More Milton Friedman Institute Blogging...

Tyler Cowen points us to University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins's denunciation and condemnation of George Soros's Open Society Institute as:

Marshall Sahlins: an exclusive rich-man's club of millionaire members entitled to special academic privileges. That sort of participation of the wealthy is discriminatory, and perhaps the most obvious clue to the ideology behind the promoters' assurances of free empirical inquiry.... [The] Institute... [is] the vanguard of an intellectual coup d'état in the academy of the same nature as the one the Chicago Boys helped pull off in Latin America.... By rendering the production of knowledge dependent on the highest financial bidders, the institute would literally transform the university into a free market in ideas — wherein those ideas backed by the most capital will be the most true. That is not intellectual diversity but academic perversity because it fundamentally subverts the disinterested pursuit and dissemination of knowledge for which universities were founded...

Marshall Sahlins also, for good measure, denounces Friedrich Engels's funding of the work of Karl Marx as illegitimate. For Engels's funds established a:

Friedrich Engels Institute for Political Science... [a] radical... approach to society and the economy... directly subsidized by private funds... an academic instrument of a certain ideology... an extremist version... that has proven to serve the welfare of the ruling elite in a number of countries at the cost of whom it may concern — notably the society in general and the poor in particular...

Forgive me if I do not find Marshall Sahlins's principle to be a neutral principle. It seems to be that wealthy philanthropists should only be allowed to fund lines of work in subdisciplines if senior anthropology professors approve.

Sahlins's true purpose, of course, is not to denounce as illegitimate either George Soros's funding of democratization efforts and scholars around the world or Friedrich Engels's funding of the work that became Capital. Sahlins's true purpose is, rather, to denounce the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman Institute. I must say that Sahlins doesn't think much of the power and robustness of his own "substantivist" ideas about economic anthropology:

[P]romoters' defense of the Milton Friedman Institute on the grounds of freedom... academic freedom, individual freedom, or free enterprise... is... a recipe for tyranny, since it would consist mainly of their ability to dominate the academy by virtue of the assets in cash and clout they command in the larger society. The Milton Friedman Institute will provide the rich and powerful with the best self-promoting ideas their money can buy... the university will be compromised by this commodification of knowledge in which a certain orthodoxy about free markets and self-serving individualism easily proves to be the highest bidder.

In fact, neither markets nor individualism of this sort are present in the majority of societies known to history and anthropology — even as the study of these societies provides an understanding of our own family existence, where the relations between goods are likewise governed by the relations between persons. Yet along with much else, such understandings of economy and society are destined to be buried by the behemoth Friedman Institute, whose so-called scientific work... is committed to the elimination of all such alternative forms of the human condition...

I must admit I never got much out of the work of Marshall Sahlins...

Sahlins's claims http://www.appropriate-economics.org/materials/Sahlins.pdf that hunter-gatherers lived in "the original affluent society" where all their wants were easily satisfied seemed to me a dishonest evasion of the fact that many people in all societies want to see their grandchildren grow up--and relatively few hunter-gatherers do. Sahlins's claims that it was "the market-industrial system [which] institutes scarcity, in a manner completely without parallel... [because where] all livelihoods dependon getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity..." seemed to indicate a total, willful, and culpable ignorance of practically all of the non-market settled agricultural societies of the past ten thousand years.

And it had always seemed to me that Gananath Obeyeseke had a good point in his debate with Sahlins: Obeyeseke maintained that British insistance that the Hawai'ians regarded Captain James Cook as a living avatar of a God had little to do with Hawai'ians imposing their myths about Lono on Captain Cook. It had, he said, more to do with the British imposing on the Hawai'ians their myths about how the British acquisition of technological knowledge had made them "like God":

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying... of the tree of knowledge... thou shalt not eat of it.... And the serpent said unto the woman: 'Ye shall not surely die; for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God...

Comments

[Colin Danby]

In Sahlins' defense (a) one could mount a nuanced defense of _Stone Age Economics_, (b) Sahlins does go after Soros albeit hypothetically, and (c) he would appear to score here:

"... donors of $1-million or $2-million, whose membership in the Milton Friedman Society will entitle them to participate in workshops, seminars, and lectures on what the university terms "fundamental questions" of economics, business, and law, as well as the implications for related disciplines such as medicine and public policy."

