Posts Tagged ‘sociology’
“Your values become your destiny”*…
… and that could be an issue for the global order. People’s principles were expected to align as countries got richer; research suggests that instead they’re diverging. What happened?…
In 1981 over 40% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. But economic growth was starting to accelerate in developing countries. And Ron Inglehart, a professor at the University of Michigan, was organising a worldwide survey team to test the theory that, as peasant farmers escape poverty, they begin to think and behave differently, as people in the past had done when they joined the middle classes.
They might give a higher priority to education, to widening their children’s knowledge, than their own parents had done. They might give greater weight to their own experience and reasoning, and less to religious books or the authority of kings. And perhaps these new ways, these basic values, would begin to converge around the world. Such matters, Inglehart thought, could be tested by asking questions which revealed underlying values such as “How important is religion in your life?”, “Would you be happy living next to a foreigner?” and “Can you trust most people?”
Forty years later, only 8% of the world’s population is still in extreme poverty; more than half, on some measures, count as middle class. The World Values Survey (WVS), Inglehart’s baby, has become the world’s biggest social-research network. Every five years or so its researchers sally out into the field interviewing, at last count, almost 130,000 people in 90 countries. Yet its latest wave of results, which covers 2017-22, provides only partial endorsement of the idea that basic values tend to converge as people get richer. In significant ways, the differences between how people think in different parts of the world seem to be widening.
The Economist unpacks the data (with loads of helpful graphics), examines the possible causes at work, and looks to the future: “Western values are steadily diverging from the rest of the world’s” @TheEconomist.
* Gandhi
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As we contemplate culture, we might send carefully-observed birthday greetings to John Scott CBE FRSA FBA FAcSS; he was born on this date in 1949. A sociologist, he is best known for his work on economic and social networks, perhaps especially The Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis and Conceptualising the Social World.
“The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly”*…
The idea of a guaranteed flow of funds to allow anyone and everyone to meet basic needs– as we’re currently discussing it, a universal basic income– has been getting significant attention in recent decades. But as Karl Widerquist explains (in an excerpt from his recent book, Universal Basic Income). “UBI” dates back as a concept– and as a practice– many centuries…
Support for Universal Basic Income (UBI) has grown so rapidly over the past few years that people might think the idea appeared out of nowhere. In fact, the idea has roots going back hundreds or even thousands of years, and activists have been floating similar ideas with gradually increasing frequency for more than a century.
Since 1900, the concept of a basic income guarantee (BIG) has experienced three distinct waves of support, each larger than the last. The first, from 1910 to 1940, was followed by a down period in the 1940s and 1950s. A second and larger wave of support happened in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by another lull in most countries through about 2010. BIG’s third, most international, and by far largest wave of support began to take off in the early 2010s, and it has increased every year since then.
[But] We could trace the beginnings of UBI into prehistory, because many have observed that “prehistoric” (in the sense of nonliterate) societies had two ways of doing things that might be considered forms of unconditional income…
From pre-historic nomads, through ancient Athens, to Thomas Paine and then Henry George, Widerquist unspools the history of UBI, then walks through the “three waves” that began in the early 20th century, concluding with the current state of the debate: “The Deep and Enduring History of Universal Basic Income,” from @KarlWiderquist and @mitpress.
For more on the recent history of the UBI debate, see Widerquist’s essay, “Three Waves of Basic Income Support.”
And for a peak at the results of (small, incomplete, but encouraging) experiments in this direction, see: “Places across the U.S. are testing no-strings cash as part of the social safety net,” from @NPR.
* Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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As we ponder poverty, we might send thoughtful birthday greeting to James Tobin; he was born on this date in 1918. An economist who contributed to the development of key ideas in the Keynesian economics of his generation, he made pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy, and financial markets– for which he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981.
Outside academia, Tobin is probably best known for his suggestion of a tax on foreign exchange transactions, now known as the “Tobin tax,” designed to reduce speculation in the international currency markets, which he saw as dangerous and unproductive.
