I found the article thought provoking, but rubbed me the wrong way. It makes a bold claim - that kinship societies are incapable of 'economic development' and by implication that the only path for...
Exemplary
I found the article thought provoking, but rubbed me the wrong way. It makes a bold claim - that kinship societies are incapable of 'economic development' and by implication that the only path for poverty reduction is through a social revolution to specifically make the people conform to Western individualist (rational, egoist, dependent on state over other structures) standards. This gets applied to an entire continent with a variety of cultures, history, and economic conditions. I don't want to just 'noble savage' and say kinship societies are perfect and propagate no social ills, they most certainly do. But to put everything on a linearized scale of kinship vs individualism and say that one is the source of impoverishment seems reductivist and like the author has a particular agenda. The whole thing is written as though this person's family went and stole their house.
I'm also shocked that any discussion positing a single reason for Africa's poverty can ignore the international and historical systems of oppression that have been, and continue to be levied against the continent. A framing of the issue as 'African kinship societies are just fundamentally bad at getting themselves out of poverty' really looks like an attempt to absolve any obligations Western countries have towards developmental aid, except of course to promote our 'superior' values of individualist capital accumulation (which of course should not be maligned here at home either lest we too slide into impoverishment). That's an uncharitable take perhaps, but I don't think the author's take was particularly charitable either.
Chiming in with my degree in development economics here, the author doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. Funerals, weddings, and kinship networks are not why these societies are poor....
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Chiming in with my degree in development economics here, the author doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. Funerals, weddings, and kinship networks are not why these societies are poor. They may explain foolish spending beyond your means by individuals in these societies, but then you’d have to argue with a straight face that the upper middle class American with a 6 bedroom McMansion and $2k/month in car payments is culturally more inclined to build wealth. In contrast to claiming the people are poor because the funerals are lavish, the funerals are actually growing increasingly lavish because the people are becoming richer and cultural expectations are ramping up to revel in the new wealth. That may be healthy or it may not be, but that’s a discussion for Ghanaians to have themselves about whether it’s worth it to them without being lectured by some dipshit blogger.
For one thing, where does he think the money spent on lavish funerals is going? If a hospital charges you an arm and a leg to keep a corpse refrigerated, what does he think happens to the money the hospital now has after charging you? Do you think that, maybe, they invest more capital into the hospital!? What does he think happens to the vendors from whom they buy the food? To the DJ? To the people who sell the clothes?
A society’s economic vitality is measured by how many goods and services it can produce. If people are spending heavily that circulates money around to incentivize production of more stuff. If there’s enough surplus capital afterwards they can invest it into productivity enhancing tools and practices to produce even MORE stuff that they value for less input. As usual with this type of moralizing scold, they confuse how personal finances work with how national wealth accumulation works. It’s also not as if the funeral doesn’t benefit the community in any way. The thing itself is an excuse to have a party, parties are things people do because we are not Vulcan ascetics. If they weren’t saving up money for funerals to party at, they’d have spent more on birthdays or baby showers or whatever other occasions they want to celebrate. In a family’s lifetime budget the funeral just comes out in the wash. It’s just an example of seeing a notable and distinctive element of a different culture and deciding that THAT difference must explain all the other differences.
And secondarily, tight kinship bonds are how social welfare services are provided in societies that lack the state capacity to provide those services through bureaucratic programs. Ritualized contexts to affirm those ties are how those bonds are maintained. You don’t magically become rich by removing peoples’ safety nets, the reason more developed economies fray these ties is because people have access to other means of supporting themselves! But even in the developed world, immigrant communities tend to thrive in contrast to their native born counterparts in large part because they have strong communal and kinship ties where they support each other instead of regarding each other in intensely individualistic and transactional terms.
This made me think of influencer culture and gender reveals with planes and fireworks and buying birkin bags and all those similar sorts of extravagance that are for nothing other than show. When...
If they weren’t saving up money for funerals to party at, they’d have spent more on birthdays or baby showers or whatever other occasions they want to celebrate. In a family’s lifetime budget the funeral just comes out in the wash. It’s just an example of seeing a notable and distinctive element of a different culture and deciding that THAT difference must explain all the other differences.
This made me think of influencer culture and gender reveals with planes and fireworks and buying birkin bags and all those similar sorts of extravagance that are for nothing other than show.
When digging through some research a sociologist posted on the actual topic I felt the determination of "kinship societies" vs individualistic societies were based on odd metrics and old data that didn't really make sense to me. All of this also makes me think a lot of people really just want to say that (the entire, treated homogenously, continent of) Africa should have solved its post-colonialism problems no matter who caused them. And it should do it the way "we" think "they" should.
Yeah it’s a general rule that most people are bad with money and tend to blow it on frivolous things. It can explain why a person or a family is poor but generally they’re making themselves poor...
Yeah it’s a general rule that most people are bad with money and tend to blow it on frivolous things. It can explain why a person or a family is poor but generally they’re making themselves poor to the benefit of other people around them who are getting richer at their expense. Unless the money is actually being destroyed, like blowing up productive capital or demolishing your house, those choices don’t make the nation poorer. More unequal certainly, but not poorer.
There’s arguments to be made that it’s gauche and tacky. I happen to think it is! But that’s an aesthetic preference. When I was planning my wedding I was frequently annoyed by the Indian cultural expectations to keep going bigger and BIGGER with everything but that was mostly culture clash in wanting to save the money for personal travel rather than on the community.
Yeah my point wasn't even that it's necessarily "bad" or "good" with money, it's that the motivation of "for the spectacle" or even "for socially expected spectacle" is very much not limited to...
Yeah my point wasn't even that it's necessarily "bad" or "good" with money, it's that the motivation of "for the spectacle" or even "for socially expected spectacle" is very much not limited to Sub Saharan Africa. Indian weddings seems a very apt comparison!
Or Sports balls. How much money does this blogger think Americans spend on sport balls every year. Even lil ol' Canada just spend $1B (conservative estimate, and no we can't see the math) on FIFA....
Or Sports balls. How much money does this blogger think Americans spend on sport balls every year. Even lil ol' Canada just spend $1B (conservative estimate, and no we can't see the math) on FIFA. (Edit: and IOC FIFA money goes straight out of the country. NHL money and NBA and NFL money is also extracted into private wealth not local DJ or the Cake Aunty)
Well said. I thought the article was very interesting, but that's because I have practically zero knowledge of anything related sub-Saharan Africa. I don't think the author is bringing forward...
Well said. I thought the article was very interesting, but that's because I have practically zero knowledge of anything related sub-Saharan Africa. I don't think the author is bringing forward enough evidence to support his sweeping claims. I might be a bit more receptive if this piece were written by, I don't know, a professor of cultural anthropology who specializes in sub-Saharan Africa and has published work about the region, but as far as I can tell the author is a 25 year old Grovel Institute kid who covers a wide range of topics. Impressive, no doubt, but forgive me if I question his expertise.
I feel like I'm in a dark room, and he's shining a light on a corner of the room and saying that's all I need to see in order to know what the rest of the room looks like.
It’s an opinionated essay rather than a summary of expert consensus, and blaming a single cause does seem rather bold and simplistic. Maybe a better takeaway would be something weaker, that...
It’s an opinionated essay rather than a summary of expert consensus, and blaming a single cause does seem rather bold and simplistic. Maybe a better takeaway would be something weaker, that kinship networks appear to be an important obstacle to economic growth.
I think I'd still probe a bit on whether kinship networks are an obstacle to economic growth, there's a number of assumptions that the article makes which I think deserve a closer look, eg: that...
I think I'd still probe a bit on whether kinship networks are an obstacle to economic growth, there's a number of assumptions that the article makes which I think deserve a closer look, eg:
that kinship networks are at conflict with rule of law and contractual obligations
that ritual removal of wealth cannot be repurposed into social benefit (eg. if wealth was given away to motivate some lasting communal improvement)
that capital allocation must be done at an individual's discretion in order to be effective (family and communally owned businesses exist after all)
that individual capital accumulation is necessary to alleviate poverty in particular (ie. why individuals instead of at the state, society, or family group level might not be better positioned to intercede to help those in need)
that these wealth burning rituals are not producing beneficial externalties worth preserving in at least some form (many cultures include extravagent events)
I agree with some of those assumptions (at least in a weakened form), but there's still too much missing for me to agree to the conclusion that kinship networks are an important obstacle.
Also, it's not like Americans don't also have their giant wealth-destroying funery rites. They tend to burn $10k on a casket when a nice cloth shroud could be had for a tiny fraction of that.
Also, it's not like Americans don't also have their giant wealth-destroying funery rites. They tend to burn $10k on a casket when a nice cloth shroud could be had for a tiny fraction of that.
Only if you're in the top 20%. The bottom 50% averages out to $9,700. That's the bitch about averages in the USA. You basically need to have completely seperate averages by quintile in order to...
Only if you're in the top 20%.
The bottom 50% averages out to $9,700.
That's the bitch about averages in the USA. You basically need to have completely seperate averages by quintile in order to have remotely reasonable numbers.
Considering that all my father left was debt and I had to pay for his funeral while I was barely getting established in life, let's just say that this is not how it always is.
Considering that all my father left was debt and I had to pay for his funeral while I was barely getting established in life, let's just say that this is not how it always is.
My father, mother, and grandfather died in debt. When my grandfather died I was living in his house, and my grandmother and I had to move out because he had a reverse mortgage and we had a choice...
My father, mother, and grandfather died in debt. When my grandfather died I was living in his house, and my grandmother and I had to move out because he had a reverse mortgage and we had a choice of paying them an absurd amount of money or letting them take the house.
I don’t have any statistics on hand but I think in the US people who die of old age will usually die in debt simply because they are burning their money on healthcare costs.
It depends on property and other investments and whether they do financial planning to protect said property and investments and basically go broke intentionally so they get Medicaid. It...
It depends on property and other investments and whether they do financial planning to protect said property and investments and basically go broke intentionally so they get Medicaid. It unfortunately requires money to figure out how to keep the money a lot of the time. To the point of couples getting divorced to not have to pay out of pocket for ridiculously expensive care.
(This one is personal as my partner and I can't get married)
Africa isn't the only region that suffered under imperialism, and we do see split economic results based on strong kinship. Some countries and regions have grown despite their former challenges...
Africa isn't the only region that suffered under imperialism, and we do see split economic results based on strong kinship. Some countries and regions have grown despite their former challenges while others haven't. It's good to ask why.
Do we see split economic results based on strong kinship? A split rigorous enough to show cause and effect? The article doesn't present evidence showing that afaict, nor does it do any comparisons...
Do we see split economic results based on strong kinship? A split rigorous enough to show cause and effect? The article doesn't present evidence showing that afaict, nor does it do any comparisons to look at other countries. Even if it did, there's a long way to go before establishing that strong kinship is not just a contributing factor but supposedly /the/ contributing factor. Perhaps there is something there, but the article is not presenting the kind of analysis I'd need to really entertain it when instead we could, eg. investigate mineral wealth exploitation or work to reconstitute USAID. It's not good to keep asking 'why' when there's an opportunity cost to not pursuing the immediate and obvious issues.
An analysis which says that a broad material issue is due specifically to culture, especially a culture that the author is not from, needs to meet an incredibly high bar because it's a suggestion that is ripe for abuse. Many imperialist projects were started under the stated aim of reshaping an indigenous culture 'for their own material betterment' up to and including the present day. Again, this isn't to say that cultures are impervious to critique in some absolute moral relatist way, but it's not critiques we should levee lightly.
Indeed the author's expertise appears to be an undergrad degree (in history?) and being politically precocious while now working in VC at Andreeson Horowitz. He makes a lot of authoritative...
Indeed the author's expertise appears to be an undergrad degree (in history?) and being politically precocious while now working in VC at Andreeson Horowitz.
He makes a lot of authoritative statements that I'd want to see causal or at least more rigorous correlational evidence for beyond "feels right, that's why they're poor". This may "just" be an opinionated essay as mentioned elsewhere but he presents it as fact.