Nonetheless on the larger point, yeah, paras 4-6 of Sahlins' piece present a cardboard picture of Friedman, and MS has not lost the politically-reductionist habits of old. To pull up a 1974 review of _Stone Age_ by Scott Cook, (Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 16, No. 3, (Jun., 1974), pp. 355-379): "Sahlins regrettably treats the formalist-substantivist controversy in terms of its ideological rather than its methodological content. ... In Sahlins' version of substantivism Polanyi's 'market mentality' bogey is resurrected under the guise of the 'historically specific business outlook' (p. 186)." Sahlins' commitment to careful, culturally-specific analayses of material processes regrettably collapses whenever he spots the "business outlook."

And yes, Obeyesekere's _Apotheosis of Captain Cook_ is great. Has anyone read the more recent _Cannibal Talk_?

[Mike Huben]

Lost in the sillier arguments is the valid point that there is a long-term corporatist movement afoot to usurp educational and intellectual institutions the way they have usurped the Republican Party and (for a time) the US government.

There are already small-scale, PR-planned channels to shepherd the best and brightest from high school through academia to think tanks. How much better to push aside challengers to the propaganda, and dominate a major economics institution!

Tyler didn't note that he works in exactly such a channel: I don't know why. Maybe it's not tactful to gloat?
Criticisms of George Mason U. Economics (and Mercatus)
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/mason.html

[piotr]

About the opulence of hunter-gatherers: the longevity dropped precipitously with the advent of neolithic revolution. I think that a gatherer had higher chanced to see her grandchildren than a worker in early 19th century.

Apart from possible political implications, we should remember that our organisms were adapted for the lifestyle predating neolihic revolution. This probably entails a varied diet (as opposed to monotone), moderatedly strenuous activity), as opposed to long workdays of early and even contemporary farmers, and small groups with somewhat fluid hierarchy.

Pre-agricultural societies had usually much lower population densities, and by the law of diminishing returns, enjoyed higher productivity per hour of labor than agricultural societies. Advent of specialization lead to new kinds of goods and higher quality. but amount of food per person, and the level of health declined.

[John Emerson]

I guess I never considered the possibility that the Chicago School might in some way get worse or more obnoxious. I suppose that this means that economics will effectively become even more Chicago schoolish. Often enough Brad's fanatical loyalty to his profession and his hard line against all non-economics makes him quite obnoxious.

[Neal]

"Hunter-gatherer" is a phrase equivalent for "hand-to-mouth". If you've ever lived hand-to-mouth in modern times, it's not pleasant. Now, imagine a time when a handful of unidentified berries or a handful of rotting corpse meant the difference between life and death.

Some places were kind to hunter-gathers, and those are the places where this survival technique is still or was recently practiced.

Systems that don't work are replaced.

"The Clan of the Cave Bear" should not be confused with historical fact.

[Barry]

Brad: "I must say that Sahlins doesn't think much of the power and robustness of his own "substantivist" ideas about economic anthropology:"

A bit of a blind spot there, Brad. Perhaps Sahlins believes in the power of purposely-directed and politically savvy money to warp the intellectual field. Perhaps not forever, but in the long run we are ...,etc.

[Joe S.]

What Mike Huben said.

This issue is precisely analogous to "corporate free speech", or campaign finance. Propagating ideas (i.e., propaganda) costs money. Once the academy is thrown on the marketplace, the ideas that attract funding will have a survival bias in their favor, independent of intellectual merit.

And thus physics (with its link to warfare) thrived in the academy of the 1950's, although its Golden Age was probably over by the time the funding peaked. And thus business school thrives today. (Thorstein Veblen noted similar trends in economics at the turn of the century.) At least physics is excellent intellectual training. (Brad, would you rather take a physics major or an econ major as a graduate student in your department? 3.8 GPAs for both, of course.)

That doesn't mean that Sahlins isn't a jackass. There is a valid distinction between Soros-Engels, on the one hand, and the Friedman institute, on the other. Soros-Engels wanted to break the plutocracy. The Friedman funders want to entrench it.

[david]

It's petty, but Sahlins evisceration of Obeyesekere (missing an re up there) is also very fun to read, and Obeyesekere comes out with no point at all -- the Apotheosis of Captain Cook is a silly, useless argument. O. didn't have the extraordinary command of the facts that Sahlins has, and he also had the perverse idea that it was a clever argument to say "Actually, it's the Hawaiians who were rational, and the Europeans who were slaves to ideology, nah nahny boo boo."