And relevantly to the piece above, Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith and another 1,200 economists signed a document in 1968 calling for the U. S. Congress to introduce that year a system of income guarantees and supplements– a UBI.
“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star”*…
Last May, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author John Markoff was asked to write an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on the heels of the murder in San Francisco of tech exec Bob Lee. The paper rejected his piece, leaving Markoff to “suspect that they were looking for more of a ‘drugs, sex and rock & roll’ analysis, which isn’t what they got. My 2005 book What the Dormouse Said is occasionally cited by people making the argument that there is some kind of causal relationship between psychedelic drugs and creativity. I have never believed that to be the case and I’ve always been more interested in sociological than psychological assessments of psychedelics.”
Happily for us, he has shared it on Medium…
The head-spinning speed with which the murder of software creator Bob Lee went from being a story about rampant crime in San Francisco to a sex and drugs tale of Silicon Valley excess says a great deal about the way the world now perceives the nation’s technology heartland.
Lee, who had gone from being a Google software engineer to become the creator of the mobile finance program Cash App, and who had more recently became the chief product officer for a crypto-currency company, is now alleged to have been stabbed to death by the brother of a wealthy socialite with whom Lee is thought to have had an affair.
On the surface it would seem to evoke something more out of a Hollywood soap opera than the world’s technology center. But the Valley is more complex than cases like Bob Lee, or dark takes on the evils of technology, suggest.
Silicon Valley has always been built around a paradox represented by the built-in tension between the open-source spirit of a hacker counterculture and the naked capitalist ambitions of Sand Hill Road, where the offices of its venture capitalists are concentrated.
Stewart Brand, who authored the Whole Earth Catalog in Menlo Park, Ca., at the same moment the high-tech region was forming in the 1960s, expressed the paradox most clearly at the first meeting of the Hackers Conference in 1984. In responding to Steve Wozniak, Apple’s cofounder, who was describing the danger of technology companies hoarding information, what the audience heard Brand say, was “information wants to be free.” Indeed, a decade later that became the rallying cry of the dot-com era, a period in which technology start-ups thrived on disrupting traditional commerce and railing against regulation.
But that is not what Brand said. He actually stated: “Information sort of wants to be expensive because its so valuable, the right information at the right point changes your life. On the other hand information almost wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.”
Brand had been influenced by social scientist Gregory Bateson who proposed the idea of “the double bind” to describe situations in which even when you win, you lose. Understanding that paradox, which was lost in translation, might have saved the Valley from some of the excess that has taken it into the dark territory it has found itself in recently.
From its inception, the very nature of Silicon Valley was about its ability to simultaneously allow diverse cultures to thrive. During the 1960s and 1970s, while Silicon Valley was being formed, you could easily drive from Walker’s Wagon Wheel in Mountain View, where crewcut hard-drinking computer chip designers gathered, to a very different long-haired scene in just up the road in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, which surrounded Stanford Research Institute, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, the three labs that pioneered the technologies that would become the modern personal computer and the Internet.
The paradox is perhaps best expressed in the formation of Apple Computer — a company that grew out of the separate interests of its two founders. One, Steve Wozniak was simply interested in building a computer to share with his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist group founded by a convicted draft resister and a software engineer that would ultimately birth several dozen start-up PC hardware and software companies including Apple. Wozniak would combine his hacker’s instincts for sharing with Steve Jobs, who had the insight to realize that there would be a market for these machines…
…
… Silicon Valley engineers believed they were just one good idea away from becoming the next Jobs or Wozniak.
That deeply entrenched culture of risk-taking — and frequent failure — originally exemplified by the Gold Rush, today remains an integral part of the California and by extension Silicon Valley, Dream.
In recent weeks, much has been made of Lee’s partying life style, which included claims of recreational drug use and attendance at the Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert, which began on a San Francisco Beach and is based on various anti-capitalist principles such as gifting, decommodification and radical inclusion. The festival, which grew out of the counterculture, has come to embrace a very different technology culture where attendees including Google founders, Sergay Brin and Larry Page and former CEO Eric Schmitt as well as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg often arrive by corporate jet. Certainly! Here’s an alternative rewrite for clarity: It has gained a reputation for surpassing the confines of a traditional California scene by integrating technology, art, drugs, and rock & roll, creating a unique and boundary-pushing experience.