ETA, I did dig into a response to this article and critiques of that response and the data use and dug into the (actual professor) author of that initial response and stopped when I found that (professor) author literally posting his own stuff to the Scott Alexander subreddit. I decided I have better things to do today, like prepare for a possible awful tornado.
I strongly agree with this in general, but I'm not convinced that the kinship society angle makes more sense than for example the fact that the pan-african movement tried to adopt marxism as an...
I strongly agree with this in general, but I'm not convinced that the kinship society angle makes more sense than for example the fact that the pan-african movement tried to adopt marxism as an antithesis to the ideology of the colonizers - something that arguably affects the economic development even more negatively, and as opposed to kinship vs poverty you can't really argue that the cause vs effect is the other way around, strong kinship existing as a way to deal with poverty.
That's an interesting observation. From that perspective, we can probably compare with India's liberalization which has led to vastly improved living standards.
That's an interesting observation. From that perspective, we can probably compare with India's liberalization which has led to vastly improved living standards.
I don't think the author was framing everything as funerals are the end all be all cause of Africa's economic woes, or even that kinship societies necessarily doomed to economic poverty. But...
I don't think the author was framing everything as funerals are the end all be all cause of Africa's economic woes, or even that kinship societies necessarily doomed to economic poverty. But surely we can point to cultural practices that don't contribute much to the overall betterment of the communities they happen in as a negative that should be looked at, right? All this money on a funeral is money that could go into infrastructure, or healthcare, or anything else that's productive or a better use of that capital. I think that yes, individual choice and economic prosperity is something we in the West prioritize, and I'm ok with thinking some of that are universal moral goods. I also vehemently disagree with practices of forced marriage, female genital mutilation etc. I think it's a bit ridiculous to have to caveat every criticism of something with "Colonialism may have been responsible for some of these woes", I don't think it's really adding much value. It's not about absolution it's about focusing on something in particular, without necessarily attributing blame, no?
I agree that societies and practices are able to be critiqued, but the title of his post, and IMO the post itself, is literally framing it this way.
I don't think the author was framing everything as funerals are the end all be all cause of Africa's economic woes, or even that kinship societies necessarily doomed to economic poverty.
I agree that societies and practices are able to be critiqued, but the title of his post, and IMO the post itself, is literally framing it this way.
I think it's framed that this is one of many things keeping Africans, of Ghana and similar nations that have this practice, poor. Not that it's the reason they are poor, but it's something that...
I think it's framed that this is one of many things keeping Africans, of Ghana and similar nations that have this practice, poor. Not that it's the reason they are poor, but it's something that keeps destroying the ability for families to spend on other, more productive things. I can see posts on Reddit in /r/Ghana lamenting the practice, and from cursory searches, it's not even something that has historical precedence in their culture, it's a modern practice, something that has more or less appeared organically. I think that's why it's important to look at it and the culture surrounding it. You can read anecdotes from many insular communities where the in-group is prioritized, whether that be money lending, jobs, etc, and it oftentimes even if it has some protective effects, it also ends up with too many negative externalities, compared to what we'd consider "typical". A place like Kiryas Joel for example, where the children can't and don't speak English, and are woefully unprepared for any society that isn't Hasidic, and those kids don't have an option to choose where they are born or the community they are raised in. It's not a good look. So there's always trade-offs, there's always reasons cultures develop practices that on paper don't seem to make a lot of sense, but I don't think it's wrong to point to the ways in which they might be detrimental to those communities.
Again I think practices can be critiqued and should be analyzed, especially by sociologists, particularly with expertise in the area which this guy doesn't seem to have. I don't understand why you...
Again I think practices can be critiqued and should be analyzed, especially by sociologists, particularly with expertise in the area which this guy doesn't seem to have. I don't understand why you went on to do so, when I said this before. I'm not arguing about the substance, I'm replying to your statement about the author's framing
Because when the title says "how funerals keep Africa poor" and the article goes on to lean heavily on kinship societies' practices are keeping people poor, that is in fact his explicit framing.
Maybe that wasn't what he meant - but it's what he wrote. And I am not inclined to be more generous to him than he was to kinship societies.
The article has a heading titled "Kinship societies are wealth-destroying societies" and says "Economic development is extraordinarily difficult in intensive kinship culture" and also remarks how...
The article has a heading titled "Kinship societies are wealth-destroying societies" and says "Economic development is extraordinarily difficult in intensive kinship culture" and also remarks how "suffocating that social world is, how parasitical it is on its most productive members, and how poisonous it is for any prospect of economic development". There's a lot like that in the article. It's pretty explicit in its hypothesis.
I didn't talk about the funeral rights in particular, but I will say that all societies indulge in many many rituals and activities that don't go into infrastructure, healthcare, or anything that's productive or a better use of capital. That's just called living life, no? We might readily agree that perhaps the amount of expenditure on funerals is too much relative to other priorities, but I'd hope it's an issue with the amount spent rather than with the activity itself. People need fulfillment beyond the base tiers of Maslow's heirarchy even if those base tiers aren't being consistently met. Economists, and likely the article's author, can call this an irrational wastage of potential but it doesn't make it wrong or bad.
In my original post I already said I'm not trying to take a moral relativist stance, there are practices that should be shunned or condemned. Costly funerals are not on that list for me though.
Finally, I don't think every discussion of issues needs caveating with 'Colonialism' but I think it's extremely telling that this author makes no mention of it and makes the claims they're making. I'll just be blunt: I think this article is a thinly veiled trojan horse of an ideology attempting to assuage western guilt at the consequences of our imperialist and colonialist past by pointing only at the idea that poverty is really just a choice that 'some specific groups of people' are making. It states that kinship groups are performing the role of the welfare state and then paints all recipients as mooches. It calls warm familial bonds wistful thinking and roundly reduces human life to a measure of productive output. It ignores any possible responsibility that we in the west may have towards addressing poverty and paints the kinship group as an active, malevolent adversary to a nebulously defined idea of progress. I'd usually give the benefit of the doubt and just allow this to be a 'oh look at that interesting societal quirk' type of article where broader systemic issues can be elided, but this article has some agenda beyond that so I feel it's relevant to bring up that missing context.
It seems that these extremely expensive funerals are a more modern invention, so I think there's not necessarily a reason to point to the colonial history of sub-Saharan Africa if it's something...
It seems that these extremely expensive funerals are a more modern invention, so I think there's not necessarily a reason to point to the colonial history of sub-Saharan Africa if it's something that has arisen post-colonialism, or within-colonialism if you'd prefer that phrasing. So from a case study perspective I think focusing on the how's and the why's is more pertinent, sure, the author is making a value judgement about the practice, and indeed making a judgement against kinship societies in comparison to more western market economies.
I think it's still totally fine to look at the situation and wonder: why are these societies, even with modern information, still making sub-optimal decisions, and we're not just speaking sub-optimal in terms of some capitalist vs kinship perspective, sub-optimal in terms of access to healthcare, maternal mortality, child hunger, etc. Real human metrics, the purpose of maslow's hierarchy is to be a heuristic for quality of life, I do find it interesting in a paradoxical way that poor communities would spend so much celebrating the dead but not spend on healthcare for the living, that's an interesting thing to look at, even if you think this author in particular has an axe to grind.
I think there's a time and a place to bring up the history that may have influenced initial conditions or underlying circumstances of a problem, but it's not always helpful to addressing that problem. I deal a lot with medicaid populations in healthcare, and saying "racism" is the reason for the disparate health outcomes of African Americans may be completely true, but it's also unhelpful. When our goal is to figure out how to stop so many black americans from having kidney failure, we have to address any practices or cultural components that are contributory factors, and yes, make a value judgement about it. I think it's just a bit....tiring, that I knew these types of comments would be here as soon as I read the article, but I don't see the same type of defense of culture or non-capitalist ideals when it comes to female genital mutilation? We don't have to litigate everything as serving some alternative cultural theses every time, sometimes we can just decry something as harmful. I think that's obviously the case with FGM, I think it's the case with Hasidic communities denying basic education to kids, and I think it's harmful here if families feel entitled to spend multiple years of salary on ever exorbitant funerals, especially when it appears to have no real historical cultural significance. Similar things like gambling, in western societies or otherwise, or lotto tickets, or payday loans, it's preying on the less fortunate to extract wealth away from them, I don't think we have to bend over backwards to defend that.
Thanks for the reply. I don't think I particularly disagree with your comment except that we have different views of the intent and thesis of the article. As I said, an article with limited aims...
Thanks for the reply. I don't think I particularly disagree with your comment except that we have different views of the intent and thesis of the article. As I said, an article with limited aims of presenting the specific exorbitant funeral costs as a predatory practice and a piece of general interest, totally fine to skip over the larger picture. Examining how a particular practice might produce ills in the society at large is good and can be done with less context. My claim is that that's not the article before us and that it's thesis and argument are not contained to the narrow scope of pricy funerals. It's making a significantly broader claim where other systemic factors are germane and relevant. If you don't think it's making those broader claims then I can see how my comments come across as superfluous.
And again, I've never said that you can't critique social practices or apply universal moral standards. I'm not a moral relativist. Post an article specifically about genital mutilation and I'll condemn the practice. Post an article that genital mutilation is the cause of infant mortality where it also vaguely implies that trans people shouldn't exist and I'll condemn the article though.
This article is the latter and not the former. It's particular critique is flawed in as such that it's used to argue a broader condemnation of kinship societies or posit either as the (not just any, but the) primary agent of poverty and vaguely imply that we should all just shut up about western societies being too individualistic. My critique of the article is limited to it taking that angle. If you don't see that angle being the primary one then I fear we can only ever talk past each other
Thanks for posting; I really enjoyed reading the article and the companion pieces from the author. I trust his general observations about some cultures in African societies, and the individual...
Exemplary
Thanks for posting; I really enjoyed reading the article and the companion pieces from the author.
I trust his general observations about some cultures in African societies, and the individual examples are compelling, but I was quite surprised by his chain of causation.
Kinship networks certainly do provide a number of important welfare functions: people want to see their relatives fed and housed and cared for, and a kinship network is, among other things, a mechanism for accomplishing that. But it’s hard not to notice something darker. The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it: someone who no longer needs your help is also someone who might not help you.
David argues that the kinship network hobbles people from investing in savings or business development, which makes sense to me, but then concludes that the kinship network hinders economic growth at large.
This dynamic, you’ll notice, isn’t really compatible with durable economic growth. Economic development is extraordinarily difficult in intensive kinship culture.
Concluding causation doesn't sit right with me, and this is because the observable behaviors of "kinship culture"—offering jobs to kinship members even when they aren't perfect, having credit networks also within families, needing to care for the unsuccessful or unemployed within kinship—are mostly well and alive within rich, well-off societies as well. I can only speak from anecdotal experience, but I believe it's quite rare for individuals to abandon their family's well-being for their own pursuit, unless there's been a severe conflict between that individual and the family. Kinship loyalty still appears very strong in at least American society.
The core difference, to me, is that there often isn't a tradeoff, because of the economic efficiencies in America that the African countries lack. When people age, children typically don't move back home to care; instead, elderly people are moved into private care facilities that can serve many people, and the elderly might pay from their own savings, a reverse mortgage, Social Security, etc. When someone is unable to work due to permanent disability, there's might be a legal structure set up to ensure their family can provide them some income tax-free, along with substantial government aid (which is still often insufficient, but I'm comparing against the societies described in the article). America is notorious among developed nations for being pretty unforgiving and unequal, but the centralized support structures are still leagues beyond undeveloped nations.
The author does identify that the lack of strong, central institutions contributes to the problem. But surprisingly, the author concludes that kinship loyalties prevent the institutions from forming.
In large part, this is because kinship loyalties crowd out loyalties to impersonal institutions: this lack of impersonal social trust is why African societies have so few large firms, for example. But it’s also because the glue that holds together kinship society is the occasional immolation of built-up wealth.
It seems far more intuitive to me to conclude that the existence of strong institutions alleviates the burden of kinship loyalty. When people can trust institutions (banks, courts of law, etc.), they can focus on themselves and their own careers, specializing and providing greater economic efficiency. Frankly, abandoning kinship loyalty in the type of society his other article describes seems like it would just mean letting all these unemployed or elderly people have no support.
