Re: [Futurework] The race to the top -- and the bottom

[Keith Hudson]

Ed,

At 08:04 15/05/2005 -0400, you wrote:

My usual colour, Keith, whatever it is.
 
Ed

----- Original Message -----

From: Keith Hudson

To: Ed Weick

Cc: futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca

Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2005 2:29 AM

Subject: Re: [Futurework] The race to the top -- and the bottom

Ed,

At 22:20 14/05/2005 -0400, you wrote:

Just a few points about marriage and who chooses whom, Keith.  Prehistorically, I'm pretty sure it wasn't just young women going after the guy who could jump highest to the toot of a didgeridoo and who could rub the most red ochre on himself (sorry, but that's the image the way you put things conveys).

Make fun of it if you want but that's probably what happened. It also still happens today. For example, in the Sahel, the young men from different groups meet together and apply make-up (which takes a whole day), put on ornaments and then parade themselves and dance in front of the girls -- who then select the male of their choice for a night out. More often than not, this choice sticks and they then get "married". During these parades it is the imagination (and intelligence) of the men that is on trial because, in these nomadic groups the girls get very little chance of assessing a wider range of capabilities of young men from other groups. I've little doubt that something rather similar went on for about 150,000 years while we were in the small group scavenger-gatherer and hunter-gatherer phase. Adjoining groups probably met fairly infrequently.

 

You do have a point.  Mating rituals are as old as mankind.  They take various forms.  Dance is often involved.  Among Russians and Ukrainians, the young men twirl, get down and kick their legs out and do all kinds of other physically tricky things to music.  Young women, on the other hand, form circles and move around teasingly, letting the young men know that "while you think you're pretty good, you're not good enough for me!"  I've seen it done, and it's beautiful.  But my point is that traditionally, as done in village society, it was serious business and the rules around it were pretty strict.

And this prompts of something I'd never realised before. The English medieval sports of morris dancing (midlands and south) and clog dancing (in the north) were men only. And then I'm reminded of an Andalucian village my better-half and I vistied some years ago where the traditional Spanish evening rituals were still taking place. The boys and young men (some of them half-drunk) would gallivant about the square, while the girls and young women sat quietly on the sidelines, sometimes looking on, sometimes pretending not to. Fascinating! I've little doubt that some discriminating observations were going on there.

 

The rules were not necessarily about whether young men and women could have sex or not.  They were about commitment.  If they did have sex, and it resulted in pregnancy, they had better be prepared to spend their lives together.  This broke down during the industrial revolution when there were mass movements out of the countryside and into cities.  To quote from a piece of research I did a few years ago:

In Sweden and Germany, bastards were an infinitesimal part of the population before the eighteenth century: on the whole less than 1 percent of all births in seventeenth-century Frankfurt am Main, less than 2 percent in Lychen, Erfurt, arid Halle. Then in the eighteenth century the increase began: a jerky upward movement in Frankfurt starting in the 1720s, peaking at 19 percent in the Napoleonic Era and at 23 percent in the 1860s. The increases in Sweden, Leipzig, Hamburg, the countryside around Halle, Chemnitz, and Styria were roughly similar, the take-off and peak decades different from one case to another, but everywhere the pattern of rapid late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century increase. German illegitimate fertility then fell off dramatically after the 1890s..."(Edward Shorter, Sexual Change and Illegitimacy: the European Experience, Robert J. Bezucha, Ed., Modern European Social History, Heath, 1972, p.238 (http://www.cyberus.ca/~ec086636/coping.htm)

 I would be willing to bet that at least since the beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, when exclusive title to land as property became important, most marriages were arranged.  Marriages were about making and maintaining connections between families and about retention of property within families.  So and so's daughter was given to so and so's son because it was advantageous to cement a relationship most likely involving land by doing so.  Title to property was probably also instrumental to the development of the class system, and once that was in place, rules about who could associate with whom by marriage and who was excluded became important.

Yes, once agriculture came along (and wealth could be stored in barns to be passed on to the next generation) this started to happen and still continues today, particularly in India where the tradition is highly formalised into the caste system -- which, despite the Congress Party, still goes on. (The fate of children born as Untouchables is still dire -- permanently consigned to poverty -- as it is in Japan also today.) It is nearly always the case with arranged marriages -- with very few exceptions -- that girls have a choice (though the male nearly always doesn't) at some stage. An arranged marriage (in Hindu India) always has a stage (particularly among the better-off) where the girl and the boy are allowed some private conversation, and the girl is allowed to renege on her parents' choice (so long as she doesn't do this too often!). And, almost always, the girl's family (particularly if the girl is attractive) will go to a higher caste or sub-caste. Until comparatively recently if a girl fell for a boy from a lower caste -- and even, so help us, had a child by him -- then that child (of whatever caste the parents belonged to) would be consigned to a lower caste, often the Untouchables (which isn't really a caste but is below them all.) In some parts of India until recently the boy in such a situation would have his penis cut off. (In almost all long-time agricultural societies all over the world -- including medieval England --  "passing-off" [pretending to be of a higher class by means of clothing or accoutrements] was a heinous offence and often punishable by death.)
 
