Name: Sick societies
ISBN: 9780029089255

What Hacker News says

ufFeb 2019

Sick Societies by Robert Edgerton changed my view on pretty much all aspects of mankind.

By giving vivid examples of failing or badly functioning and "maladaptive" (processes in) various (indigenous) societies he made made me value our current state of existence very much: Government, rights, laws, police, infrastructure, jobs, and all that really are a great achievement of mankind.

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anatolyDec 2015

Non-fiction, best to worst:

Henry Marsh, Do No Harm. A brilliant memoir by a neurosurgeon about his work, the nature of his profession, successes and mistakes (especially the latter). Frequently touches or verges into the personal. Not morbid, but often sad.

Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers. Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater

Two very good books about improvisation, although Spolin's is too dry and theory-laden for me (it's meant for teachers more than practitioners). Both, however, pale compared to Keith Johnstone's earlier Impro: Improvisation and the Theater, which is a life-changing book about what improvisation can teach us about spontaneous creativity and relationships between people. I recommend that one first and foremost if you know nothing about improvisation and are curious.

Martinus J G Veltman, Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics. A readable account - necessarily simplified, of course - of the current state of affairs in elementary particles and much of the last 50 years of history, by one of the participants (a Nobel prize winner). Not as organized and methodical as I thought it would be, and half a year later I forgot most of the physical explanations, but it was an interesting read.

Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies. A thorough examination of the hundreds of horrible examples when "natural" societies studied by anthropologists have customs that are not only bad from our modern Western point of view, but arguably fail in achieving their own objectives. The whole book exists to counter lazy cultural relativism of the "maybe we don't like X, but if they do it, it must be for a good reason and it must be a useful adaptation for them" kind.

Michael Harris, Mathematics Without Apologies. A very eclectic and idiosyncratic book by a mathematician on the sociology and epistemology of mathematics as a discipline. To be appreciated for its wealth of ideas and references to other interesting books and theories, rather than for any particular argument or thread.

Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. A story on what happened when a psychologist tried to bring three psychiatric patients, each believing themselves to be Christ, together and to talk it out amongst themselves. Happened in the 1960s. The idea is more interesting than the outcome.

Fiction, best to worst:

Patrick O'Brian, The Hundred Days. The penultimate book in the series of the best historical novels (the Aubrey-Maturin series) ever written, by a huge margin. The series transcend the genre and I count the Aubrey-Maturin books among the very best books I read in the last decade.

Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle. A brilliantly written coming-of-age story about a girl growing up in an impoverished family occupying a decaying castle in the English countryside, set in the 1930s. Reminded me in many ways of Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, a novel in the similar genre (but with a younger protagonist) that's known much less than it deserves.

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo. If you read and liked Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude, this one is shorter, darker, involves many more dead people, and you may want to give it a try.

Alfred Hayes, In Love. A story of a man obsessed by love in a mid-century NYC. Unexpectedly touching, very convincing psychologically.

Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background. SF, a grand heist novel set in a advanced civilization living in a star system located unimaginably far away from any other stars and galaxies, and so doomed to a lone struggle with its own long history. A wealth of technological and social ideas you'd expect from Banks. The ending felt a bit forced.

Gene Wolfe, There Are Doors. Gene Wolfe, Nightsite of the Long Sun/Lake of the Long Sun.

Gene Wolfe is the best writer American science fiction produced in the last half-century. "There are Doors" is a pretty weird fantasy novel about an alternate world where men die after their first intercourse (as some spiders do in ours), and the hero travels back and forth between that world and ours. It's good, but not as strong as Wolfe's best, which to my taste is the Book of the New Sun tetralogy, the novellas in the Fifth Head of Cerberus collection, and many of his short stories (well-collected in The Best of Gene Wolfe). The other two are the first half of the "Book of the Long Sun" series that I'm still reading through.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed. Superb political SF about an imagined anarchist [anti-]utopia. A serious attempt to describe a human society with no central power structures and no ownership. The hero is a physicist born and raised in that society who escapes to a sibling planet with the more typical modern states. This novel took all the awards in the 1970s when it was published, and deservedly so.

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MichaelGGOct 2015

Yep. There's a great book called Sick Societies that does a great job dismantling the myth of the noble savage. PNG is one place discussed. IIRC, it also contains some cultures that highly value eating people you betray. The greater the betrayal (as in, you've befriended someone and act in their interests, then kill them), the higher the reward (respect or whatever).

Simply by agreeing on some basic human rights, or just being opposed to murder, is enough to show these societies are bad. Interference isn't intrinsically bad, and there's nothing unethical about putting an end to such atrocities. (It might be easy to fall into the trap of committing your own ethical violations while ending atrocities, but it's not required.)

The book does a good job of providing solid evidence of the harm these cultures inflict on people.

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pdfernhoutSep 2018

Related from 2003 by Jim Sanford: "Confessions of a Recovering Economist" http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue21/Stanford21.htm "I am an economist. It is seventeen days since I last uttered the phrase "supply and demand." But the demon still lurks untamed, within me. Economics is an addiction. Every other addiction has a Twelve Step program, laced with tough love and blunt self-honesty. Why not a Twelve Step program for economists? God knows, we have done enough damage with our arrogant, drunken prescriptions. Here's how each and every economist can face up to their inner demons, and make their own small contribution to setting things right. ..."