There’s a reason why virtually every economically successful society has graduated from a social order that stresses the claims of kin into one that stresses the rights of individuals.
I think the economic, legal, and political successes come first, and the social order transformation comes later.
I think the context about funerals specifically and the idea of enforced destruction of wealth adds interesting texture to this though, because I can see most of the points more or less equally...
I think the context about funerals specifically and the idea of enforced destruction of wealth adds interesting texture to this though, because I can see most of the points more or less equally from either a “kinship first, then strengthening economics, then loosening the more damaging expectations” or a “loosening expectations first, allowing economics to be strengthened” point of view, but I can’t square the former with the idea that funerals are sending a decade of family income up in smoke. I’d come across a few articles about the elaborate funeral culture in the past, looking at it as a social, cultural, and artistic phenomenon - and mentioning the costs as a burden - but the idea of them evolving as a deliberate destruction of wealth to maintain existing social structures is an interesting one I hadn’t heard before, and it does make a fair amount of sense to me, even though I doubt the people participating consciously see it that way.
To follow up on that, here’s a third blog post where he writes about why there are few large firms: Africa doesn't have large firms because it doesn't have social trust … It seems like a trap...
To follow up on that, here’s a third blog post where he writes about why there are few large firms:
Simply put, it’s very difficult to operate a large formal business if the enforceability of contracts is a matter of doubt in any way or if personal relationships and affiliations are seen to supersede legal ones. Rule of law doesn’t need to be absolute, and there was plenty of corruption and chicanery in the United States and East Asia during their periods of most rapid industrial expansion. But the ability of everyday legal agreements to be promptly enforced is an absolute requirement for firms to scale.
In turn the reason that African countries have so few large firms, and in part why African commercial economies tend to be so inefficient and have such high transaction costs, is that they have extraordinarily low levels of social trust. In practically every African country, impersonal social trust as measured by the World Values Survey or Afrobarometer ranks among the lowest in the world. Meanwhile kinship intensity, as measured by the strength of various kinship-favoring norms—preferences for cousin-marriage, polygamy, the co-residence of extended families, clan organization, and community endogamy—is extraordinarily intense across Africa.
…
As one would expect, all the economic symptoms of the lack of impersonal trust and dependence on kin networks that are embedded in traditional societies—the absence of forward contracts, the avoidance of the legal system in handling commercial disputes, the inability of ethnically mixed groups to punish defectors—are abundant across Africa. It is this stark deficit of impersonal and out-of-network trust that prevents African societies from forming large-scale, complex, formal enterprises; large firms rely on contractual obligations—to and from employees, suppliers, and customers—that cannot be enforced in a situation where kinship ties outweigh impersonal obligations. It is this trust deficit that leaves an opening for market-dominant minorities, like Lebanese in West Africa or South Asians in East Africa, to fill the vacuum.
It seems like a trap that’s hard to get out of. Perhaps that’s why outside help is needed?
This is an exceptionally good post. I think you're exactly right to question the arrow of causality between kinship and lack of formal institutions. I agree that Oks overstates it -- the more...
This is an exceptionally good post.
I think you're exactly right to question the arrow of causality between kinship and lack of formal institutions. I agree that Oks overstates it -- the more likely answer, in my opinion, is that the two reinforce one another in a vicious cycle. In many African countries, for instance, the ethnic group in power favors its own, which reduces trust in formal institutions, leading people to strengthen kinship bonds - and, naturally, then seek political power to protect their own kin. That's not universally true and it's not a perfect explanation: South Africa isn't really like this at all (it's a genuinely multiethnic government) and yet many South Africans still rely more on kinship than institutions, especially in rural areas where the institutions are weak. It does illustrate a general principle, though, that the two are mutually reinforcing.
I do think that Oks' first point, though, that kinship networks impede economic development, is pretty defensible.
Concluding causation doesn't sit right with me, and this is because the observable behaviors of "kinship culture"—offering jobs to kinship members even when they aren't perfect, having credit networks also within families, needing to care for the unsuccessful or unemployed within kinship—are mostly well and alive within rich, well-off societies as well.
Though I agree in general, as above, I totally disagree with this. The scale and scope is so dissimilar. "Nepo baby" is a derogatory term in America, whereas in high-kinship societies it's just... life.
There's a story, probably apocryphal but illustrative, about Americans talking to Afghans about development.
"Giving a job to your cousin instead of someone else is corruption," said the Americans. "It's bad."
"What? No," replied the Afghans. "What's bad is when you have a job to give and you don't give it to your cousin!"
I don't attach a moral judgement to that, necessarily. It's easy to see how and why people get there. But from an economic development perspective, it's clearly corrosive.
I get the distinction you're making, but while this is true among a subset of Americans and particularly when thinking about high paying, high profile jobs, getting a familial advantage is not...
Nepo baby" is a derogatory term in America, whereas in high-kinship societies it's just... life.
I get the distinction you're making, but while this is true among a subset of Americans and particularly when thinking about high paying, high profile jobs, getting a familial advantage is not uncommon . Lots of folks use connections to get jobs or to make more money at said job.
We do have laws and ethics practices against it in many fields and that certainly makes an impact. But when opportunities are scarcer, people are going to try to help out family and friends. That also happens in the US.
I agree that the moral judgment is a valuable distinction to make. I think that even though “nepo baby” is a derogatory term, it’s still a common practice. Especially among wealthy and powerful...
Though I agree in general, as above, I totally disagree with this. The scale and scope is so dissimilar. "Nepo baby" is a derogatory term in America, whereas in high-kinship societies it's just... life.
I agree that the moral judgment is a valuable distinction to make. I think that even though “nepo baby” is a derogatory term, it’s still a common practice.
Especially among wealthy and powerful families, families find ways to get that kinship outcome within the structures at hand, particularly education. Competitive, elite schools often have legacy admissions. Expensive private high schools serve as ways for privileged children to establish strong networks with other children of privilege when they’re just growing up.
My larger point was that one can see kinship allegiance still being a strong priority within American society. That allegiance just incurs less economic loss (or at least less obvious loss) because the institutions are strong.
That's fair, but I really think you're still underestimating the scope and scale of kinship in western societies vs. African societies. One key difference that I haven't seen anyone remark on yet...
That's fair, but I really think you're still underestimating the scope and scale of kinship in western societies vs. African societies. One key difference that I haven't seen anyone remark on yet is that in Africa it's typically the extended family that's the primary drain, not direct family members. The examples you cited in America are about direct lineage - paying for private high school for your own children, legacy admissions for the school your parents went to. (I think in theory having an extended relative still slightly preferences you, but I'm not sure what that really means in practice.)
By contrast, to cite the Senegal paper,
...we find that people fear redistributive pressure from extended family members, but not from within the household or from friends and neighbors.
Paying for your children's education isn't really a kinship tax in the same way that having to send money to distant cousins is.
Heard. I hadn’t really considered, but I see that the family units in Western cultures often consist only of the nuclear family. That’s definitely a greater economic strain on potential...
Heard. I hadn’t really considered, but I see that the family units in Western cultures often consist only of the nuclear family. That’s definitely a greater economic strain on potential entrepreneurs or professionally successful individuals.
I wonder how much that culture would naturally subside if the institutions were stronger.
This point is certainly overbroad. 'Kinship networks' in the West are often considered a secret of success; see for example this random, recent article that claims that kinship networks among the...
David argues that the kinship network hobbles people from investing in savings or business development, which makes sense to me, but then concludes that the kinship network hinders economic growth at large.
This point is certainly overbroad. 'Kinship networks' in the West are often considered a secret of success; see for example this random, recent article that claims that kinship networks among the Jewish diaspora were responsible for the surprising economic success of a normally marginalized ethnic group.
Also taking every claim in this article at face value, the blog post doesn't really address why kinship networks are the 'oldest and most durable type of human society.' If that claim is true, they can't be purely parasitic under historical conditions; what changed?
I think the synthesis is found in how the determiners of wealth have changed over the past two centuries. As I see it, the wealth of pre-industrial agrarian and pre-agrarian is determined by luck, manpower, and common works, in no particular order. Kinship societies would help along all three axes:
By redistributing from haves to have-nots, they act as a kind of mutual insurance. Before refrigeration consumable wealth was relatively ephemeral (it would rot), so a potlach is not 'ritualistic destruction of individual wealth' but more a sharing of fortune.
By providing organizational ties, they can act to organize labour. If you have work to be done then you can call on this network to get your cousins to show up, and if they slack off then you can shame them in front of the rest of the network. At the same time, the dynamics of subsistence-and-a-little-bit-more production meant that most households were relatively unspecialized by modern standards, so it's more likely that generic family help would suffice.
By providing hierarchy and stability, they satisfied some of the preconditions for common works to be shared among the community, like irrigation networks, field clearance, or herd enlargement.
I suppose that the problem arises with economic structures where wealth arises from individual capital: knowledge/education, tooling, machinery. Unlike the stochastic fortune of a good harvest those benefits are more sustained, so structures that incentivize capital accumulation are more likely to prosper. (Simultaneously, the other half of the equation -- that gifts bring status within the kinship structure -- matters much less when the source of wealth is an impersonal market rather than household production of subsistence-and-a-little-more goods.)
The answer, I think, is that the funeral isn’t really about the deceased. Funerals function as a costly signal of kinship group loyalty: and in that context, the expense of the funeral is the point. And, in turn, funerals tell us quite a lot about why so many societies across Africa have had so much trouble achieving economic “takeoff.” Kinship societies are actively hostile to economic growth, because economic growth undermines the basis of kinship: that is why kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead. The funeral is a window into a system of wealth destruction that serves, above all else, to keep people poor.
[...]
African societies, as a broad pattern, have extraordinarily intense kinship ties. Only a few other places—the Pashtun heartlands of southern Afghanistan, the mountains of Chechnya and Dagestan, the jungles of New Guinea—exhibit kinship intensity on par with what prevails in much of sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a universal pattern across all of Africa—the San people of the Kalahari desert, for example, have relatively flexible social arrangements—but the general tendency is clear: African societies, by and large, are kinship societies.
[...]
But you also owe things to your kinship network on a more day-to-day level: we can call these sharing obligations. Just as you pay taxes and fees to the various impersonal institutions that govern life in the rich world, you must make regular contributions to the collective welfare of your kin. But there’s a crucial distinction. In a modern society, you will know, more or less, what you owe and when you’ll owe it; but with sharing obligations there’s no such clarity. The demands from your kin—hospital bills, loan requests, funeral expenses—simply come up.
And you can’t really say no to these obligations. The mutual obligation that defines intensive kinship really is essential to the functioning of everyday life in kinship societies. A person who fails to demonstrate loyalty to the group risks losing access to everything the group provides. And this threat is powerfully enforced in traditional cultures. In a society where your standing in the kinship network is often the single most important thing about you, being cast out is a kind of social death.
And so, in a kinship society, nothing that you earn is truly yours. If you make money beyond the point of subsistence, you’ll be expected to share it with your less-fortunate relatives; if you start a business, you’ll be expected to hire your cousins or nephews or in-laws, even if they’re not the best possible employees; if you buy a car, you’ll be expected to lend it out to relatives who need it.
[...]
The relentlessness of sharing obligations also makes it nearly impossible to accrue savings over time. Thus we see that in KwaZulu-Natal individuals will go out of their way to invest their surplus in non-sharable goods, like roofing or fencing, instead of accumulating liquid savings that their families might claim.
[...]
So from the perspective of the kinship network, wealth is a threat. Those who become wealthy have an incentive to defect; and while social sanctions can punish those who defect explicitly, it’s much harder to police those—like the businesswoman in Nairobi—who defect quietly. The safest bet is to prevent people from becoming too rich in the first place.
[...]
You can think of funerals as another wealth destruction ritual. The genius of it is that it can’t be evaded: it is a public ceremony virtually dedicated to the immolation of wealth. In private, you might be able to evade your sharing obligations by hiding your earnings or your savings; but in public, at the funeral, the claims that your kin make on your wealth are at their most visible and least avoidable. You can’t simply not show up to your uncle’s funeral; and, if you show up, you will obviously be expected to contribute a handsome sum.