Islands of History is superb. Sahlins' Mintz lecture, which reworks some of Stone Age Economics, is really smart. If you didn't get much out of Sahlins' work you should go back and reread, it may be your prejudices led you to miss the good stuff. Of course, you also like Jared Diamond, who gives me the creeps.

The Milton Friedman Institute sounds to me like a very bad idea, not just, but mostly because of the Society of donors Colin mentions. when Newt Gingrich comes to tell them big ideas and gains from the Chicago glow, don't say you weren't warned.

[anne]

"Tyler Cowen points us to University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins's denunciation and condemnation of George Soros's Open Society Institute"

But, this headline completely distorts the issue (to be nice about it). Marshall Sahlins is quite right, and Tyler Cowens as usual is quite wrong.

[vnoe]

In the society that is deeply unequal any "open" ideology institutions are bound to reach the state where they serve the tiny sliver of the population - work against democracy. Soros should not walk - run away from that idea unless he believes he can maintain ideological control over it - which is of course impossible.

[Brian]

Sahlins has a completely valid point about the consequences of how we fund our academy. His other ideas may be complete crap, but that is irrelevant. This should be obvious.

[Doctor Jay]

It seems a bit bizarre for Brad to complain of Sahlin's "original affluent society", while it was posted on this very blog that I read Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race".

Granted, I haven't read much of Sahlin's work, but is there any difference that is substantive, as opposed to rhetorical?

[Brad DeLong]

Not bizarre at all. Jared Diamond's point is that the coming of agrarian society made humanity a lot poorer. That seems to me to be right. Marshall Sahlins's point is that hunter-gatherer societies are "affluent" ones in which all wants are easily satisfied. That seems to me to be wrong.

Cf. Ursula K. Le Guin, *The Dispossessed*; Peter Lawrence, *Road Belong Cargo*.

[alkali]

That Sahlins holds a university to standards he would not apply to a grantmaking foundation or private patronage is not surprising.

@BDL: "Marshall Sahlins's point is that hunter-gatherer societies are 'affluent' ones in which all wants are easily satisfied. That seems to me to be wrong."

It seems to me that Sahlins' primary point is that thinking of hunter-gatherers as necessarily desparate and close to starvation is wrong, and that his secondary point is that congratulating the market system for saving us from the pitiable condition of the hunter-gatherer sets the bar way too low.

[ogmb]

So quite obviously the MilFriInst is slated to become a faux research institute where the Rumsfelds of this world and their wealthy acolytes can pose as "scholars" and "fellows" for cash. The sad thing is that this should also be a cause of concern to those who generally agree with Friedman's world view, but they're too busy circling the wagons against the heathens attacking from downcampus. Too sad that Brad feels like he has to take sides in this pathetic food fight.

[CalDem]

Come on, that Sahlin is an ass doesn't change the fact the right wing economics has been predominate and heterodox extinguished precisely because of large wealthy donors that favor right wing economics. Bowles was rejected for tenure at Harvard for ideological reasons, and you know that.

And its not some penny ante debate, the country is going down the tubes because of the absolute dominance of right wing economics in the public sphere. this institute will further that dominance, and your acquiescence to right wing dominance of economics means that you are not a friend of the policies that you generally advocate for.

I just don't get how a guy as smart as Brad doesn't see the harm that will be done by this institute. You are tenured, find some courage, man.

[John Pertz]

Mike Huben, are you trying to say that libertarian ideas are not allowed to be discussed and should not be brought up in the context of debate? I think in light of the evidence, moderate libertarianism stands on solid empirical ground.

[John Emerson]

*"Some places were kind to hunter-gathers, and those are the places where this survival technique is still or was recently practiced."*

The exact opposite of the truth. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle was easiest and most successful in fertile areas, but over the millennia the pressure from agriculturalists has driven them into the least productive areas.

[John Emerson]

It would nice if Brad had an editor to protect us from his more bigoted economistic ideas. Posts like this one take a lot of fun out of the site.

[Colin Danby]

But admit it, John, you come here for that little frisson, the abuse of your tender sensibilities. Still, maybe Brad has a fun-only feed...

Re Mike's "long-term corporatist movement afoot to usurp educational and intellectual institutions" -- right, the plutocrats are worried about making the U of Chicago econ dept more business-friendly (a point John almost makes in his first posting). What's going on here is some academic hustlers figuring Friedman's name ought to be good for a few million, and perhaps that they'd better move before Stanford, where MF spent the last 30 years of his career, does.