Experimentation with psychedelic drugs has been a continuous theme for a subculture in Silicon Valley, going back to the 1960s when group that included engineers from Ampex and Stanford, created a research project to explore the relationship between LSD and creativity.
Yet despite this fascination originally with psychedelics and more recently in the idea of “microdosing” small amounts of LSD, the science has never been clear…
It is more likely that an alternative proposed by a group of social scientists at the Santa Fe Institute offers a more cogent explanation. Creativity, they argued, takes place at the edge of chaos. And that certainly describes the early Silicon Valley which emerged in the midst of a tumultuous time on the San Francisco mid-peninsula during the Sixties…
Eminently worth reading in full.
* Friedrich Nietzsche
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As we cultivate creative contradictions, we might recall that it was on this date in 1978 that Ward Christensen and Randy Suess launched the first public dialup computer bulletin board system, or BBS– the foundation of what would eventually become the world wide web, countless online messaging systems, and, arguably, Twitter.
It was several decades before the hardware or the network caught up to Christensen and Suess’ imaginations, but all the basic seeds of today’s online communities were in place when the two launched the first bulletin board…
“Bulletin Board Goes Electronic“
“Nations, as well as men, almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years.”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: assumptions in the developed West were that, as economic development progressed around the world, rising countries would become more liberal– just like us (or, at least just like the expert’s image of “us”). Similarly, there was an expectation by many that, as the U.S. and Europe continued to develop, their cultures and politics might become more homogenous. Alice Evans has a theory as to why that hasn’t happened…
In the West economic development spawned individualism and the spirit of ‘68. Modernisation theorists predicted that growth would deliver liberalism worldwide. Inglehart and Welzel argued that post-industrial societies would champion self-expression. But in fact, this has not transpired. Many prosperous places – like Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and South Korea – remain quite conservative. India’s economic growth has not delivered secularism, but Hindu nationalism.
What explains this global cultural divergence?
I have a theory:
- Cultural change occurs when bold rebels stick their necks out, champion some radical alternative, and successfully encourage wider defiance.
- In close-knit, collectivist societies, people care intensely about wider social approval, and tend to follow the herd. This suppresses individualism.
- Cultural tightness is much higher in societies where:
- Agriculture was extremely labour-intensive and required strong inter-dependence (e.g. rice or Andean potatoes), and/or
- Intensive kinship meant that commerce, cooperation and marriages were all rooted in a close-knit, endogamous community (tribe, clan or jati);
- Authoritarian governance represses dissent and reinforces despondency.
- In culturally tight societies (with labour-intensive agriculture or strong kinship intensity), then even as families grow richer, they still care for social approval. This suppresses individual resistance.
…
If you walk outside and do something weird, will anyone mind? India’s panchayats would certainly express disapproval and punish deviation. Such cultures are ‘tight’. The rules are known, conformity is widespread and subversion is abhorred. But head to São Paulo and no one will care. ‘Loose’ cultures like these are relatively tolerant and open-minded. There’s plenty of scope for self-expression.
Professor Michele Gelfand and co-authors’ international survey (spanning 33 countries across 5 continents) reveals a spectrum of ‘tight and loose cultures. People in tight cultures show greater self-control, conscientiousness, less littering, lower crime, more synchrony, stronger prejudice against outsiders, low immigration, low ethnic diversity, and more restrictions on public speech. Loose cultures are typically more open, tolerant, creative and over-weight.
Neither extreme is superior, these are just descriptively different cultures.
Within the US, there’s great cultural heterogeneity. Southern states have far higher rates of corporal punishment, executions and alcohol restrictions. In Texas in 2011, 28,000 school students were paddled or spanked. Alabama still criminalises the sale of sex toys. Tight states like these strongly opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.