And this logic is even more powerful for those who are suspected of shirking their kinship obligations. It’s at the funeral where you must signal your willingness to honor sharing obligations most loudly. The lavishness of the funeral is a costly signal of continued commitment to the system of mutual obligation that holds the kinship group together. The point is that it’s expensive and incommensurate with your means.
[...]
And so in the second half of the twentieth century a huge funeral economy emerged in Ghana. Bodies could be refrigerated indefinitely in hospital mortuaries, and since the fees escalated with each passing week it became prestigious to refrigerate bodies for a long time; by the 2000s, many Ghanaian hospitals were earning more from storing dead bodies than from treating living patients.
[...]
There’s a reason why virtually every economically successful society has graduated from a social order that stresses the claims of kin into one that stresses the rights of individuals. Living in a society of individuals governed by impersonal institutions, we have an understandable wistfulness for the imagined world of warm communities and thick familial bonds. But we forget how suffocating that social world is, how parasitical it is on its most productive members, and how poisonous it is for any prospect of economic development.
I don’t think that African societies are ripe for social transformations of the kind just described; loyalties to strong states won’t supplant loyalties to kinship networks anytime soon. But for the most productive people trapped inside these kinship networks, I do think that technology offers something like an escape hatch. Mobile phones and bank accounts held under a single name are tools that help these people put a wall between what they earn and what their family knows they earn. In many cases these technologies are remarkably liberating. Senegalese women who were able to receive hidden income immediately cut transfers to relatives by a quarter and spent the money on healthcare for themselves.
There’s a lot to be said, then, for one of the most underappreciated virtues of modern financial systems: privacy. Social modernity, in the end, is really about not having to do what your family tells you to do—marrying whom you want, taking the job you want, and spending your earnings the way you want. There is something cold about this, of course, but also something deeply emancipating. In a world where your relatives can see and lay claim to everything you earn, anything that makes your income a little less legible to them is also, quietly, an engine of economic development.
The Akan have a proverb, abusua do funu: “the family loves the corpse.” I quoted it in my essay on funerals, as a sort of wry comment on the tendency to spend more on funerals than on the living. But really it’s much darker than that: it’s one of the proverbs that Ghanaian taxi drivers paint on the backs of their cars as charms against witchcraft, alongside others like sura nea oben wo, “fear the one who is close to you” and otan firi fie, “hatred comes from the home.” They are sayings about the dangers that lurk within the family unit. The family loves the corpse because the corpse no longer eats. The living elder, in bad times, is not always loved at all.
The extent to which these kinship societies impact the lives even of people that have "left" can often be seen in successful athletes, e.g. football (soccer) players of African descent. Their...
The extent to which these kinship societies impact the lives even of people that have "left" can often be seen in successful athletes, e.g. football (soccer) players of African descent. Their wealth is redistributed to their (extended) family (in Africa) and their next of kin share in the wealth of the player to a level that is not really seen in successful athletes from individualistic western societies.
There is nothing new in this observation, but I enjoyed the contextualization that this article provided for an observation that I (and others) have often made about the lifestyles of such football players.
This was really interesting but I can't help but think he was going out of his way to not mention capitalism at all. Sure kinship societies probably have their issues but while reading this I...
This was really interesting but I can't help but think he was going out of his way to not mention capitalism at all. Sure kinship societies probably have their issues but while reading this I couldn't help but think that the clear problem here is that everyone in these modern kinship societies is viewing it through a capitalist lense.
The idea that nobody gathers more wealth than anyone else is perfectly fine in a society that doesn't also have currency or follow the principles of capitalism. It keeps everyone fairly equal within the community. The rituals they have then spread the wealth and everyone is happy. It's not a perfect system but it worked for a long time. Sure hording your hard earned funbucks so that your lazy cousin doesn't do anything and just wants hand outs from you makes sense because the kinship model has been dismantled by modern financial and social systems.
The issue is that subsaharan africa is desperately poor. Most people do not have running water or electricity. Africa represents 70% of the world's deaths during pregancy. 20% of people are...
Sure kinship societies probably have their issues but while reading this I couldn't help but think that the clear problem here is that everyone in these modern kinship societies is viewing it through a capitalist lense.
The idea that nobody gathers more wealth than anyone else is perfectly fine in a society that doesn't also have currency or follow the principles of capitalism.
The issue is that subsaharan africa is desperately poor. Most people do not have running water or electricity. Africa represents 70% of the world's deaths during pregancy. 20% of people are severely malnourished. 30% of children are stunted in growth by poor nutrition.
Having to off your elders to make sure the family has enough food to eat is not what I'd call "perfectly fine".
What the article is talking about is fundamentally crab mentality - crabs dragging each other down in the bucket. Communist societies still aspire to greater material wealth - in many ways the soviet union or CCP china were far more intense in "destroying" the family unit and promoting a national proletariat identity than capitalist nations.
Capitalism is far from the only economic model that values overall economic development - practically all of them do! It's mainly disagreements on how economic resources should be distributed (should it be centrally planned or implicitly by market forces) and who should own the resources.
Ok I will try reply to all three comments here. I am aware of the financial situation in Africa,since I am from there,which was by design by imperialist powers. Im not saying that people should...
Ok I will try reply to all three comments here.
I am aware of the financial situation in Africa,since I am from there,which was by design by imperialist powers. Im not saying that people should not at any point aspire to have more wealth and live a nice life. My point was that Kinship societies functioned fine(not perfectly) before our modern day economic systems were forced onto the people of the continent. The fact that they invest so much money into these funerals in this modern day is not the greatest but this is a tradition that has been co opted/corrupted by capitalism. Before that came around I imagine they would throw lavish feast in the same vein as the Potlach of North America but that doesn't cut it in our modern times so here we are with funerals that bankrupt families.
Iv not studied much social anthropology but whenever I have, iv noticed that many traditions from the before times generally don't gel with how we operate today. These rituals seem almost alien because they are woven into the fabric of their society and make sense to the people practicing it. I find it sad that what was once a death ritual that would most likely bring together a village is now been bloated to something that is barely recogniseable from its origin.
What about them worked "ok" before colonialism? It would still hamper economic growth, in the same fashion that feudalism hampered economic growth in Europe or Japan before absolute monarchs and...
What about them worked "ok" before colonialism? It would still hamper economic growth, in the same fashion that feudalism hampered economic growth in Europe or Japan before absolute monarchs and power consolidation.
Sub-saharan Africa in the 1400s-1500s still had horrible infant mortality, constant hunger, and so on. It was just on par - Asia and Europe and everywhere also had all that. But we've moved on since then. Today you can live with running water and electricity and hospitals and food satiaty.
Before that came around I imagine they would throw lavish feast
Yes, that would deplete food stores and mean that people have to spend more time farming and less time for other people to specialize, which is the key to economic development - that some people can farm enough food for other people to spend their time learning mathematics, engineering, and so on.
It's not as if you just stopped valuing wealth and "viewing things from a capitalist lens", that people would stop dying of malnutrition and disease. Death is not a social construct. People are going to die from malnutrition and disease until you can produce enough food to feed all of them, factories to make modern medicine, electricity to provide people with refrigerated food and lighting, running purified water so they don't get waterborne diseases and can bathe and clean clothes. All of that is economic development, whether it be from a socialist or capitalist or whatever regime.
For all that, the life of someone of a farmer in Ghana is better today than it would be in the 1400s. They have occassional electricity, possibly a smartphone, a hospital somewhere, cheap fertilizer, affordable clothes. It's just could be much better.
Ok I dunno what you want me to say here. I am not a social anthropologist who specialised in Kinship societies from the sahel. Im going to go out on a limb and say maybe the indigenous peoples of...
Ok I dunno what you want me to say here. I am not a social anthropologist who specialised in Kinship societies from the sahel. Im going to go out on a limb and say maybe the indigenous peoples of the region didn't place as much value on economic development as much as social development hence the way they structured their society and had these kinship rituals. All Im saying is that they had a way of doing things that im assuming worked for a long time. Sure life wasn't easy and im sure when they had a funeral they didn't eat through their entire food stocks. This is also only one aspect that shouldnt be taken in isolation. They would have had exchange system with other tribes and various other practises that insured they didn't die out.
To reply to your last point. I think things could be better but that is not going to happen because it isn't in the global norths interest for that to happen. How Europe underdeveloped Africa is on my reading list.
That's kind of the problem, no? Without economic development, you don't get food security, running water, vaccines, hospitals, electricity. It also leaves you vulnerable to being preyed upon by...
Im going to go out on a limb and say maybe the indigenous peoples of the region didn't place as much value on economic development as much as social development hence the way they structured their society and had these kinship rituals.
That's kind of the problem, no? Without economic development, you don't get food security, running water, vaccines, hospitals, electricity. It also leaves you vulnerable to being preyed upon by other countries, like European colonizers. Capitalism or not, I find it hard to justify any arguments that you shouldn't at least develop economically and technologically until everyone can meet the lower tiers of Maslow's pyramid.
Valuing social coherence so much that you'd prefer to drag down members who overachieve is the issue. It's not a good thing. It perpetuates itself, but not only continues human misery from a lack of resources, but leaves you weak when stronger neighbors come knocking.
I think things could be better but that is not going to happen because it isn't in the global norths interest for that to happen.
Seems overly defeatist. That's what the global north would want African countries to think - that they're doomed forever. Then they can stripe mine the country of resources forever.
Southeast asia was also colonialized and suffers many scars, but countries like Vietnam and Thailand have made huge strides in quality of life. China went through a colonial control, a civil war, and an imperial invasion with casualty numbers that make the Western theater of WW2 look like a cake walk, and it's now a technological powerhouse that scares the US.
China's GDP per capita in 1960 was $90. What would become Ghana's GDP per capita was $192.
Ok so Im talking about tribes in the context of several centuries ago not more modern times. Also they didn't know they were gonna be colonised so why would they prepare for that. Again as I said...
That's kind of the problem, no? Without economic development, you don't get food security, running water, vaccines, hospitals, electricity. It also leaves you vulnerable to being preyed upon by other countries, like European colonizers. Capitalism or not, I find it hard to justify any arguments that you shouldn't at least develop economically and technologically until everyone can meet the lower tiers of Maslow's pyramid.
Valuing social coherence so much that you'd prefer to drag down members who overachieve is the issue. It's not a good thing. It perpetuates itself, but not only continues human misery from a lack of resources, but leaves you weak when stronger neighbors come knocking.
Ok so Im talking about tribes in the context of several centuries ago not more modern times. Also they didn't know they were gonna be colonised so why would they prepare for that. Again as I said they most likely did not pull people down so that they were immiserated. Thats not how a kinship society works.
Seems overly defeatist. That's what the global north would want African countries to think - that they're doomed forever. Then they can stripe mine the country of resources forever.
Its by design. The world bank and IMF have structured African economies in such a way that they cannot develop. Its one of the big plays by neoliberalism. So no matter how much positive thinking you wanna throw down Africa will most likely stay as is for a long time. I would love to see Africa prosper but like I said earlier it was never decolonised. They just shifted to corporations doing the dirty work.
Southeast asia was also colonialized and suffers many scars, but countries like Vietnam and Thailand have made huge strides in quality of life. China went through a colonial control, a civil war, and an imperial invasion with casualty numbers that make the Western theater of WW2 look like a cake walk, and it's now a technological powerhouse that scares the US.
China's GDP per capita in 1960 was $90. What would become Ghana's GDP per capita was $192.
These are geographically different places. Just because parts of Asia are flourishing doesnt mean all of Asia is. Just like there are parts of Africa that are doing well and parts that aren't. At this point I actually think you are trolling because that was a wild statement to make.
The global north has donated approximately 1.5 trillion dollars to Africa since 1960 and invested about another trillion. Now, I completely agree that it mostly hasn't worked, for a variety of...
I think things could be better but that is not going to happen because it isn't in the global norths interest for that to happen. How Europe underdeveloped Africa is on my reading list.