[Maynard Handley]

*
*"Some places were kind to hunter-gathers, and those are the places where this survival technique is still or was recently practiced."*

The exact opposite of the truth. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle was easiest and most successful in fertile areas, but over the millennia the pressure from agriculturalists has driven them into the least productive areas.
*

This doesn't necessarily mean he is wrong. Might doesn't make right, and the fact that agriculture can sustain more lives doesn't mean that the "happiness" of each life is higher.

I would argue against him on rather different grounds, namely that I believe that humans are capable of more than hunter-gathering. What exactly is the good that we are going after in such a discussion? If the good is some sort of animal happiness, why don't we all lobotomize ourselves, or lie around dripping heroin into our veins? Why don't we just give up and leave the planet to cows or other animals that appear to do a better job of being happy all the time?
An argument like this demands that each protagonist state up front quite what it is that they are trying to achieve. I have a simple answer to this --- I want humanity to maximize knowledge, and with this as a goal, I have to accept the necessary steps along the way. This is, I guess, an Aristotelian view, but with less emphasis on the individual.

What is it that Sahlins thinks humanity should try to maximize?

[Mike Huben]

John Pertz, I'm saying that the U of Chicago should not allow its name to be exploited to promote libertarian/corporatist propaganda.

As for your claim that "moderate libertarianism stands on solid empirical ground", that is a typical glittering generality of propaganda. There is no well-defined "moderate libertarianism" to make such a claim about because there are clear boundaries. What was the moderate libertarianism in Pinochet's case? Please cite the scholarly sources. Such amorphous arguments are merely opportunities for recitation of propaganda points by you and your ilk.

[Neal]

"....The exact opposite of the truth. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle was easiest and most successful in fertile areas, but over the millennia the pressure from agriculturalists has driven them into the least productive areas..."

So these sucessful hunter gatherer societies (presumably well-fed, healthy, well-armed and sustaianable) were displaced by itinerant agriculturists who just knew if they repeatedly seeded a particular plant they too would be a sucessful, sustainable society in a couple dozen generations?

This condition has only come true in the recent, historical past where the itinerant agriculturists had the benefit of superior weapons, technology, knowledge and seed where the value of a particular biome was judged to be worth the effort of displacing the hunter-gatherer.

It certainly wasn't true in the pre-historic past where I'm not even sure when the concept of "fertile land" was recognized. Random feverish scrabbling in the dirt by a starving hunter-gatherer for something edible is more like it, followed by a desire to stay in an area where that "something" was found, eventually leading to the understanding of seed and cultivation, where ultimately the reliability of plants was found to be greater than that of the hunted animal.

The agriculurists arose because of the failures of the hunter-gather model, not because of the success of it.

[alkali]

@Maynard Handley: I'm pretty sure Sahlins is not arguing that we should be hunter-gatherers. I think what he is arguing is that you can't excuse the failures of civilized society by saying that before capitalism, everyone starved all the time, because that's just not true.

@Neal: I don't think Sahlins would agree with your evolutionary model; I certainly don't. In general, that one species displaces another doesn't mean that that species is "better" or more capable in all respects than the displaced species. Agricultural societies surely have advantages over hunter-gatherer societies, but it is not necessarily true that agricultural societies are better at ensuring that everyone gets fed: indeed, perhaps it is one of the advantages of agricultural society that you can extract labor from members of the society by threatening them with starvation.

[Lee A. Arnold]

Hunting-gathering was probably a very fat way of life until about 12,000 years ago. Agriculture wasn't a sudden discovery, it was a fallback position due to population growth, resource depletion, climate change. You can't look at the beautiful artistry of figurines from 25,000-30,000 years ago and maintain these people didn't have the cognitive ability to notice that seeds give rise to plants. More than likely they had enormous floral and faunal knowledge systems. More than likely they weren't forced to take advantage of planting seeds.

Early agriculture, by contrast, was a difficult and labor-intensive way of life.

There is plenty of modern ethnographic evidence of the easy life of hunter-gatherers when ecosystems are lush. Anthropologists documented many equatorial tribes in South America and Africa. The Kwakiutl and north coast tribes (fishers) were found to have permanent settlements, leisure time, art, and ritual money systems for status -- this is probably a good model for the sort of social system which might have existed purely by hunting and gathering long before, say 30,000 years ago. A Pacific island tribe was found where the men never worked and the women only worked a few hours a day. Where I should have been born. Instead, I got cable. Everybody had plenty.

