From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri Aug 23 2002 - 08:30:57 MDT
Amara writes
> Woo Hoo!
>
> Lee, I was under the impression that you thought
> culture was only wearing different clothes and
> eating different foods. Now I'll revise my opinion.
The fact that (I think) cultural differences *includes*
the wearing of different clothes and eating different
foods is actually something I *do* need to be reminded
of, so rarely do I leave silicon valley. :-)
> Never underestimate the importance of local knowledge!
>
> http://www.amara.com/neverunderestimate.jpg
Cute picture. Amazing if it's true (Hubert suggests that
we take that with a grain of salt). But I'm sure, to use
a similarly grainy metaphor, that there is at least a grain
of truth there.
> >It's just that many libertarians and minarchists go to
> >far the other way---they assume that all peoples, all
> >ethnic groups, all traditions are equal. They're not.
>
> Careful with how you use 'equal'. I suggest stopping
> at 'different'.
Yes, "equal" can too easily be thought by some as of
equal value, or equal intelligence or whatever. All
that I meant, of course, was that there appears to be
a scale of readiness for the acceptance of democratic
procedures, and a scale for tolerance of non-conformity.
In these ways, I would say that not all cultures are
equal, but I'll try to avoid using the word in isolation
as you suggest.
> In the later 1990s a German lady named Silke Regine Stahl-Rolf made
> her PhD thesis...
> First, she found that there exists a number of social conditions
> that allow new patterns of behaviour and social values to develop.
> She said that the key factors for promoting innovations are:
>
> 1) social heterogeneity
This makes sense. As disturbing as diversity is in some
ways, it has to help promote technological progress and
more advanced behavior (so long as the demographically
overwhelming numbers aren't themselves members of atavistic
cultures). For one thing, the sub cultures will differ in
their native ability to incorporate some particular change,
and then the other sub cultures will want to keep up with
the Joneses.
> 2) individualism
> 3) the belief in being able to influence one's own life
> 4) plausible representative of the new cultural ideas
Nothing comes to mind about what that last one could mean.
> 5) gentle restructuring processes which do not break
> with the past completely
Yes, you certainly want to avoid being overly threatening
to the mainstream. Hopefully, for example, when speaking
on television or while being interviewed by mainstream
publications, extropians would emphasize those parts of
our beliefs which are less threatening---only common sense,
of course.
But the real bottom line here, probably is, "evolution,
not revolution".
> 6) failures of existing institutions
This is a bit paradoxical. Those countries or regions already
ahead in dedication to personal liberty and technical innovation
will probably have the fewest failures of existing institutions.
On the other hand, reform won't occur until, tautologically,
there is something that needs reform. One could compare, I
suppose, the inequities of land distribution in Czarist Russia
and the current accounting scandals in the West. Both can be
seen as failures of existing institutions. And so, I guess,
both prod an existing society into change.
> Then she looked at Russian farm villages 100 years ago, and today,
> and identified that much of the above was not in place and it
> contributed to the failure of the reforms.
Quite interesting, and thanks for the long quote from her
article.
Oh, and one more thing: your subject line is quite in keeping
with an Hayekian understanding of economics, which you probably
intended. What is truly miraculous about the Soviet Union is
not that it collapsed (although given the thirst for power so
typical of people and institutions that's amazing too), but
that it could have got so far and achieved so much without
utilizing local knowledge.
Lee
> I quote:
> "Today's economists attribute the almost complete failure of the
> reforms in the countryside mainly to the poor macro-economic
> framework, inadequate infrastructure and underdeveloped money and
> capital markets. A major cause, however, is culture-related. Culture
> often changes only very slowly and can decisively determine the
> development of a country over long periods. [...] As long as it is
> not understood how cultural factors influence economic action and
> as long as these factors are neglected, politico-economic concepts
> are doomed to failure. Stolypin's unsuccessful reforms and the
> farmers' resistance to reform prevailing in Russia today are prime
> examples of how politico-economic measures have failed on cultural
> grounds.