The global north has donated approximately 1.5 trillion dollars to Africa since 1960 and invested about another trillion.
Now, I completely agree that it mostly hasn't worked, for a variety of complicated reasons. But it's not like the rest of the world is keeping Africa poor on purpose.
It's not as explicit as it once was, but the continent is still to some extent exploited. Multinational corporations still own and extract much of Africa's mineral wealth. Industries reliant on...
It's not as explicit as it once was, but the continent is still to some extent exploited. Multinational corporations still own and extract much of Africa's mineral wealth. Industries reliant on African cash crops share very little wealth back to the continent despite large profits in their home countries. Loans from the IMF come with requirements for privatization and austerity. Unequal trade agreements protect western industrial imports.
Yes, of course. All of that is true. But every country in the world is to some extent exploited - that's just sorta how it goes. It certainly doesn't mean that the north is intentionally keeping...
Yes, of course. All of that is true. But every country in the world is to some extent exploited - that's just sorta how it goes. It certainly doesn't mean that the north is intentionally keeping Africa down.
However, I take your point that my comment was pollyannaish.
They have also removed wealth from the continent. I recently heard a statistic that for every dollar sent to Africa the global north extracts $7 or something along those lines. I'm not sure what...
They have also removed wealth from the continent. I recently heard a statistic that for every dollar sent to Africa the global north extracts $7 or something along those lines.
I'm not sure what your point is but if its that the global north has invested trillions into Africa so they should be developed then you are not looking deeper into the issue. You are assuming that money went to projects that solely benefit people but that most likely went to building infrastructure to continue exploiting the natural resources of the continent and funding authoritarian regimes.
You mean this statistic? It conflates aid with debt repayments and business profits. Okay, what is the solution? 1) No countries are allowed to make loans to African countries/business/entities....
You mean this statistic? It conflates aid with debt repayments and business profits. Okay, what is the solution? 1) No countries are allowed to make loans to African countries/business/entities. 2) Non-African companies are not allowed to operate in Africa. Cool, you've wrecked the economy and destroyed free trade. I thought Tildes was very much for free trade when the US tariffs were being enacted..
To reply to myself:
No countries are allowed to make loans to African countries/business/entities.
If a loan is made, the loaner expects to be repaid and with interest. Otherwise, there wouldn't be many loans being made. Few people are willing to flip a coin where heads they break even, and tails they lose their money.
Non-African companies are not allowed to operate in Africa.
Part of the complaint in the link is that companies made profits and brought them back to their original countries. If you prevent this, then foreign companies will not invest. This is fine, but goes against the grain of the last few decades of liberals pushing for free trade (see Krugman). If we now think that we should keep American dollars in the US and British pounds in the UK, then an isolationist policy from America would be in line with this.
I think capitalism is a problem here (and in general), but so is putting ten person-years worth of resources into a funeral - whether those resources take the form of cash spending or tangible...
I think capitalism is a problem here (and in general), but so is putting ten person-years worth of resources into a funeral - whether those resources take the form of cash spending or tangible shared goods in a non-capitalist society.
This amounts to saying that poverty is okay. Most of Africa is desperately poor and figuring out how to change that is very important. The contrast with Asia is stark.
This amounts to saying that poverty is okay. Most of Africa is desperately poor and figuring out how to change that is very important. The contrast with Asia is stark.
I remember this making the rounds on hacker news (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710907) a few months ago, and the discussion was roughly the same kind of split as here (albeit Tildes has...
I remember this making the rounds on hacker news (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710907) a few months ago, and the discussion was roughly the same kind of split as here (albeit Tildes has a much higher floor on bad comments than HN).
I think my take away from reading it this time (I didn't read it the first time on hn), in addition to all the great discussion here so far, is that I don't feel like the article really supports the "wealth destroying" argument. All throughout the article are quotes like:
Your body is going to remain in that refrigerated unit for a long time. Typically it will be weeks or months; sometimes bodies can stay refrigerated for an entire year. Why so long? Because the longer that the body stays in the mortuary, the more time the family has to raise funds for a funeral truly befitting your status. And, since the hospital charges escalating fees for each additional week that your body is stored there, keeping your body refrigerated for a long time is itself a mark of prestige.
Eventually, your family decides that they’ve raised the funds they’re going to raise. So they pick a Saturday—the funerals of Christian Ghanaians are always held on Saturdays—and plan a lavish event that will, in fact, stretch across three days. They hire a graphic designer to produce large colorful banners bearing your name, your photograph, your dates of birth and death, and the time and place of your funeral: these are hung on walls and fences at intersections around the city. They rent a venue, hire a large staff—caterers, a DJ or live band, a photographer, maybe a videographer, perhaps even dancing pallbearers—and choose a funeral cloth for the family to wear. And if your family can afford it, or wants the community to believe that they can, they commission a craftsman to carve you a “fantasy coffin” shaped like something you enjoyed or admired in life: perhaps a cocoa pod, a school building, a crab, a paintbrush, or a giant blue teapot.
And, finally, after all this, the big day comes. Your body is retrieved from the mortuary; hundreds of people show up, many of whom never knew you in life; and a great deal of money is spent feeding them, entertaining them, and sending you off in the style that an Akan elder deserves.
It’s often observed, in fact, that families will spend more money on burying the dead than on keeping the sick alive: indeed, in the Kagera region of northern Tanzania, families spend 50 percent more money on funerals than on medical care.
Sometimes they’ll have insurance of some kind: funeral insurance, where the payout is earmarked for the funeral costs, is one of the most popular financial products in sub-Saharan Africa—often, in fact, more popular than health insurance. And much of the time, family members will pay for funerals with loans from others. About a quarter of households in KwaZulu-Natal, for example, pay for funerals by going into debt.
In each case it's an example of the deceased's relatives paying money to someone in exchange for goods or services. You pay money to a hospital, to the staff of that hospital, to the graphic designers, to the caterers, the DJ, you're paying for food, where is that money going? It sounds like its going to the local hospital, to local labour, to local goods, where is the wealth being destroyed? Individual wealth, by which I mean the family of the deceased who are paying for the funeral, that seems to be decreasing in these incidents, but its not going on a funeral pyre, nor does it sound like its going outside of the country (or even municipality I bet), the money is exchanging hands and powering a local economy.
I could, myself, personally, probably come up with reasons why (whether I agree or believe them or not) -- but the article, as best I can tell, does not.
The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it: someone who no longer needs your help is also someone who might not help you.
"any of its members", it claims are prevented from prospering, but doesn't support why the network itself is not prospering as a whole from, what sounds like, a big wealth distribution mechanism.
There’s a reason why virtually every economically successful society has graduated from a social order that stresses the claims of kin into one that stresses the rights of individuals. Living in a society of individuals governed by impersonal institutions, we have an understandable wistfulness for the imagined world of warm communities and thick familial bonds. But we forget how suffocating that social world is, how parasitical it is on its most productive members, and how poisonous it is for any prospect of economic development.
I don't believe at any point does it delve in to why it poisons any prospect of economic development, it's laid out like a natural fact without elucidation
The obvious incentive, then, is to hobble the most productive: the demands that the kinship group makes on its most productive members are not simply demands for solidarity but demands for a kind of enforced mediocrity.
"mediocrity" is an interesting choice, we all use contemporarily use it to imply subpar, but the actual definition is moreso "the state or quality of being average, ordinary, or merely adequate". An "enforced average", the most productive members of the group are "hobbled" as it claims, by having to pay out for all these expenses, but does not address why the expenses are not bringing the average up, and making the network more prosperous as a whole.
It's an interesting take on what is a society I know very little about, and is very different from the ones I am familiar with, but I don't get the sense that it backs up its arguments, that it "makes the math work". The author seems in-line with modern western-style individualism, and writes with the conviction that its' principles are inherent and synonymous with positive economic growth, and whether I or anyone agrees or disagrees with that, you still have to make the arguments and back up why that's the case.
It's only briefly touched on in the article, but the canonical example here is the study showing that when senegalese women received secret incomes, the amount they gave to relatives dropped and...
any of its members", it claims are prevented from prospering, but doesn't support why the network itself is not prospering as a whole from, what sounds like, a big wealth distribution mechanism.
It's only briefly touched on in the article, but the canonical example here is the study showing that when senegalese women received secret incomes, the amount they gave to relatives dropped and they spent more on their own healthcare. The point being that people are actively being hurt by strong kin networks - it's not only the extra that gets redistributed, it's everything.
That study doesn't explain why the network itself isn't prospering. This is me, so weight your credulity accordingly: basically, the network is not prospering because there's not enough wealth to distribute in the first place.
Anything from starting a small business to building a house - two primary ways to build wealth - takes a certain amount of capital. In these strong kin networks, amassing that capital is nearly impossible because anything you have you're expected to redistribute. Returning to my point about there not being enough wealth in the first place, what is redistributed all basically gets diffused into living expenses for the whole kin network, so the others in the network aren't receiving enough to start business or build houses either (I'm not attaching a moral judgement to this, by the way.)
That's why microlending and, now, direct cash giving are so popular (and seemingly effective) - they provide starter capital, bypassing the redistributative process entirely.
Regarding waste, you need to look at what people do in exchange for the money. Making a fancy coffin or other fancy ornaments that would otherwise be unnecessary is wasteful. But is banqueting...
Regarding waste, you need to look at what people do in exchange for the money. Making a fancy coffin or other fancy ornaments that would otherwise be unnecessary is wasteful. But is banqueting your neighbors wasteful? Not necessarily as long as the food doesn't go to waste.
I don't know enough about these cultures to say, but there are lots of links in the articles for further reading.
From what I've read about potlatch culture in the Pacific Northwest, it sounds like it was extremely wasteful and that was the point.
Well said Not only that, but this piece also demonstrates a view point that economic worth is a key indicator, if not the very definition, of a worthy person and a worthy culture.
Well said
The author seems in-line with modern western-style individualism, and writes with the conviction that its' principles are inherent and synonymous with positive economic growth,
Not only that, but this piece also demonstrates a view point that economic worth is a key indicator, if not the very definition, of a worthy person and a worthy culture.
I don't think that's the intent. The point is that "wealth" correlates extremely strongly with health and well-being. Extreme poverty is devastating by modern standards, and no amount of social...
I don't think that's the intent. The point is that "wealth" correlates extremely strongly with health and well-being. Extreme poverty is devastating by modern standards, and no amount of social network support will fix that.
I couldn't tell how much of this is the "crabs in a bucket" mentality, but I have to imagine it contributes. Success or good fortune can easily breed social resentment.
I couldn't tell how much of this is the "crabs in a bucket" mentality, but I have to imagine it contributes. Success or good fortune can easily breed social resentment.
My point is broader than material wealth. Social influencers and clout chasers are intoxicated by likes and subscribers and engagement. Greed and resentment aren't limited to money.
My point is broader than material wealth. Social influencers and clout chasers are intoxicated by likes and subscribers and engagement. Greed and resentment aren't limited to money.
Yea, but money is very much the jet fuel on the campfire, so to speak. Like + subscribe (and the whole influencer thing) is very much driven by monetary gains once a threshold is met.
Yea, but money is very much the jet fuel on the campfire, so to speak.
Like + subscribe (and the whole influencer thing) is very much driven by monetary gains once a threshold is met.
I found the article thought provoking, but rubbed me the wrong way. It makes a bold claim - that kinship societies are incapable of 'economic development' and by implication that the only path for poverty reduction is through a social revolution to specifically make the people conform to Western individualist (rational, egoist, dependent on state over other structures) standards. This gets applied to an entire continent with a variety of cultures, history, and economic conditions. I don't want to just 'noble savage' and say kinship societies are perfect and propagate no social ills, they most certainly do. But to put everything on a linearized scale of kinship vs individualism and say that one is the source of impoverishment seems reductivist and like the author has a particular agenda. The whole thing is written as though this person's family went and stole their house.