Again, you can fool around up to a point, but the rules within which you do it are pretty strict and often punitive.

Even pre-agricultural societies had strict rules about marriage.  For example, the Athabascan (Dene) Indians of the Mackenzie Valley divided themselves into two clans, the wolves and the crows.  A crow could not marry another crow.  He or she had to marry a wolf and usually, I believe, marry a wolf from another community.  The reason was probably keeping the gene pool mixed and avoiding the genetic perils of marriage within the close family.

This is similar to the Australian aborigenes (where it became even more complex where two-fold divisions became four-fold and even eight-fold sometimes and there were very intricate rules of who could marry whom -- you could only marry someone in a distant "box" -- rather like a knight's jump at chess). This is a formalised arrangement to make sure of genetic mixing.
 

During periods of large-scale social change, rules about who can marry whom break down.  That happened in central Europe during the industrialization of the early part of the 19th Century when large numbers of men and women moved from the country to the city.  A result was a huge increase in the number of often-abandoned illegitimate children.  It has happened again in the urbanizing society of the advanced world during recent decades.  Young men and women are free to marry whomever they want to and judging by the high divorce rate, the choices they make are often not very good.

Once again, though, large scale surveys show that females almost always marry males of as high economic potential as possible. In terms of IQ scores (investigated after the event, of course!), most selections of girls are to higher scoring boys.

  Given the ease with which people can now move around the world and mix, a recent trend appears to be a breaking down of the taboos against inter-racial marriage.  It's not uncommon to see a black father and a white mother (or vs..) with children of a colour somewhere between these days.  This fall, a young woman whom we know is going to marry her Chinese fianc�, who she met while spending some time in China a few years ago.  And so it goes.

I've little doubt, however, that the same upper-seeking tendency of girls applies. (In Edwardian England for a period at about the turn of the last century it became almost the norm for the young males of the aristocracy to marry the most beautiful [working class] girls from the choruses of the theatre and music hall -- called the Gaiety Girl phenomenon.) It is my impression from what I've read about America that the degree of mixed marriages has now stabilised somewhat and that Afro-Americans (even the professionals among them) are withdrawing into their own enclaves -- be it suburban housing estates or inner city ghettoes. This also seems to be going on here, though it's more complicated here with a large input of both Asian Hindus (and a minority of Sikhs) and Asian Muslims. They dislike each other but both of them virulently hate the African and Caribbean blacks. Indeed, some of the nastiest gun-fights are between young Muslims trying to break into the drug distribution rackets of the (usually) Caribbean blacks. Young Muslims and blacks have about four times the unemployment rate as Hindus and Sikhs. The latter integrate fairly well into the white employment scene while the former tend to start their own businesses. Their children -- like Chinese immigrant children -- are usually streets ahead of whites at school.
 
When couples get together, I think it depends a lot on what they are looking for.  If it's a fling, a person may pick someone from the opposite sex who can best provide that.  If it's a long term relationship, they might very well pick someone else.
There have been quite a number of research studies on this point and they bear out what you have written. When it's a one-night stand girls (like boys) will choose as handsome a boy as possible. When it comes to long-term relationships girls choose on the basis of security and potential (on the basis of "character" as they colloquially say) even if they're not good-looking. Think of Jackie Kennedy marrying one of the ugliest men alive (but also one of the richest)! (She made sure she arranged a pre-nuptial marriage settlement!)  I'm thinking of Rupert Murdoch, too -- marrying a beautiful Chinese girl 40 years younger than himself! (I hasten to say that I'm not imputing bad motives in her case -- I simply don't know. )

  Divorce rates are high because people make wrong choices about partners.  What initially looked like a good bet for a long term relationship turned out to be a bad one.

Biology is involved.  Most women do want to have children and they want to have them under the most secure circumstances possible, but of course it doesn't always work out that way.

At a more individual level, I think that young people tend to find partners whose personality compliments theirs -- a shy girl will marry a confident boy, etc. In the case of marriages between older people -- when, presumably, individuals have rounded-off their own personalities somewhat -- I get the impression that those concerned look for similar characteristics and tastes. But the same underlying upward-selecting instinct of the female applies, I would imagine, even though it's not so important (assuming that the female has become independent or has wealth from a first marriage). Of course, there have been notorious cases of beautiful film stars who have become very wealthy individuals indeed by means of serial marriages, ratcheting up their alimonies each time. One can only imagine that these women did so systematically.

