A couple of comments, Keith. One is that I've known strong-willed and powerful women whose husbands are low status whimps. They didn't marry them to attain status, but probably because it is nice to have a husband when attending events. The other concerns gold, as you may have guessed. It may feel reassuring to think there is something out there that can ultimately provide the world with the stability it lacks, but I can't really see anything doing that, not even gold. We live in a world of quick fixes, and something that prevents governments from trying to fix quickly doesn't fit anymore.
Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Keith Hudson To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, ,EDUCATION Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2011 4:51 AM Subject: [Futurework] Consequences of our second-strongest instinct As the stock markets of the world seem on the point of collapse and likely long-term economic depression looms, let me dwell on a couple of fundamentals. The strongest instinct of all is individual survival. In extremis we have even been known to eat one another. Thus food and water are the ultimate backing for any currency. A billionaire marooned in a tent in the middle of the Sahara would spend his last penny if he were to be offered food and water and taken to safety. He might even spend his last penny on one cupful of water without any further guarantees. We don't need any of the biological sciences to tell us the above. However, for the vast majority of mankind, as yet uneducated in any of the biological sciences (even in the Western world), we need such stuff as anthropology or evolutionary biology to tell us what is the second-most important instinct which we share with 3,000 other mammalian species. This is procreation, disguised in practical form as status. The male of the species needs to have as high a status as possible in order to have as much sex as possible, in particular with young, healthy, desirable females. This, of course, can't happen for more than a small minority of human males, as with other mammals, because of the 50:50 male:female sex ratio. Mao Zedong, the all-powerful dictator of China for many years was a recent example of an exception (now that his true life story is being told!). By the age of about 30 years, when our frontal lobes have largely ceased developing, and potential skills are largely revealed, most males have settled into an acceptable status role for themselves. It is not that any male (to my knowledge anyway) will turn down an opportunity to increase his status, but he won't necessarily strive hard for it. Only relatively few will continue to be energetic in mid- and older-life in pursuing higher status intensively in the arts, or sciences, or politics, or business, or sport (of the gentler sort!) or even in some obscure hobby or activity. The general instinctive strategy of the young pubescent female is to choose as her life partner a male of as high a status as possible within her social domain as her intelligence, health and beauty allows. This is our human version of the quality control instinct of all mammalian species in making sure that the more inept males are left childless so that their less fortunate genes are not passed on. In oppressive cultures, parents will do this for her, often having to entice such a male with a dowry offering. And, talking of dowries, this immediately brings us back to money because currency and status are highly correlated in most spheres of human activity. Even individuals with the finest intellectual minds who don't usually bother overmuch with conventional status objects strive for gongs such as Nobel Prizes -- and usually also find themselves (accidentally?) in higher-paid jobs than the humdrum mental plodder. Food and water are not convenient items to carry around in exchange for items which have to do with our second-strongest instinct, so man has made do with small items which are valuable because of their rarity. Gold and precious stones are good examples. In fact, as an economic survival-of-the-fittest phenomenon, gold coins became by far the best currency to carry around. By the 17th century it was the universal currency except in a few small isolated islands. Gold had to be assisted, however, with a cloud of many other vicarious currencies during the course of the industrial revolution, because of the sheer volume of money that was being transacted. Principally (as regards most people most of the time) these surrogates were banknotes, though they could be exchanged, if absolutely necessary, with gold. This regime was thrown over completely, however, in 1914, when major countries started printing hitherto unimaginable quantities of banknotes to pay for wartime armaments. After WWII was over, they decided that it was in their interests to outlaw gold as the currency with which their electorates had to pay their taxes -- that is, the legal currency. By printing banknotes, at first modestly and then exuberantly, they could devalue the cost of their debts. But, as we are seeing in the past few weeks and months, this trick never quite came off. The principal paper currencies -- the dollar, the euro and the renminbi -- have all been devaluing and are now close to panic mode. Gold, which had never quite lost its currency status, either in the minds of many ordinary people nor in the vaults of the central banks, is now re-establishing its basic value in mirror-like fashion. Central banks of the world, particularly those of the fast emerging countries, have been buying gold steadily since the last pseudo currency, the Euro, was instituted in 1999. If we do, in fact, descend into world-wide economic depression in the next few days then one thing is for certain. Treasury economists, central bankers and top politicians will be re-reading their history books to determine more precisely just what went wrong in the last century. Then we might have some hope that a dependable stable world trading currency will follow. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2011/08/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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