From 2010: "They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)" https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.h... "But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists — like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor — have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. “There is so much inbredness in this profession,” says Ms. Reinhart. “They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded.”"

Or from 2011: "Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal" by Moshe Adler https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7197448-economics-for-th... "Why do contemporary economists consider food subsidies in starving countries, rent control in rich cities, and health insurance everywhere "inefficient"? Why do they feel that corporate executives deserve no less than their multimillion-dollar "compensation" packages and workers no more than their meager wages? Here is a lively and accessible debunking of the two elements that make economics the "science" of the rich: the definition of what is efficient and the theory of how wages are determined. The first is used to justify the cruelest policies, the second grand larceny.Filled with lively examples-from food riots in Indonesia to eminent domain in Connecticut and everyone from Adam Smith to Jeremy Bentham to Larry Summers-Economics for the Rest of Us shows how today's dominant economic theories evolved, how they explicitly favor the rich over the poor, and why they're not the only or best options. Written for anyone with an interest in understanding contemporary economic thinking-and why it is dead wrong-Economics for the Rest of Us offers a foundation for a fundamentally more just economic system."

Or harder hitting from a trial lawyer: http://conceptualguerilla.com/essays/essays-on-economics-and... "Old habits die hard. In fact, we still have a “leisure class”. As capitalism has grown so has the wealth and privilege of our leisure class. The old mythologies – gods, the “great chain of being” etc. – are no longer available to justify the existence and perpetuation of our leisure class, something our elites are definitely interested in perpetuating. What was needed was a new “rational” world-view that justified the existence of privileged elites. That rationalization came in the form of a brand new science known as economics, which included a brand new mythology."

Or from 1999: "The Market as God" by Harvey Cox (Harvard professor of religion): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-mar... "A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar. Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine's City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies."

See also: "The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier" by Richard G. Wilkinson

And: "The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger" by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

And: "The Price of Inequality" by Joseph E. Stiglitz

Another petition/manifesto by students from 2009: "The True Cost Economics Manifesto" https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-true-cost-economics-manif... "“We, the Undersigned, make this accusation: that you, the teachers of neoclassical economics and the students that you graduate, have perpetuated a gigantic fraud upon the world. You claim to work in a pure science of formula and law, but yours is a social science, with all the fragility and uncertainty that this entails. We accuse you of pretending to be what you are not. You hide in your offices, protected by your mathematical jargon, while in the real world, forests vanish, species perish and human lives are callously destroyed. We accuse you of gross negligence in the management of our planetary household. ..."

There is at least one other petition I saw from around then (though with softer words) mainly by economics professors and grad students -- can't find it at the moment.

Or to go way, way back, see Marshall Sahlins: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's -- in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times. ... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

Even in the 1980s when I was in college it was clear to many that much of economics was, essentially, am apologetic branch of mathematics with little connection to the real world. My own take on that from around 2008: https://pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#Some_com...

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pdfernhoutJul 2017

Yes, for example the book "The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier".

From the Amazon blurb: "Comparing the United States with other market democracies and one state with another, this book offers irrefutable evidence that unequal societies create poor health, more social conflict, and more violence. Richard Wilkinson, a pioneering social scientist, addresses the growing feeling — so common in the United States — that modern societies, despite their material success, are social failures. The Impact of Inequality explains why inequality has such devastating effects on the quality and length of our lives. Wilkinson shows that inequality leads to stress, stress creates sickness on the individual and mass level, and overall society suffers widespread unhappiness and high levels of violence, depression, and mistrust across the social spectrum. The evidence he presents is incontrovertible: social and political equality are essential to improve life for everyone. Wilkinson argues that even small reductions in inequality can make an important difference—for, as this book explains, social relations are always built on material foundations."

See also: "Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal" by Moshe Adler.

From that blurb: "At a time when growing numbers of people are deeply anxious about the workings of our economy—and when our very future as a society is up for grabs—economist Moshe Adler offers a lively and accessible debunking of two elements that make economics the science” of the rich: the definition of what is efficient and the theory of how wages are determined"

The only evolutionary justification I can see is that some people who have accumulated assets of some sort (or wannabees of that sort) expect themselves or their children to be sexually advantaged by making everyone else suffer, as a form of amplified Social Darwinism. See for example: "The Mythology of Wealth" https://web.archive.org/web/20101028013317/http://conceptual... "The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's" https://web.archive.org/web/20081223191749/http://conceptual...

So, in that sense, perhaps it is meant to be exhausting? As financier Jay Gould is claimed to have said in 1886: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jay_Gould "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half."

Today, he might say: "I can always hire half of the working class to misinform the other half through social media, schooling, and the press."

Even if such an advantage was even true in the past (ignoring that egalitarian hunter/gatherer tribes had numerous ways of dealing with that issue), in a world of nukes, designer plagues, and autonomous drones (which could get unleashed as society breaks down), such an approach to try to increase relative personal fecundity seems like a very a risky proposition.

Some ideas from the past include reverse dominance by teasing, shunning, and ridicule, encouraging play, and permissive/trusting child rearing. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/ho...

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