I'm also shocked that any discussion positing a single reason for Africa's poverty can ignore the international and historical systems of oppression that have been, and continue to be levied against the continent. A framing of the issue as 'African kinship societies are just fundamentally bad at getting themselves out of poverty' really looks like an attempt to absolve any obligations Western countries have towards developmental aid, except of course to promote our 'superior' values of individualist capital accumulation (which of course should not be maligned here at home either lest we too slide into impoverishment). That's an uncharitable take perhaps, but I don't think the author's take was particularly charitable either.
Chiming in with my degree in development economics here, the author doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. Funerals, weddings, and kinship networks are not why these societies are poor. They may explain foolish spending beyond your means by individuals in these societies, but then you’d have to argue with a straight face that the upper middle class American with a 6 bedroom McMansion and $2k/month in car payments is culturally more inclined to build wealth. In contrast to claiming the people are poor because the funerals are lavish, the funerals are actually growing increasingly lavish because the people are becoming richer and cultural expectations are ramping up to revel in the new wealth. That may be healthy or it may not be, but that’s a discussion for Ghanaians to have themselves about whether it’s worth it to them without being lectured by some dipshit blogger.
For one thing, where does he think the money spent on lavish funerals is going? If a hospital charges you an arm and a leg to keep a corpse refrigerated, what does he think happens to the money the hospital now has after charging you? Do you think that, maybe, they invest more capital into the hospital!? What does he think happens to the vendors from whom they buy the food? To the DJ? To the people who sell the clothes?
A society’s economic vitality is measured by how many goods and services it can produce. If people are spending heavily that circulates money around to incentivize production of more stuff. If there’s enough surplus capital afterwards they can invest it into productivity enhancing tools and practices to produce even MORE stuff that they value for less input. As usual with this type of moralizing scold, they confuse how personal finances work with how national wealth accumulation works. It’s also not as if the funeral doesn’t benefit the community in any way. The thing itself is an excuse to have a party, parties are things people do because we are not Vulcan ascetics. If they weren’t saving up money for funerals to party at, they’d have spent more on birthdays or baby showers or whatever other occasions they want to celebrate. In a family’s lifetime budget the funeral just comes out in the wash. It’s just an example of seeing a notable and distinctive element of a different culture and deciding that THAT difference must explain all the other differences.
And secondarily, tight kinship bonds are how social welfare services are provided in societies that lack the state capacity to provide those services through bureaucratic programs. Ritualized contexts to affirm those ties are how those bonds are maintained. You don’t magically become rich by removing peoples’ safety nets, the reason more developed economies fray these ties is because people have access to other means of supporting themselves! But even in the developed world, immigrant communities tend to thrive in contrast to their native born counterparts in large part because they have strong communal and kinship ties where they support each other instead of regarding each other in intensely individualistic and transactional terms.
This made me think of influencer culture and gender reveals with planes and fireworks and buying birkin bags and all those similar sorts of extravagance that are for nothing other than show.
When digging through some research a sociologist posted on the actual topic I felt the determination of "kinship societies" vs individualistic societies were based on odd metrics and old data that didn't really make sense to me. All of this also makes me think a lot of people really just want to say that (the entire, treated homogenously, continent of) Africa should have solved its post-colonialism problems no matter who caused them. And it should do it the way "we" think "they" should.
Yeah it’s a general rule that most people are bad with money and tend to blow it on frivolous things. It can explain why a person or a family is poor but generally they’re making themselves poor to the benefit of other people around them who are getting richer at their expense. Unless the money is actually being destroyed, like blowing up productive capital or demolishing your house, those choices don’t make the nation poorer. More unequal certainly, but not poorer.
There’s arguments to be made that it’s gauche and tacky. I happen to think it is! But that’s an aesthetic preference. When I was planning my wedding I was frequently annoyed by the Indian cultural expectations to keep going bigger and BIGGER with everything but that was mostly culture clash in wanting to save the money for personal travel rather than on the community.
Yeah my point wasn't even that it's necessarily "bad" or "good" with money, it's that the motivation of "for the spectacle" or even "for socially expected spectacle" is very much not limited to Sub Saharan Africa. Indian weddings seems a very apt comparison!
Or Sports balls. How much money does this blogger think Americans spend on sport balls every year. Even lil ol' Canada just spend $1B (conservative estimate, and no we can't see the math) on FIFA. (Edit: and IOC FIFA money goes straight out of the country. NHL money and NBA and NFL money is also extracted into private wealth not local DJ or the Cake Aunty)
Ridiculous sermonizing (blogger I mean)
Well said. I thought the article was very interesting, but that's because I have practically zero knowledge of anything related sub-Saharan Africa. I don't think the author is bringing forward enough evidence to support his sweeping claims. I might be a bit more receptive if this piece were written by, I don't know, a professor of cultural anthropology who specializes in sub-Saharan Africa and has published work about the region, but as far as I can tell the author is a 25 year old Grovel Institute kid who covers a wide range of topics. Impressive, no doubt, but forgive me if I question his expertise.
I feel like I'm in a dark room, and he's shining a light on a corner of the room and saying that's all I need to see in order to know what the rest of the room looks like.
It’s an opinionated essay rather than a summary of expert consensus, and blaming a single cause does seem rather bold and simplistic. Maybe a better takeaway would be something weaker, that kinship networks appear to be an important obstacle to economic growth.
I think I'd still probe a bit on whether kinship networks are an obstacle to economic growth, there's a number of assumptions that the article makes which I think deserve a closer look, eg:
I agree with some of those assumptions (at least in a weakened form), but there's still too much missing for me to agree to the conclusion that kinship networks are an important obstacle.
Also, it's not like Americans don't also have their giant wealth-destroying funery rites. They tend to burn $10k on a casket when a nice cloth shroud could be had for a tiny fraction of that.
In the US that's usually pretty minor compared to inheritance.
Only if you're in the top 20%.
The bottom 50% averages out to $9,700.
That's the bitch about averages in the USA. You basically need to have completely seperate averages by quintile in order to have remotely reasonable numbers.
We literally buy insurance to afford the funeral rites we want!
Considering that all my father left was debt and I had to pay for his funeral while I was barely getting established in life, let's just say that this is not how it always is.
My father, mother, and grandfather died in debt. When my grandfather died I was living in his house, and my grandmother and I had to move out because he had a reverse mortgage and we had a choice of paying them an absurd amount of money or letting them take the house.
I don’t have any statistics on hand but I think in the US people who die of old age will usually die in debt simply because they are burning their money on healthcare costs.
It depends on property and other investments and whether they do financial planning to protect said property and investments and basically go broke intentionally so they get Medicaid. It unfortunately requires money to figure out how to keep the money a lot of the time. To the point of couples getting divorced to not have to pay out of pocket for ridiculously expensive care.
(This one is personal as my partner and I can't get married)
Africa isn't the only region that suffered under imperialism, and we do see split economic results based on strong kinship. Some countries and regions have grown despite their former challenges while others haven't. It's good to ask why.
Do we see split economic results based on strong kinship? A split rigorous enough to show cause and effect? The article doesn't present evidence showing that afaict, nor does it do any comparisons to look at other countries. Even if it did, there's a long way to go before establishing that strong kinship is not just a contributing factor but supposedly /the/ contributing factor. Perhaps there is something there, but the article is not presenting the kind of analysis I'd need to really entertain it when instead we could, eg. investigate mineral wealth exploitation or work to reconstitute USAID. It's not good to keep asking 'why' when there's an opportunity cost to not pursuing the immediate and obvious issues.
An analysis which says that a broad material issue is due specifically to culture, especially a culture that the author is not from, needs to meet an incredibly high bar because it's a suggestion that is ripe for abuse. Many imperialist projects were started under the stated aim of reshaping an indigenous culture 'for their own material betterment' up to and including the present day. Again, this isn't to say that cultures are impervious to critique in some absolute moral relatist way, but it's not critiques we should levee lightly.
Indeed the author's expertise appears to be an undergrad degree (in history?) and being politically precocious while now working in VC at Andreeson Horowitz.
He makes a lot of authoritative statements that I'd want to see causal or at least more rigorous correlational evidence for beyond "feels right, that's why they're poor". This may "just" be an opinionated essay as mentioned elsewhere but he presents it as fact.
ETA, I did dig into a response to this article and critiques of that response and the data use and dug into the (actual professor) author of that initial response and stopped when I found that (professor) author literally posting his own stuff to the Scott Alexander subreddit. I decided I have better things to do today, like prepare for a possible awful tornado.
I strongly agree with this in general, but I'm not convinced that the kinship society angle makes more sense than for example the fact that the pan-african movement tried to adopt marxism as an antithesis to the ideology of the colonizers - something that arguably affects the economic development even more negatively, and as opposed to kinship vs poverty you can't really argue that the cause vs effect is the other way around, strong kinship existing as a way to deal with poverty.
That's an interesting observation. From that perspective, we can probably compare with India's liberalization which has led to vastly improved living standards.
I don't think the author was framing everything as funerals are the end all be all cause of Africa's economic woes, or even that kinship societies necessarily doomed to economic poverty. But surely we can point to cultural practices that don't contribute much to the overall betterment of the communities they happen in as a negative that should be looked at, right? All this money on a funeral is money that could go into infrastructure, or healthcare, or anything else that's productive or a better use of that capital. I think that yes, individual choice and economic prosperity is something we in the West prioritize, and I'm ok with thinking some of that are universal moral goods. I also vehemently disagree with practices of forced marriage, female genital mutilation etc. I think it's a bit ridiculous to have to caveat every criticism of something with "Colonialism may have been responsible for some of these woes", I don't think it's really adding much value. It's not about absolution it's about focusing on something in particular, without necessarily attributing blame, no?
I agree that societies and practices are able to be critiqued, but the title of his post, and IMO the post itself, is literally framing it this way.
I think it's framed that this is one of many things keeping Africans, of Ghana and similar nations that have this practice, poor. Not that it's the reason they are poor, but it's something that keeps destroying the ability for families to spend on other, more productive things. I can see posts on Reddit in /r/Ghana lamenting the practice, and from cursory searches, it's not even something that has historical precedence in their culture, it's a modern practice, something that has more or less appeared organically. I think that's why it's important to look at it and the culture surrounding it. You can read anecdotes from many insular communities where the in-group is prioritized, whether that be money lending, jobs, etc, and it oftentimes even if it has some protective effects, it also ends up with too many negative externalities, compared to what we'd consider "typical". A place like Kiryas Joel for example, where the children can't and don't speak English, and are woefully unprepared for any society that isn't Hasidic, and those kids don't have an option to choose where they are born or the community they are raised in. It's not a good look. So there's always trade-offs, there's always reasons cultures develop practices that on paper don't seem to make a lot of sense, but I don't think it's wrong to point to the ways in which they might be detrimental to those communities.
Again I think practices can be critiqued and should be analyzed, especially by sociologists, particularly with expertise in the area which this guy doesn't seem to have. I don't understand why you went on to do so, when I said this before. I'm not arguing about the substance, I'm replying to your statement about the author's framing
Because when the title says "how funerals keep Africa poor" and the article goes on to lean heavily on kinship societies' practices are keeping people poor, that is in fact his explicit framing.
Maybe that wasn't what he meant - but it's what he wrote. And I am not inclined to be more generous to him than he was to kinship societies.
The article has a heading titled "Kinship societies are wealth-destroying societies" and says "Economic development is extraordinarily difficult in intensive kinship culture" and also remarks how "suffocating that social world is, how parasitical it is on its most productive members, and how poisonous it is for any prospect of economic development". There's a lot like that in the article. It's pretty explicit in its hypothesis.
I didn't talk about the funeral rights in particular, but I will say that all societies indulge in many many rituals and activities that don't go into infrastructure, healthcare, or anything that's productive or a better use of capital. That's just called living life, no? We might readily agree that perhaps the amount of expenditure on funerals is too much relative to other priorities, but I'd hope it's an issue with the amount spent rather than with the activity itself. People need fulfillment beyond the base tiers of Maslow's heirarchy even if those base tiers aren't being consistently met. Economists, and likely the article's author, can call this an irrational wastage of potential but it doesn't make it wrong or bad.
