Japan and Sweden have achieved more tolerable societies simply because their populations - specifically, their poor - are simply smarter or more go-getting than ours. We might want to quibble that the Japanese are all groovy, non-materialistic Buddhisty types who spend their off-duty time staring at miniature trees...but this doesn't seem to explain their material success.

Two relavant bits from today's Grauniad:

(can't find this bit on teh interwebs)
John Harris suggests what the French call a 'Solidarity Tax' and he calls a 'Child Poverty Charge'. It would kick in at 0.55% on wealth over £1M, rising to 1.8% on asset holdings of £16M.


Also - feature on what poverty's like for one woman:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/18/child-poverty-labour-eradicate-promise

Hi Ed,
>>it occurs in places and times where there is no economy

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Can you give an example?<<

I had to think about this awhile and perhaps I'm not sure what I mean. If you go far enough back and stretch the definition of economy far enough, there never was a time when there was no economy. There's even one among wolves. As long as there is a limit of resources there has to be a way of sorting out who gets what.

>>No - it's socio-economic, not biological. Let me explain.<<

Here you provide a good example of what I would call a biological explanation

If two groups meet to contend over a resource then the ability to tell ours from yours, what I would call evolved, then informs what I would call a socio-economic situation.

Perhaps we're trying to fine line the broad line in the nature/nurture debate.

I'm going to guess that, as a Marxist, you're no fan of Steven Pinker. I'll reread The Blank Slate and perhaps start a new thread. The one with warner in it is worn out.

>>There's even one among wolves

Precisely! See also biological economics.

>>Here you provide a good example of what I would call a biological explanation

You've rumbled me. Yes, fundamentally we're talking about biological phenomena. What I meant was that the distinction isn't encoded at the level of the individual human animal. Maybe something like 'instinct' vs 'learned behaviour' fits the bill better.

>>I'm going to guess that, as a Marxist, you're no fan of Steven Pinker.

I've not read TBS...but from what I understand of the ideas, I don't think they contradict each other.

So, yes, an apocalypse-free discussion would be good.

Ed,

I see from a post on the other thread that you have read The Stuff of Thought. Unless you've read Pinker's sources directly.

Arguing with you is an intimidating experience. I don't have warner's armour.

Not having warner's inch-think codpiece of ignorance is no bad thing, Tumsup. Economics is really just about how you manage stuff. It roughly translates from Greek as 'household management'.

<>

Of course, nowadays we've got way more stuff than cavemen to manage, but it's just a difference of degree.

>Of course, nowadays we've got way more stuff than cavemen to manage<

The modern tragedy. In the old days resources were limited to what nature provided and there wasn't enough to go around. Since then we've invented means of production so we have more than we could ever need yet some still starve.

I see the debate has moved on somewhat since last I was here. Inequality could be seen as a visible signifier of discrimination, no? Hence the UK (or Scotland in the example given) is a society more rife with discrimination than Sweden. May I suggest that Marxism is a root cause of discrimination and therefore inequality in society? Consider Group Conflict Theory and Minimal Groups in conjunction with Social Identity Theory. Simply put, these theories identify that the mere act of categorisation creates discrimination. I'm not suggesting that Marxism created ingroups and outgroups, but it created the contemporary labels and almost invented class consciousness. Indeed, class warfare is a necessary requisite for Marxism. Introduce class identity politics into an industrial society with it's rigid demarcation of roles and it is almost inevitable that discord will be the result. Which was of course the intention all along. Where the UK and Sweden differ is that Sweden was nowhere near as industrialised as the UK when Marxism took root. Discrimination is much more embedded in UK culture than in Sweden and will therefore be much harder to dislodge. Trying to use the very tool that played a large part in it's creation is self-defeating. In my humble opinion, as always.

Sharon, there's an inversion of reason in your post. Marx didn't create classes or class warfare, he just pointed them out. Human tribal instinct does the dirty here.

The whole Romans v Spartacus thing was old long before Marx was born.

OK, I'm going to get a few brickbats for this one, but what's new?

Some people are just "losers", genetically programmed to "fail".

There is increasing evidence of a genetic link to criminality which goes some way to explaining why successive generations of a family engage in criminal behaviour. That's more than a little simplistic of course. Someone can be genetically pre-disposed to criminality but it takes the right social factors to see criminal behaviour develop.

I think the same principles can be applied to low achievers. Note, I'm *not* saying that being poor is a crime, I'm saying that how people react to differing social conditions may be linked to genetic make up. People who make poor choices tend to have children who make similar poor choices.

I'm happy to be wrong about this, so don't go shouting at me thinking this is my deeply held conviction.

But isn't that also part of the nature vs. nurture debate? If the children grow up in criminal families, wouldn't that predispose them with no genetic interference required?