[John Emerson]

*"It certainly wasn't true in the pre-historic past where I'm not even sure when the concept of "fertile land" was recognized. Random feverish scrabbling in the dirt by a starving hunter-gatherer for something edible is more like it, followed by a desire to stay in an area where that "something" was found, eventually leading to the understanding of seed and cultivation, where ultimately the reliability of plants was found to be greater than that of the hunted animal."*

I'm boggled that I even have to say this, but hunter-gatherers were not so stupid that they hunted and gathered mostly in places where nothing could grow. The may not have had a concept of "fertility", but they did have a concept of "places where hunting and gathering can be done easily and successfully". And those are the places which we now call "fertile". Jesus F. Christ, you seem to have learned your prehistory from a comic book.

The Bushmen used to have the run of South Africa. Now they're limited to the rather barren Kalahari desert (and the native Australians are concentrated in the Outback) because the places where they used to live have been taken over by others.

Per unit of fertile land, agriculture supports much larger populations than hunting and gathering, and the prosperity of hunter-gatherers depends on some sort of population limitation. They didn't have much storable food, so hey were highly susceptible to famine (though agriculturalists were too). But "Random feverish scrabbling in the dirt by a starving hunter-gatherer for something edible is more like it" is amazingly silly.

[Matt]

@CalDem and @ John Emerson- pretty much like your comments.
@Lee A Arnold - gotta disagree.

Blog folks are risking a firestorm of reputation and credibility if you try to object to buying stuff in packets with greenbacks and apply the rest of your idealised case to the Pacific, as Sahlins has found to his massive discredit, you'll get the Aus/NZ academic community and the blogging Pasifika community in those institutions and elsewhere having a crack at you.

And Sahlins, honestly, all over again? Gawd, it's like groundhog day. Didn't we do this with the Apotheosis of Cook like 20 years ago? There are some good Auckland Uni conference procedings on Beaches from around 1992 - some good stuff.

And the next time someone gives me a "subsistence affluence" argument, I'm going to variously scream, counter, troll and pound the blog. It doesn't exist, it never has, and let's stop being silly about affluence in subsistence economies. Doesn't get your kid immunised, or condoms delivered to reduce AIDS, or kids reading and ready for a transition economy. Also it does nothing on the social side negatives, esp personal security and safety, esp of women and adolescents, who are traditionally abused and brutalised. I guess you hunter-gatherer bloggers have heard of human rights. Any reaction? [sound of crickets]

M

.

[John V]

I've often the book called "The Plight of the Democratic Economist" would make for fun reading. But when we have blogs like Brad's, there's no real need for it. ;)

Chin up, Dr. DeLong. Chin up.

Just imagine what would happen if spent even MORE time slapping down economically illiterate Leftist clap trap. Then you'd REALLY be in the dog house.

Chin up...

[Sam B]

"literally transform the university into a free market in ideas"

There is only one thing worse than using "literally" where something couldn't literally have happened, e.g. "Beckham has literally demolished the German defence" or "The sergeant literally blew his top". That is using "literally" where it doesn't bloody mean anything. You can visualise Beckham driving a JCB into the opposing 4-4-2 but not a "market in ideas". How would the meaning of that sentence change if you turned "literally transform" into just "transform"? It wouldn't. Typical academic logorrhea, assuming that more words = more meaning.

It's excusable for excitable commentators, but any academic who thinks that "literally" means "really" cannot be taken seriously.

[John Emerson]

Don't be silly, Sam. The free marketplace of ideas is a metaphor. It doesn't really mean that someone goes to the idea market and buys the ideas and vegetables they need that day. Sahlins is saying that ideological think-tanks really, not metaphorically, are putting ideas on the market to the highest bidder.

Supposedly the university is professionally-organized rather than market-organized, but Friedmanites think that everything should be market-organized.

It's usually silly to try to refute a statement based on a quibble about usage, much less to try to reject a man's entire career for that kind of reason, but it's sillier still when you're wrong about the usage.

[Neal]

"...but hunter-gatherers were not so stupid that they hunted and gathered mostly in places where nothing could grow. The may not have had a concept of "fertility", but they did have a concept of "places where hunting and gathering can be done easily and successfully". And those are the places which we now call "fertile"...."

Hmmm, I guess you think that places that are succesful hunting/gathering grounds are exactly the same places that make good agricultural lands?

I could live off of hunting and fishing in northern Minnesota, but there sure are a lot of abandoned farmsteads up there where they found that the only things that came up in abundance every year were rocks.