Norm adherence isn’t just a function of self-regulation. Gelfand also emphasises institutions. Tight cultures tend to have more police per capita and security personnel. In Singapore, there are harsh punishments for littering, drug possession and even importing chewing gum. In some Chinese classrooms, webcams broadcast children’s behaviour, relaying footage to parents and school officials.
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Our ancestors used to farm a rich variety of crops. Some were very labour intensive, requiring neighbourly cooperation.
A phenomenal new paper by Martin Fiszbein, Yeonha Jung and Dietrich Vollrath finds that in U.S. counties with labour-intensive crops, parents were more likely to give their children names that were common. This may indicate a desire for conformity. By contrast, in areas where farmers could be more self-sufficient, they chose names that were more individualistic. And when exogenous shifts propelled farmers into economic autonomy, they became even more self-expressive… Crops in the U.S. South were exceptionally labour intensive.
…
Economic interdependence seems to breed cultural conformity and collectivism. These are both examples of what Michele Gelfand calls ‘cultural tightness’. People in tight cultures show more synchrony, stronger prejudice against outsiders and more restrictions on public speech. Outraged by deviants, they tend to impose harsh punishments…
Fiszbein et al do not consider cultural tightness, but it does seem correlated with 19th century labour intensity [as one can see in comparing this map to the one above].
Globally, cultural tightness seems more common in places where farming was once extremely labour intensive and necessarily interdependent. Wet paddy rice required immense coordination. Thomas Talhelm argues that this encouraged East Asian collectivism. Students from rice-growing regions contribute more to public goods and harshly punish free-riders.
I was initially sceptical of the rice theory of culture. What about Confucianism and institutions? Fiszbein et al’s paper enables us to disentangle the two. Even under totally different, American institutions, agrarian interdependence nurtures conformity.
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Strong kinship intensity keeps commerce and cooperation rooted around the family. This enables strong social policing and concern for wider approval.
Arabs continue to rely on wasta. Social connections are necessary to access jobs, secure permits, avoid trickery, and resolve conflicts. Even middle-class, professional Jordanians acquire social insurance from kin. Loyalty is also culturally esteemed: girls are encouraged to put family first, above narrow self-interest.
Caste remains imperative in India. Cities (especially the smaller ones) are rife with caste-based residential segregation. People remain dependent on close-knit networks, which maintain strict surveillance (messaging via Whatsapp)…
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My theory can be tested empirically!
I predict that economic growth will foster more cultural liberalisation in societies
- historically reliant on crops with low labour intensity
- with weak kinship intensity.
Data-wise, I would recommend using the World Values Survey composite score of emancipative values over the past 15 years…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Why are some Rich Societies Conservative?” from @_alice_evans.
{Image at top: source]
* Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (in which he also relevantly observed: “I know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world; every citizen must be put in possession of his rights, or rights must be granted to no one.”)
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As we contemplate culture, we might recall that it was on this date in 1890 that journalist Nellie Bly completed her 72-day trip around the world.
In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, with two days’ notice, she boarded the steamer Augusta Victoria, and began her 24,899-mile journey.
She brought with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear, and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money (£200 in English bank notes and gold, as well as some American currency) in a bag tied around her neck.
Bly traveled through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. Just over seventy-two days after her departure from Hoboken, having used steamships and existing railway lines, Bly was back in New York; she beat Phileas Fogg’s time by almost 8 days.
“Can one desire too much of a good thing?”*…
In his wonderful newsletter, The Convivial Society, L. M. Sacasas wonders if the success, and thus proliferation, of language in the world around us has undermined its effectiveness…
Close to the start of the year, I reflected on the plight of language under digital conditions. I was motivated by the sense that “something of consequence is happening to ordinary language, the lifeblood of human thought and action, under digital conditions.” More specifically, I proposed the following thesis: “that having built our political structures on the assumption that human experience and human society can be ordered by human language and speech, we may now be suffering through the discovery that the world we have built is no longer responsive to either.”