In my original post I already said I'm not trying to take a moral relativist stance, there are practices that should be shunned or condemned. Costly funerals are not on that list for me though.
Finally, I don't think every discussion of issues needs caveating with 'Colonialism' but I think it's extremely telling that this author makes no mention of it and makes the claims they're making. I'll just be blunt: I think this article is a thinly veiled trojan horse of an ideology attempting to assuage western guilt at the consequences of our imperialist and colonialist past by pointing only at the idea that poverty is really just a choice that 'some specific groups of people' are making. It states that kinship groups are performing the role of the welfare state and then paints all recipients as mooches. It calls warm familial bonds wistful thinking and roundly reduces human life to a measure of productive output. It ignores any possible responsibility that we in the west may have towards addressing poverty and paints the kinship group as an active, malevolent adversary to a nebulously defined idea of progress. I'd usually give the benefit of the doubt and just allow this to be a 'oh look at that interesting societal quirk' type of article where broader systemic issues can be elided, but this article has some agenda beyond that so I feel it's relevant to bring up that missing context.
It seems that these extremely expensive funerals are a more modern invention, so I think there's not necessarily a reason to point to the colonial history of sub-Saharan Africa if it's something that has arisen post-colonialism, or within-colonialism if you'd prefer that phrasing. So from a case study perspective I think focusing on the how's and the why's is more pertinent, sure, the author is making a value judgement about the practice, and indeed making a judgement against kinship societies in comparison to more western market economies.
I think it's still totally fine to look at the situation and wonder: why are these societies, even with modern information, still making sub-optimal decisions, and we're not just speaking sub-optimal in terms of some capitalist vs kinship perspective, sub-optimal in terms of access to healthcare, maternal mortality, child hunger, etc. Real human metrics, the purpose of maslow's hierarchy is to be a heuristic for quality of life, I do find it interesting in a paradoxical way that poor communities would spend so much celebrating the dead but not spend on healthcare for the living, that's an interesting thing to look at, even if you think this author in particular has an axe to grind.
I think there's a time and a place to bring up the history that may have influenced initial conditions or underlying circumstances of a problem, but it's not always helpful to addressing that problem. I deal a lot with medicaid populations in healthcare, and saying "racism" is the reason for the disparate health outcomes of African Americans may be completely true, but it's also unhelpful. When our goal is to figure out how to stop so many black americans from having kidney failure, we have to address any practices or cultural components that are contributory factors, and yes, make a value judgement about it. I think it's just a bit....tiring, that I knew these types of comments would be here as soon as I read the article, but I don't see the same type of defense of culture or non-capitalist ideals when it comes to female genital mutilation? We don't have to litigate everything as serving some alternative cultural theses every time, sometimes we can just decry something as harmful. I think that's obviously the case with FGM, I think it's the case with Hasidic communities denying basic education to kids, and I think it's harmful here if families feel entitled to spend multiple years of salary on ever exorbitant funerals, especially when it appears to have no real historical cultural significance. Similar things like gambling, in western societies or otherwise, or lotto tickets, or payday loans, it's preying on the less fortunate to extract wealth away from them, I don't think we have to bend over backwards to defend that.
Thanks for the reply. I don't think I particularly disagree with your comment except that we have different views of the intent and thesis of the article. As I said, an article with limited aims of presenting the specific exorbitant funeral costs as a predatory practice and a piece of general interest, totally fine to skip over the larger picture. Examining how a particular practice might produce ills in the society at large is good and can be done with less context. My claim is that that's not the article before us and that it's thesis and argument are not contained to the narrow scope of pricy funerals. It's making a significantly broader claim where other systemic factors are germane and relevant. If you don't think it's making those broader claims then I can see how my comments come across as superfluous.
And again, I've never said that you can't critique social practices or apply universal moral standards. I'm not a moral relativist. Post an article specifically about genital mutilation and I'll condemn the practice. Post an article that genital mutilation is the cause of infant mortality where it also vaguely implies that trans people shouldn't exist and I'll condemn the article though.
This article is the latter and not the former. It's particular critique is flawed in as such that it's used to argue a broader condemnation of kinship societies or posit either as the (not just any, but the) primary agent of poverty and vaguely imply that we should all just shut up about western societies being too individualistic. My critique of the article is limited to it taking that angle. If you don't see that angle being the primary one then I fear we can only ever talk past each other
Thanks for posting; I really enjoyed reading the article and the companion pieces from the author.
I trust his general observations about some cultures in African societies, and the individual examples are compelling, but I was quite surprised by his chain of causation.
David argues that the kinship network hobbles people from investing in savings or business development, which makes sense to me, but then concludes that the kinship network hinders economic growth at large.
Concluding causation doesn't sit right with me, and this is because the observable behaviors of "kinship culture"—offering jobs to kinship members even when they aren't perfect, having credit networks also within families, needing to care for the unsuccessful or unemployed within kinship—are mostly well and alive within rich, well-off societies as well. I can only speak from anecdotal experience, but I believe it's quite rare for individuals to abandon their family's well-being for their own pursuit, unless there's been a severe conflict between that individual and the family. Kinship loyalty still appears very strong in at least American society.
The core difference, to me, is that there often isn't a tradeoff, because of the economic efficiencies in America that the African countries lack. When people age, children typically don't move back home to care; instead, elderly people are moved into private care facilities that can serve many people, and the elderly might pay from their own savings, a reverse mortgage, Social Security, etc. When someone is unable to work due to permanent disability, there's might be a legal structure set up to ensure their family can provide them some income tax-free, along with substantial government aid (which is still often insufficient, but I'm comparing against the societies described in the article). America is notorious among developed nations for being pretty unforgiving and unequal, but the centralized support structures are still leagues beyond undeveloped nations.
The author does identify that the lack of strong, central institutions contributes to the problem. But surprisingly, the author concludes that kinship loyalties prevent the institutions from forming.
It seems far more intuitive to me to conclude that the existence of strong institutions alleviates the burden of kinship loyalty. When people can trust institutions (banks, courts of law, etc.), they can focus on themselves and their own careers, specializing and providing greater economic efficiency. Frankly, abandoning kinship loyalty in the type of society his other article describes seems like it would just mean letting all these unemployed or elderly people have no support.
I think the economic, legal, and political successes come first, and the social order transformation comes later.
I think the context about funerals specifically and the idea of enforced destruction of wealth adds interesting texture to this though, because I can see most of the points more or less equally from either a “kinship first, then strengthening economics, then loosening the more damaging expectations” or a “loosening expectations first, allowing economics to be strengthened” point of view, but I can’t square the former with the idea that funerals are sending a decade of family income up in smoke. I’d come across a few articles about the elaborate funeral culture in the past, looking at it as a social, cultural, and artistic phenomenon - and mentioning the costs as a burden - but the idea of them evolving as a deliberate destruction of wealth to maintain existing social structures is an interesting one I hadn’t heard before, and it does make a fair amount of sense to me, even though I doubt the people participating consciously see it that way.
To follow up on that, here’s a third blog post where he writes about why there are few large firms:
Africa doesn't have large firms because it doesn't have social trust
…
It seems like a trap that’s hard to get out of. Perhaps that’s why outside help is needed?
This is an exceptionally good post.
I think you're exactly right to question the arrow of causality between kinship and lack of formal institutions. I agree that Oks overstates it -- the more likely answer, in my opinion, is that the two reinforce one another in a vicious cycle. In many African countries, for instance, the ethnic group in power favors its own, which reduces trust in formal institutions, leading people to strengthen kinship bonds - and, naturally, then seek political power to protect their own kin. That's not universally true and it's not a perfect explanation: South Africa isn't really like this at all (it's a genuinely multiethnic government) and yet many South Africans still rely more on kinship than institutions, especially in rural areas where the institutions are weak. It does illustrate a general principle, though, that the two are mutually reinforcing.
I do think that Oks' first point, though, that kinship networks impede economic development, is pretty defensible.
Though I agree in general, as above, I totally disagree with this. The scale and scope is so dissimilar. "Nepo baby" is a derogatory term in America, whereas in high-kinship societies it's just... life.
There's a story, probably apocryphal but illustrative, about Americans talking to Afghans about development.
"Giving a job to your cousin instead of someone else is corruption," said the Americans. "It's bad."
"What? No," replied the Afghans. "What's bad is when you have a job to give and you don't give it to your cousin!"
I don't attach a moral judgement to that, necessarily. It's easy to see how and why people get there. But from an economic development perspective, it's clearly corrosive.
I get the distinction you're making, but while this is true among a subset of Americans and particularly when thinking about high paying, high profile jobs, getting a familial advantage is not uncommon . Lots of folks use connections to get jobs or to make more money at said job.
We do have laws and ethics practices against it in many fields and that certainly makes an impact. But when opportunities are scarcer, people are going to try to help out family and friends. That also happens in the US.
I agree that the moral judgment is a valuable distinction to make. I think that even though “nepo baby” is a derogatory term, it’s still a common practice.
Especially among wealthy and powerful families, families find ways to get that kinship outcome within the structures at hand, particularly education. Competitive, elite schools often have legacy admissions. Expensive private high schools serve as ways for privileged children to establish strong networks with other children of privilege when they’re just growing up.
My larger point was that one can see kinship allegiance still being a strong priority within American society. That allegiance just incurs less economic loss (or at least less obvious loss) because the institutions are strong.
That's fair, but I really think you're still underestimating the scope and scale of kinship in western societies vs. African societies. One key difference that I haven't seen anyone remark on yet is that in Africa it's typically the extended family that's the primary drain, not direct family members. The examples you cited in America are about direct lineage - paying for private high school for your own children, legacy admissions for the school your parents went to. (I think in theory having an extended relative still slightly preferences you, but I'm not sure what that really means in practice.)
By contrast, to cite the Senegal paper,
Paying for your children's education isn't really a kinship tax in the same way that having to send money to distant cousins is.
Heard. I hadn’t really considered, but I see that the family units in Western cultures often consist only of the nuclear family. That’s definitely a greater economic strain on potential entrepreneurs or professionally successful individuals.
I wonder how much that culture would naturally subside if the institutions were stronger.
This point is certainly overbroad. 'Kinship networks' in the West are often considered a secret of success; see for example this random, recent article that claims that kinship networks among the Jewish diaspora were responsible for the surprising economic success of a normally marginalized ethnic group.
Also taking every claim in this article at face value, the blog post doesn't really address why kinship networks are the 'oldest and most durable type of human society.' If that claim is true, they can't be purely parasitic under historical conditions; what changed?
I think the synthesis is found in how the determiners of wealth have changed over the past two centuries. As I see it, the wealth of pre-industrial agrarian and pre-agrarian is determined by luck, manpower, and common works, in no particular order. Kinship societies would help along all three axes:
I suppose that the problem arises with economic structures where wealth arises from individual capital: knowledge/education, tooling, machinery. Unlike the stochastic fortune of a good harvest those benefits are more sustained, so structures that incentivize capital accumulation are more likely to prosper. (Simultaneously, the other half of the equation -- that gifts bring status within the kinship structure -- matters much less when the source of wealth is an impersonal market rather than household production of subsistence-and-a-little-more goods.)
From the article:
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The author also wrote another post that's very dark: Why kinship societies kill their old
Wow. That is so incredibly fascinating and sad.
The extent to which these kinship societies impact the lives even of people that have "left" can often be seen in successful athletes, e.g. football (soccer) players of African descent. Their wealth is redistributed to their (extended) family (in Africa) and their next of kin share in the wealth of the player to a level that is not really seen in successful athletes from individualistic western societies.
There is nothing new in this observation, but I enjoyed the contextualization that this article provided for an observation that I (and others) have often made about the lifestyles of such football players.
This was really interesting but I can't help but think he was going out of his way to not mention capitalism at all. Sure kinship societies probably have their issues but while reading this I couldn't help but think that the clear problem here is that everyone in these modern kinship societies is viewing it through a capitalist lense.