There are many examples of tundra, forest, steppe, jungle, arid and semi-arid lands where nomadic hunter-gathers were and still are "sucessful" in the sense of being sustaining but cannot be defined as "fertile" in terms of agriculture.

And I guess you think that animal and plant populations are perma-stable where their harvestable quantity remains the same decade after decade? And, that there were no instances where a harvestable population of animals and plants were wiped out through too vigorous harvesting?

[John Emerson]

Neal, you're nuts. Hunters and gatherers are now restricted to areas where agriculture is not profitable -- waste land, basically. Though frankly, hunting and gathering in northern Minnesota, though perhaps theoretically possible, is not done.

"Hmmm, I guess you think that places that are succesful hunting/gathering grounds are exactly the same places that make good agricultural lands?"

Exactly! Exactly! "Fertility" is not a subjective concept -- it's a fact of geography based on soils, rainfall, and temperature. More fertile areas have more wildlife and more edible plants, and that's where hunters and gatherers go **if they can**. Hunters and gatherers can't compete with agriculturalists, which is why they're driven out of the cultivable areas once the agriculturalists arrive.

Agriculture never reached Australia, except possible in the area nearest Indonesia, so when westerners arrived the majority of the continent was inhabited by hunters and gatherers -- most densely in the present agricultural areas. Much of Sahlins book is about Australia for that very reason.

Sahlins does not claim that a h-g lifestyle is globally possible today, and I think that he tends to idealize and romanticize pre-modern lifestyles, but what he says is based on actual knowledge and is far superior to the comic-book caricatures that not only you, but many economists believe in.

[Barry]

What's amazing about this is that Brad has posted repeatedly on historical matters, quantifying just how marginal most agricultural life was until very, very recently. Average per-capita productions of 2,000-3,000 calories per day are pretty poor, given hard work, bad weather and fluctuations. Most peasants lived desperate lives.

[Lee A. Arnold]

Matt, you might want to read a little more carefully. Lest a firestorm of reputation, etc. No one here wants to be a hunter-gatherer nor an early agriculturalist (two different things -- some of our commenters appear not to distinguish.) No one here believes that modern economies aren't far more affluent by several orders of magnitude. I was responding to erroneous statements higher in the thread. Your comment "subsistence affluence...doesn't exist, it never has" also appears to be erroneous, but then, I have never seen the term "subsistence affluence" defined. I'm guessing it would NOT mean "able to invent modern vaccination," but I suppose we may have to spell that out for some readers here. "Subsistence affluence" would be a very good term applied to the traditional Kwakiutl, when compared for example to the Shoshone... I think we have all also heard of human rights -- and, were it solved by modern affluence, it would be secured by now. What percentage of women in the United States report being molested, when children or teenagers, by men, usually a male family member? Is it 25%?

[Neal]

What agriculturist restricted the Inuit to Alaska? Where were the farmers at that time? What about the tribes within the Amazon basin? Was it the modern soybean farmers in Brazil who drove them into the jungle a few thousand years ago? What about New Guinea? What about the desert tribes in the Middle East and Africa? When were they driven from "fertile" land into the desert?

As for being driven from the land--how do you picture these orginal farmers? Stout, well-armed guys, hoe on one shoulder, weapon on the other, bag of seed around the waist, supplies to last until the next harvest? The hunter being driven out over the freshly plowed field by the armed bands of farmers who recognize the inherent soil fertility of that particular piece of land as opposed to the piece 10 miles away?

One life style transitioning into the other due to greater reliability of food source is more likely.

You're confusing modern agriculture and ancient patterns of survival, along with clear-cut differentiation of life styles as opposed to a struggle for life with adaptability to differing food sources being the key for survival.

"........Though frankly, hunting and gathering in northern Minnesota, though perhaps theoretically possible, is not done....." I may be nuts but I think you might want to review the data on the pre-Columbian northern original tribes of the US and Canada. It has been done.

[John Emerson]

Most of the people of New Guinea are agriculturalists. Desert tribes are pastoralists, not hunter-gatherers, and they are interdependent with agriculturalists. Most Eastern Native Americans were agriculturalists, though they did do a lot of hunting. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle has been marginal and almost extinct for a long time.

Before agriculture (ca. 8000 BC) everyone everywhere was a hunter-gatherer. As agriculture became more important, they took over the best agricultural land. This was, however, also the best hunter-gatherer land. The hunter-gatherers were driven to marginal lands where agriculture was difficult and unproductive. This was not voluntary.