Keith

 

Ed

Keith

Ed

----- Original Message -----

From: Keith Hudson

To: futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca

Sent: Friday, May 13, 2005 3:25 AM

Subject: [Futurework] The race to the top -- and the bottom

732. The race to the top -- and the bottom

Any beautiful girl with a moderate degree of intelligence can, if she so wishes, marry as high up the class system as she wishes if she plays her cards correctly. This can be seen from most photographs of rich or powerful men with their spouses in almost any newspaper on any day of the week. More usually than not, these men have married twice or thrice, and when they do so they nearly always marry someone younger than themselves and someone who is very beautiful.

Almost all women marry upwards -- to a male of more intelligence and fitness leaving the less competent males behind. The only females who don't tend to marry upwards are those with very high intelligence because males of sufficient intelligence have usually been snapped up already.

The instinct is clear. A post-puberty girl, by and large, is looking for economic security for herself and her future children. To be more correct, she is looking for that extra degree of security and well-being than she has already experienced in her childhood family. Biologists are now realising that this principle probably runs through all sexual species on earth -- whether plant or animal.

It has been the biggest all-pervading fallacy that has permeated the thinking of mankind for the past 100 years or so that, somehow, homo sapiens is above the usual competitive process of evolution. We have, somehow, reached perfection; the species is stabilised and will change no more.

Darwin gathered a plethora of evidence of the general survival (and subsequent procreation) of the fittest which shapes a species to its precise environment. However, he also suspected that a principle of sexual selection was at work -- that the principle of selection was chiefly channelled through the way that females choose the males they had sexual relations with and had offspring by.

This principle can be clearly seen in all animal species -- birds, fish, mammals -- but particularly in the social mammals and even more so in the primate species -- of which we are one -- where fairly clear rank order can be observed in all of their groups. Sometimes the rank order is extreme in which an alpha male gathers all the females in his group and has exclusive sex with them but, by and large, there is a more gradated rank order -- sometimes hard to determine in the middle ranks but usually clearly visible between the higher-ranking males and also at the bottom of the heap where the less competent males cannot find a partner.

Two trends have obscured the reality which evolutionary biologists are now elucidating. The first is that religious views -- particularly the monotheistic religions -- say that all individuals are equal. All have a soul or equal individual worth. All will go to heaven if they believe and do what the religion or the state tells them.

The second is that the fossil fuel bonanza, starting with vastly expanded coal production two centuries ago and proceeding without a check right up to the present age of oil and natural gas, has encouraged an industrial revolution by which a tide of economic prosperity has lifted almost all ships in the developed countries. We have had such an abundance of goodies that almost all our populations have been able to share them. Even the poorest in the land now have household goods and facilities which people in the medieval ages -- whether kings or peasants -- could hardly dream of.

But the principle of sexual selection has still continued and it can be seen today -- now that times are getting harder -- in a wider gulf opening out in all developed countries between the rich and the poor, between the well-educated and the less-educated, between the gifted and the less gifted. In England, for example, there has been an increasing tendency for the less intelligent young males to be left in the north of England while the more intelligent females have gone south to find their partners. The consequence is that the south of the country -- and particularly London -- subsidises the rest of the country financially.

The big problem of the fossil fuel prosperity of the last 200 years is that competition for rank order has not needed to be quite so intense as in former times because most people have been able to share in the innovations that the brightest people have invented and have experienced an apparent rise in status due to being able to afford the succession of consumer goods that have poured forth.

As a consequence, the state education systems of developed countries have adapted to this new more comfortable environment by dumbing down. So long as a proportion of the population keeps the show going -- scientifically, administratively or politically -- then all is well and the usual class divisions need not be considered so serious. A general air of egalitarianism and equal rights has tended to be a feature of all the developed countries for most of the last 50 years or so. Mass disorder and revolutions have been a thing of the past, except in those countries which are trying to break through into modernity.

However, times are getting tougher now. Energy prices -- which understrap the whole economy -- are rising inexorably. We need to develop new energy technologies of far more sophistication than the mere burning of coal, oil or gas in our power stations or in our cars. We cannot afford to dumb down most of our population now. We will need all the talent we can find. As energy prices rise, the new harsher economic environment will mean that the country, or region, or city, or group or class that has paid attention to neuroscience in the last 20 years and institutes the best possible nursery experience and education for its young children will be able to have a far higher standard of realised ability than those which don't.