To put this in parlance that has grown increasingly familiar in the intervening months, the human-built world is already unaligned to human values and well-being because it operates at a scale and according to a logic that elude our comprehension and confound our agency. And this is so largely because it exists beyond the reach of ordinary language. The realm of speech, specifically its public and thus political quarters, increasingly becomes the realm of exasperating and maddening futility. And we may all be forgiven for feeling as if we are the idiots whose words, however full of sound and fury, finally signify nothing, and, more to the point, effect no change in the world.
Just as in the modern West faith was deemed too irrational and volatile for the public sphere and thus relegated to the relative obscurity of private life, so now it seems that language itself is being likewise banished to the realm of the private, which is to say that, whatever pretenses to the contrary, real power no longer resides in ordinary human speech. We are not ruled by words but by formulas and algorithms and those who wield them…
… now, nearly a year later and after an unplanned hiatus, I find myself serendipitously drawn back to the theme of language but from a different angle: from the perspective of silence. The specific occasion has been my reading of The World of Silence, by the Swiss philosopher Max Picard.
Silence, like darkness, tends to be conceived chiefly as an absence, as nothing in itself. Darkness is merely the absence of light and, likewise, silence is merely the absence of sound. Considered this way, it’s tempting to imagine darkness and silence both as negations of some more positive reality. Light is to be preferred to darkness, and sound to silence. We bear this out when, if darkness or silence threaten, we instinctively flood our living spaces with both light and sound.
Not surprisingly, I suppose, it is hard to describe in words what I have chiefly learned from Picard. But if I were to try, it is this idea—which became more than idea, something sensible to me—that silence is what Picard called an autonomous reality, it is something of itself and not merely a negation, and, critically, that it is part of the nature of silence to be a vital, renewing force from whose absence we suffer more than we know.
…
Picard asserts that “silence is the only phenomenon today that is ‘useless’.” “It does not fit into the world of profit and utility,” he continues, “it simply is. It seems to have no other purpose; it cannot be exploited.”
This uselessness is precisely what gives silence, in Picard’s view, its healing quality. Consider these words:
“Yet there is more help and healing in silence than in all the ‘useful things’. Purposeless, unexplainable silence suddenly appears at the side of the all-too-powerful, and frightens us by its very purposelessness. It interferes with the regular flow of the purposeful. It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the damage inflicted by exploitation. It makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness.”
This wholeness emerges from Picard’s metaphysical reflections on the nature of silence. At another point he speaks of silence as a substance that enters into us. That substance creates a buffer among the various, often conflicting realities within us. Our own contradictions must pass over the substance of silence before coming into contact with one another. In this way, silence is a substance protective of our inner life. Picard also suggests that “man is better able to endure things hostile to his own nature, things that use him up, if he has the silent substance within …. Technics in itself, life with machines, is not injurious unless the protective substance of silence is absent.”
These are not words to be analyzed. They are, I believe, simply to be contemplated, and their truth ascertained only in practice. But they struck me. They struck me for the promise Picard holds out of help and healing and wholeness. We live in a scattering time, to borrow a line from the poet Richard Wilbur. All the forces at play within us and without seem to be centrifugal forces, pulling us apart. I remain interested in understanding the nature of these forces. The critical conversation remains important. But I’m increasingly interested in how we might find and deploy alternative ways of being in the world. What are the practices that will sustain us? Silence may be just such a practice, and we may do well to experiment with whatever possibilities are afforded to us to enter into silence and to allow silence to enter into us…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Thing That Is Silence.”
Bonus recommendation: Percival Everett‘s Dr. No, a “caper” novel about an “expert on nothing” (that’s to say, a brilliant mathematician who is an expert in his area of study: nothing) drawn into a plot to rob Fort Knox. As thought-provoking as it is entertaining– which is to say, tons.
[Image above: source]
* Rosalind, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It
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As we query quietness, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that Billboard magazine published the first pop music chart– the “Music Popularity Chart”– based on record sales. A listing of the ten most popular records, it became a weekly feature in 1940 (as pictured below). It fluctuated in size from ten to 30 records until 1955, when Billboard introduced its first Top 100 chart. The “Hot 100” chart, now recognized as the definitive singles chart in the US, was first published on August 4th, 1958.
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