The exception was Australia, where agriculture never took hold. As a result, what's now the best farm land in Australia was populated by hunter-gatherers only a couple of centuries ago.

Your argument is increasingly incoherent. I don't know what you're arguing for or arguing against.

[Barry]

"As for being driven from the land--how do you picture these orginal farmers? Stout, well-armed guys, hoe on one shoulder, weapon on the other, bag of seed around the waist, supplies to last until the next harvest? The hunter being driven out over the freshly plowed field by the armed bands of farmers who recognize the inherent soil fertility of that particular piece of land as opposed to the piece 10 miles away?

One life style transitioning into the other due to greater reliability of food source is more likely. "

Rather, one life style being able to displace the other owing to a greater number of people on a square mile of land, for those square miles of land most suitable for agriculture.

[Neal]

My main points being:

Hunter-gatherer was not always an idyllic lifestyle, nor a guanteed meal ticket, but provided a means of practical survival in many instances.

The agriculturists arose from the failures of the hunter-gather model. The switch came through the universal survival instinct--ultimately both agriculturists and hunter-gatherer are survival techniques in a harsh world.

There is some overlap between good agriculture land and good hunting-gathering land--but it far, far from 100% overlap. You also have to consider that there were far more forested areas then than now--so was a tree covered area a "good" farming area in a society whith few effective means for clearing land?

And given the scale of farming operations and small number of people, it is impossible that pre-historic farmers significantly displace pre-historic hunters.

The transition to agriculturists from hunter-gatherers was not abrupt, nor were they a distintly separate group at one time, and more than likely coexisted on the same land at the same time (where would animals congregate-have you ever hunted deer in a cornfield?)

So, to me the picture of pre-historic farmers driving away pre-historic hunters is an unlikely one. In fact, it is more logical that a fixed source of food (farms) would be raided by a hungry hunter.

Fini

[John Emerson]

Because hungry hunters raided farms, they were driven away. Land can be used for agriculture or for hunting and gathering, but not both at once. Agriculturalists displaced hunter-gatherers over the course of millennia and the process is not quite complete even yet, though very nearly so. The hunter-gatherers of today are almost all interdependent with agriculturalists.

An agriculturalist who hunts some is still an agriculturalist, as these terms are used.

The weakness of the h-g lifestyle is that it couldn't support a large population. Sahlins' point is that it supported a small population pretty well.

There is no good agricultural land that would not be good h-g land.

[Name]

"A Pacific island tribe was found where the men never worked and the women only worked a few hours a day."

So all they had to do was wait until dolphins evolved sufficiently to develop internet, and they could enjoy the comments section of a weblog like us?

I will never ever understand people who romanticize about life in a time with little hope of literacy, no expectation that technology will render the daily mileau obselete in 15 years, no access to the ideas of anyone more than 50 miles away, continuous rediscovery of basic concepts because the inventor died, and no preservation and accumulation of the work of geniuses.

Lets spend this generation and the next thousand watching the tide roll in and out.

[Guest]

When Sahlins wrote Stone-Age Economics, most cultural anthropologists (including Leslie White who Sahlins studied under) were writing about the progress of cultural evolution. Western Cultures were assumed to be at the pinnacle and other cultures were considered more or less primitive depending on how much they resembled Western Culture. Sahlins's underlying point, I think, was that the assumptions about hunter gatherers were based on this larger evolutionary perspective more than anything else. A larger point in Sahlins's later work is that cultures are worth studying on their own terms, and that there is nothing magical about Western rationality that makes Western thought categorically different from the way other cultures see the world.

He might be right and he might be wrong. But (unlike the vast majority of cultural anthropologists) he isn't ridiculous. He doesn't go in for high-falutin' theory, and he's probably one of the more readable humanities scholars of the 20th Century.

[John Emerson]

"no expectation that technology will render the daily mileau obselete in 15 years"

Anything but that! OMFG save me!

[Lee A. Arnold]

Several comments above contended that hundreds of thousands of years of hunting-gathering must have been an arduous hardscrabble life, and that it was gladly put aside by the invention of agriculture. Nothing could be sillier, except to take my correction of both points to be a romanticization.

Hunting-gathering in highly-productive ecosystems was an EASIER life than prehistoric grain agriculture -- the ethnographic evidence is clear. And knowledge that seeds give rise to plants must have existed for tens of thousands of years before people resorted to depend upon it. That's a logical inference. So why didn't they start agriculture sooner?