The rich cottoned onto this a long time ago by employing nannies and governesses. The present-day rich in New York or London fight fiercely between themselves to find the best possible nursery education for their children. These parents, naturally enough, want to give their children the best possible start in life. This now needs to be extended to all children because it is not only the rich who are capable of producing talented children.

In former hunter-gathering times, the children of the more competent and the less competent played together and had much the same childhood experience out of which they gradually sifted themselves into rank order by the time of puberty. The children of the less-than-rich today have nowhere near the opportunities from a young age than the children of the rich. Recent educational surveys have shown that, by the age of about five or six, the talents of many children are already blunted. In strictly neurological terms, the neurons which could have developed their skills have not been used and have therefore died. These children will never learn the skills that will be necessary in the coming years.

I'm afraid that some economic commentators, however eminent, have confined themselves so much to economic data that they have not had time to apprise themselves of the findings of other human sciences.

Keith Hudson

<<<<

ALWAYS LOW WAGES. ALWAYS.

Paul Krugman

Last week Standard and Poor's, a bond rating agency, downgraded both Ford and General Motors bonds to junk status. That is, it sees a significant risk that the companies won't be able to pay their debts.

Don't cry for the bondholders, but do cry for the workers.

Standard and Poor's downgraded GM and Ford sooner rather than later because it believes that the public is losing interest in S.U.V.'s. But the companies were vulnerable because they still pay decent wages and offer good benefits, in an age when taking care of employees has gone out of style. In particular, they are weighed down by health care costs for current and retired workers, which run to about $1,500 per vehicle at G.M.

So the downgrade was a reminder of how far we have come from the days when hard-working Americans could count on a reasonable degree of economic security.

In 1968, when General Motors was a widely emulated icon of American business, many of its workers were lifetime employees. On average, they earned about $29,000 a year in today's dollars, a solidly middle-class income at the time. They also had generous health and retirement benefits.

Since then, America has grown much richer, but American workers have become far less secure.

Today, Wal-Mart is America's largest corporation. Like G.M. in its prime, it has become a widely emulated business icon. But there the resemblance ends.

The average full-time Wal-Mart employee is paid only about $17,000 a year. The company's health care plan covers fewer than half of its workers.

True, not everyone is badly paid. In 1968, the head of General Motors received about $4 million in today's dollars - and that was considered extravagant. But last year Scott Lee Jr., Wal-Mart's chief executive, was paid $17.5 million. That is, every two weeks Mr. Lee was paid about as much as his average employee will earn in a lifetime.

Not that many of them will actually spend a lifetime at Wal-Mart: more than 40 percent of the company's workers leave every year.

I'm not trying either to romanticize the General Motors of yore or to portray Wal-Mart as the root of all evil. GM was , and Wal-Mart is, a product of its time. And there's no easy way to reverse the changes.

What should be clear, however, is that the public safety net F.D.R. and L.B.J. created is more important than ever, now that workers in the world's richest nation can no longer count on the private sector to provide them with economic security.

When they reach 65, most Wal-Mart employees will rely heavily on Social Security -- if the privatizers don't kill it. And many Wal-Mart employees already rely on Medicaid to pay for health care, especially for their children.

Indeed, a growing number of working Americans have turned to Medicaid. As the Kaiser Family Foundation points out, that's why children have for the most part have retained health coverage, despite a sharp decline in employer-based health insurance since 2000.

Yet our current political leaders are trying to privatize Social Security and reduce benefits. And they are slashing funds for Medicaid even as they give big tax cuts to people like Mr. Lee.

The attack on the safety net is motivated by ideology, not popular demand. The public isn't taken with the vision of an "ownership society"; it seems to want more, not less, social insurance. According to a poll cited in a recent Business Week article titled "Safety Net Nation," 67 percent of Americans think we should guarantee health care to all citizens; just 27 percent disagree.

The question is whether the public's desire for a stronger safety net will finally be seconded by corporations that haven't yet adopted the Wal-Mart model of minimal benefits and always low wages.

Last year Richard Wagoner Jr., G.M.'s chief executive, gave a speech about the costs of America's "Kafkaesque" health care system that sounded a lot like my recent columns. And his company has made it clear that it likes Canada's system: in 2002 the president of General Motors of Canada and the head of the Canadian Auto Workers signed a joint letter declaring that "it is vitally important that the publicly funded health care system be preserved and renewed."

But according to The Journal Register News Service, which covered Mr. Wagoner's speech, he "stressed later to reporters that he was not proposing a national health care plan." Why not?

New York Times -- 13 May 2005

>>>>

Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>

---

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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>

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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>

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