>
> Both the collectivist Russian village communes with their
> traditional redistribution practices and the Soviet collective
> enterprises prevented private entrepreneurship and structural
> diversity. In both cases, tradition prevailed over reformative
> pressure. What is more, a long history of peasant dependency and the
> traumatic experience of forced collectivization in the thirties,
> tying the rural population to the collective farms as second-class
> citizens, have certainly not contributed to reinforcing the Russian
> farmers' belief in the power of changing one's own life.
>
> Historically speaking, Russian peasants had not known private land
> ownership until Stolypin's reforms were introduced. The land, mostly
> in the hands of a landlord, was collectively managed by the village
> commune. However, according to Russian traditional religious belief,
> God is the sole owner of land. Hence people may claim possession of
> the land they use only as long as they work on or cultivate the
> land. This tradition is reflected in the practice of regularly
> redistributing the land to take account not only of the needs,
> but also of the possibilities, of the individual families.
>
> Against this background, it is not difficult to understand why the
> Stolypin reforms found so little support with the rural population.
> The reform's goals ran counter to their outlook on life and fatalism
> paralyzed the population. Moreover, the officials in charge of
> implementing the reforms did not enjoy the peasant's confidence.
> [...] Similarly, this applies to the farmer's resistance to reform
> witnessed in Russia today. Since the Stolypin reforms, the
> collectivistic and egalitarian social features have rather increased
> and fatalism in the countryside is still unbroken. As before the
> government initiating the laws does not enjoy the population's
> confidence.
>
> At present, Russia cannot be expected to change spontaneously.
> Therefore, agricultural restructuring needs to be stepped up by
> organizations enjoying the rural population's confidence. One
> possibility would be to have rural multipliers trained and employed
> for consultation on the spot. In doing so, the intended
> restructuring should, initially, not depart from existing traditions
> too much. The large collective enterprises of Soviet times have
> proved a drastic failure, and a return to the Russian village with
> its redistribution practices is certainly no option in the age of
> international agricultural markets. Smaller cooperative-oriented
> enterprises would have the best chance of survival in the market.
> They would be a tool to initiate urgently needs change, while taking
> account of the particular ownership traditions in Russia."
>
> -------
>
> I tried to find some articles by Silke Regine Stahl-Rolf, besides
> the MPI magazine where i read about her work, and I have not
> succeeded. In the last few years, she spent some time at Columbia University
> New York, and is now at the Private Universität Witten/Herdecke
> working on her habilitation (second PhD, required for teaching in
> Germany). The department that she is in, is very interesting and
> perfectly suited to the area of her first PhD, I think.
>
> Her present work is along these lines:
>
> -------
> "Culture and Observation in the Study of Economic Systems."
>
> Abstract:
> In recent years the concept of "culture" has been revived in order
> to understand differences in the institutional set-up and
> performance of economic systems. At the same time, scholars
> increasingly adopt a cognitive science approach. On closer scrutiny,
> however, culture is shown to be either redundant or leading into
> serious paradoxes of self-reference in scientific analysis, if the
> concept is related to cognitive schemes and/or informal
> institutions. This is also valid in case of attempts at treating
> culture as a black box by means of relying exclusively on "culture
> free" data (for example, data on international trade). Therefore I
> propose to define culture as a "pattern" (of cognitive schemes or
> informal institutions) that is not directly accessible to
> observation, but can be conceived of as emergent property of the
> relation between observer and observed object, like the economic
> system. Based on a detailed description of that process of
> observation I sketch a specific strategy for empirical research.
> Here, culture becomes an hypothesis of the scientific observer that
> is based on observing the observation of culture.
> -------
>
> Amara
>
>
> --
>
> ********************************************************************
> Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com
> Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
> Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
> ********************************************************************
> "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in
> overalls and looks like work." -Thomas Edison
>
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