[John Emerson]

Lee, I'm a Sahlins buff and have read at least four of his books. But as far as I know, the h-g lifestyle only works when there's enough territory, and the territory is only enough if there's some way of limiting population. My guess is that fighting and intermittent famine were the main ways of limiting population in old Australia. But I agree that, other than that, it was probably a wonderful and not impoverished life.

[Matt]

Ok, Lee, I think I understand what you're writing, but the key, as you and John seem to have met some kind of cooperative synthesis on this towards the end, is that it depends on the ecology and geography. Within those limits, perhaps. But not just that. There's an interesting Chinese phrase for our positions, I think: "pigu jueding naodai", which is pretty coarse in the original and more Beijing dialect than standard Mandarin, but usually translated means "where you sit determines how you think". I'm working on trying to help Pacific countries get less poor, more skilled up, and empowered to engage, not least with modernity and the economics that comes with it, in a rather confusing geopolitical situation. Maybe that's the basis of our exchange. How about you disclose position?

What I do not accept is Lee's elision of my gripe about the subsistence affluence angle and the "human rights are not fully observed in the wealthy US". C'mon, apples and oranges.

But seriously, the debate does raise a very important question about epistemology; how do we know about what we purport to know? In my experience, looking at the legacy of substantially similar cultural and production systems, notably in the Pacific, gives a response that the cultural, agricultural and inter-island interaction set has been in homeostatic equilibrium for a thousand years. Little changed, but/as there was a strong base for continuity. There were warfare puncturing events, natural disasters and so on, but substantial continuity prevailed. (Actually I should check with friends on linguistic variation, but on the production and economic side it was fairly stable, excepting Easter Island).

I remain concerned when it comes to the Pacific about romanticism, about revanchism to Gauguin, Segalen, and other, later, subsistence affluence eminences, and about the alternate supposed teleologies of the Great Return to the luscious past, versus the Grim Coming of Modernity.

There's another, more humane path there somewhere.

M

[Lee A. Arnold]

Matt, my positions are (1) that everybody should be allowed to join modernity, and (2) that the Milton Friedman Institute can do whatever it wants, it likely won't matter, the libertarian bolt is already shot, it will have little or no additional importance to intellectual understanding as time goes on, it's a dead parrot. And it will never, ever speak to the human condition the way the Theological Seminary did.

But I also think (3) that people should use terms correctly. You write that "subsistence affluence...doesn't exist, it never has..." Brad DeLong writes that he disagrees with "Sahlin's point...that hunter-gatherer societies are 'affluent' ones in which all wants are easily satisfied."

What is the meaning of "affluence" in these statements? Surely you do not insist that economic anthropologists believe the term "affluence" in regard to stone-age hunter-gatherer societies to mean "access to the goods and services of the modern industrial economy?"

[Matt]

Lee

Since we're getting all reasonable now,

your:
1) yes, by choice
2/ yes, by choice, and ignore at will
3) hmmm, yes to Brad, but the historical record shows otherwise in epidemiology, unnecessary maternal and child mortality, lack of surgical care (vs upside in some cases of some great internal medicine), social maladies of various kinds now classed as human rights violations. I think this is where subsistence affluence either becomes a foreign and western concept, or one which speaks volumes about need, provision, inequity and the deprioritisation of those who don't benefit. Which clearly doesn't square with a (at lest my) definition of modernity.

@Neal 20 Aug, about subsistence in the North American Midwest, I have had similar thoughts about NZ Maori, having had an association with the Rapaki-based Kai Tahu tribe out of Christchurch. How those tribes and those further south in Otago actually made it through the winter let alone flourished is something my family and local contacts cannot tell me, aside from wiping out several species of land-based megafauna. The crew is working on it though.

M

[Ziggurat]

What I find a little alarming about the debate is the assumption that there is a unified "libertarian/corporatist" position that the proposed institute is going to promote.

Anyone with any real life experience in business can't help but observe that large, powerful businesses are diverse and a very significant number aren't much interested in libertarian ideology. Banks are quite delighted with certain forms of regulation, and competing institutions, like insurance companies or hedge funds are quite at odds with banks and each other regarding financial regulation.

Obviously pointing this out is not nearly as interesting as the stone age eden debate, but to the extent that this is an assumption of those opposing the institute, it seems moronic.

[Rumple Stiltskin]

Good riddance to the evil dwarf.

Why name anything after him. He lived his life in an island of fantasy as do his followers.

He missed his chance in life when he didn't get a part in a once popular TV show.

How I would have loved to see him "Boss!... The plane! The plane!"