The idea that nobody gathers more wealth than anyone else is perfectly fine in a society that doesn't also have currency or follow the principles of capitalism. It keeps everyone fairly equal within the community. The rituals they have then spread the wealth and everyone is happy. It's not a perfect system but it worked for a long time. Sure hording your hard earned funbucks so that your lazy cousin doesn't do anything and just wants hand outs from you makes sense because the kinship model has been dismantled by modern financial and social systems.
The issue is that subsaharan africa is desperately poor. Most people do not have running water or electricity. Africa represents 70% of the world's deaths during pregancy. 20% of people are severely malnourished. 30% of children are stunted in growth by poor nutrition.
Having to off your elders to make sure the family has enough food to eat is not what I'd call "perfectly fine".
What the article is talking about is fundamentally crab mentality - crabs dragging each other down in the bucket. Communist societies still aspire to greater material wealth - in many ways the soviet union or CCP china were far more intense in "destroying" the family unit and promoting a national proletariat identity than capitalist nations.
Capitalism is far from the only economic model that values overall economic development - practically all of them do! It's mainly disagreements on how economic resources should be distributed (should it be centrally planned or implicitly by market forces) and who should own the resources.
Ok I will try reply to all three comments here.
I am aware of the financial situation in Africa,since I am from there,which was by design by imperialist powers. Im not saying that people should not at any point aspire to have more wealth and live a nice life. My point was that Kinship societies functioned fine(not perfectly) before our modern day economic systems were forced onto the people of the continent. The fact that they invest so much money into these funerals in this modern day is not the greatest but this is a tradition that has been co opted/corrupted by capitalism. Before that came around I imagine they would throw lavish feast in the same vein as the Potlach of North America but that doesn't cut it in our modern times so here we are with funerals that bankrupt families.
Iv not studied much social anthropology but whenever I have, iv noticed that many traditions from the before times generally don't gel with how we operate today. These rituals seem almost alien because they are woven into the fabric of their society and make sense to the people practicing it. I find it sad that what was once a death ritual that would most likely bring together a village is now been bloated to something that is barely recogniseable from its origin.
What about them worked "ok" before colonialism? It would still hamper economic growth, in the same fashion that feudalism hampered economic growth in Europe or Japan before absolute monarchs and power consolidation.
Sub-saharan Africa in the 1400s-1500s still had horrible infant mortality, constant hunger, and so on. It was just on par - Asia and Europe and everywhere also had all that. But we've moved on since then. Today you can live with running water and electricity and hospitals and food satiaty.
Yes, that would deplete food stores and mean that people have to spend more time farming and less time for other people to specialize, which is the key to economic development - that some people can farm enough food for other people to spend their time learning mathematics, engineering, and so on.
It's not as if you just stopped valuing wealth and "viewing things from a capitalist lens", that people would stop dying of malnutrition and disease. Death is not a social construct. People are going to die from malnutrition and disease until you can produce enough food to feed all of them, factories to make modern medicine, electricity to provide people with refrigerated food and lighting, running purified water so they don't get waterborne diseases and can bathe and clean clothes. All of that is economic development, whether it be from a socialist or capitalist or whatever regime.
For all that, the life of someone of a farmer in Ghana is better today than it would be in the 1400s. They have occassional electricity, possibly a smartphone, a hospital somewhere, cheap fertilizer, affordable clothes. It's just could be much better.
Ok I dunno what you want me to say here. I am not a social anthropologist who specialised in Kinship societies from the sahel. Im going to go out on a limb and say maybe the indigenous peoples of the region didn't place as much value on economic development as much as social development hence the way they structured their society and had these kinship rituals. All Im saying is that they had a way of doing things that im assuming worked for a long time. Sure life wasn't easy and im sure when they had a funeral they didn't eat through their entire food stocks. This is also only one aspect that shouldnt be taken in isolation. They would have had exchange system with other tribes and various other practises that insured they didn't die out.
To reply to your last point. I think things could be better but that is not going to happen because it isn't in the global norths interest for that to happen. How Europe underdeveloped Africa is on my reading list.
That's kind of the problem, no? Without economic development, you don't get food security, running water, vaccines, hospitals, electricity. It also leaves you vulnerable to being preyed upon by other countries, like European colonizers. Capitalism or not, I find it hard to justify any arguments that you shouldn't at least develop economically and technologically until everyone can meet the lower tiers of Maslow's pyramid.
Valuing social coherence so much that you'd prefer to drag down members who overachieve is the issue. It's not a good thing. It perpetuates itself, but not only continues human misery from a lack of resources, but leaves you weak when stronger neighbors come knocking.
Seems overly defeatist. That's what the global north would want African countries to think - that they're doomed forever. Then they can stripe mine the country of resources forever.
Southeast asia was also colonialized and suffers many scars, but countries like Vietnam and Thailand have made huge strides in quality of life. China went through a colonial control, a civil war, and an imperial invasion with casualty numbers that make the Western theater of WW2 look like a cake walk, and it's now a technological powerhouse that scares the US.
China's GDP per capita in 1960 was $90. What would become Ghana's GDP per capita was $192.
Ok so Im talking about tribes in the context of several centuries ago not more modern times. Also they didn't know they were gonna be colonised so why would they prepare for that. Again as I said they most likely did not pull people down so that they were immiserated. Thats not how a kinship society works.
Its by design. The world bank and IMF have structured African economies in such a way that they cannot develop. Its one of the big plays by neoliberalism. So no matter how much positive thinking you wanna throw down Africa will most likely stay as is for a long time. I would love to see Africa prosper but like I said earlier it was never decolonised. They just shifted to corporations doing the dirty work.
These are geographically different places. Just because parts of Asia are flourishing doesnt mean all of Asia is. Just like there are parts of Africa that are doing well and parts that aren't. At this point I actually think you are trolling because that was a wild statement to make.
The global north has donated approximately 1.5 trillion dollars to Africa since 1960 and invested about another trillion.
Now, I completely agree that it mostly hasn't worked, for a variety of complicated reasons. But it's not like the rest of the world is keeping Africa poor on purpose.
It's not as explicit as it once was, but the continent is still to some extent exploited. Multinational corporations still own and extract much of Africa's mineral wealth. Industries reliant on African cash crops share very little wealth back to the continent despite large profits in their home countries. Loans from the IMF come with requirements for privatization and austerity. Unequal trade agreements protect western industrial imports.
Yes, of course. All of that is true. But every country in the world is to some extent exploited - that's just sorta how it goes. It certainly doesn't mean that the north is intentionally keeping Africa down.
However, I take your point that my comment was pollyannaish.
They have also removed wealth from the continent. I recently heard a statistic that for every dollar sent to Africa the global north extracts $7 or something along those lines.
I'm not sure what your point is but if its that the global north has invested trillions into Africa so they should be developed then you are not looking deeper into the issue. You are assuming that money went to projects that solely benefit people but that most likely went to building infrastructure to continue exploiting the natural resources of the continent and funding authoritarian regimes.
You mean this statistic? It conflates aid with debt repayments and business profits. Okay, what is the solution? 1) No countries are allowed to make loans to African countries/business/entities. 2) Non-African companies are not allowed to operate in Africa. Cool, you've wrecked the economy and destroyed free trade. I thought Tildes was very much for free trade when the US tariffs were being enacted..
To reply to myself:
If a loan is made, the loaner expects to be repaid and with interest. Otherwise, there wouldn't be many loans being made. Few people are willing to flip a coin where heads they break even, and tails they lose their money.
Part of the complaint in the link is that companies made profits and brought them back to their original countries. If you prevent this, then foreign companies will not invest. This is fine, but goes against the grain of the last few decades of liberals pushing for free trade (see Krugman). If we now think that we should keep American dollars in the US and British pounds in the UK, then an isolationist policy from America would be in line with this.
I think capitalism is a problem here (and in general), but so is putting ten person-years worth of resources into a funeral - whether those resources take the form of cash spending or tangible shared goods in a non-capitalist society.
This amounts to saying that poverty is okay. Most of Africa is desperately poor and figuring out how to change that is very important. The contrast with Asia is stark.
I remember this making the rounds on hacker news (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710907) a few months ago, and the discussion was roughly the same kind of split as here (albeit Tildes has a much higher floor on bad comments than HN).
I think my take away from reading it this time (I didn't read it the first time on hn), in addition to all the great discussion here so far, is that I don't feel like the article really supports the "wealth destroying" argument. All throughout the article are quotes like:
In each case it's an example of the deceased's relatives paying money to someone in exchange for goods or services. You pay money to a hospital, to the staff of that hospital, to the graphic designers, to the caterers, the DJ, you're paying for food, where is that money going? It sounds like its going to the local hospital, to local labour, to local goods, where is the wealth being destroyed? Individual wealth, by which I mean the family of the deceased who are paying for the funeral, that seems to be decreasing in these incidents, but its not going on a funeral pyre, nor does it sound like its going outside of the country (or even municipality I bet), the money is exchanging hands and powering a local economy.
I could, myself, personally, probably come up with reasons why (whether I agree or believe them or not) -- but the article, as best I can tell, does not.
"any of its members", it claims are prevented from prospering, but doesn't support why the network itself is not prospering as a whole from, what sounds like, a big wealth distribution mechanism.
I don't believe at any point does it delve in to why it poisons any prospect of economic development, it's laid out like a natural fact without elucidation
"mediocrity" is an interesting choice, we all use contemporarily use it to imply subpar, but the actual definition is moreso "the state or quality of being average, ordinary, or merely adequate". An "enforced average", the most productive members of the group are "hobbled" as it claims, by having to pay out for all these expenses, but does not address why the expenses are not bringing the average up, and making the network more prosperous as a whole.
It's an interesting take on what is a society I know very little about, and is very different from the ones I am familiar with, but I don't get the sense that it backs up its arguments, that it "makes the math work". The author seems in-line with modern western-style individualism, and writes with the conviction that its' principles are inherent and synonymous with positive economic growth, and whether I or anyone agrees or disagrees with that, you still have to make the arguments and back up why that's the case.
It's only briefly touched on in the article, but the canonical example here is the study showing that when senegalese women received secret incomes, the amount they gave to relatives dropped and they spent more on their own healthcare. The point being that people are actively being hurt by strong kin networks - it's not only the extra that gets redistributed, it's everything.
That study doesn't explain why the network itself isn't prospering. This is me, so weight your credulity accordingly: basically, the network is not prospering because there's not enough wealth to distribute in the first place.
Anything from starting a small business to building a house - two primary ways to build wealth - takes a certain amount of capital. In these strong kin networks, amassing that capital is nearly impossible because anything you have you're expected to redistribute. Returning to my point about there not being enough wealth in the first place, what is redistributed all basically gets diffused into living expenses for the whole kin network, so the others in the network aren't receiving enough to start business or build houses either (I'm not attaching a moral judgement to this, by the way.)
That's why microlending and, now, direct cash giving are so popular (and seemingly effective) - they provide starter capital, bypassing the redistributative process entirely.
Regarding waste, you need to look at what people do in exchange for the money. Making a fancy coffin or other fancy ornaments that would otherwise be unnecessary is wasteful. But is banqueting your neighbors wasteful? Not necessarily as long as the food doesn't go to waste.
I don't know enough about these cultures to say, but there are lots of links in the articles for further reading.
From what I've read about potlatch culture in the Pacific Northwest, it sounds like it was extremely wasteful and that was the point.
Well said
Not only that, but this piece also demonstrates a view point that economic worth is a key indicator, if not the very definition, of a worthy person and a worthy culture.
I don't think that's the intent. The point is that "wealth" correlates extremely strongly with health and well-being. Extreme poverty is devastating by modern standards, and no amount of social network support will fix that.
I feel this at a visceral level.
I couldn't tell how much of this is the "crabs in a bucket" mentality, but I have to imagine it contributes. Success or good fortune can easily breed social resentment.
For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.
My point is broader than material wealth. Social influencers and clout chasers are intoxicated by likes and subscribers and engagement. Greed and resentment aren't limited to money.
Yea, but money is very much the jet fuel on the campfire, so to speak.
Like + subscribe (and the whole influencer thing) is very much driven by monetary gains once a threshold is met.
What an incredibly interesting article about something I had absolutely no idea existed. Thanks for sharing!