6 ms·

As appears in Debt by David Graeber [0]: Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that. Samoan: Why? What do you think I

As appears in Debt by David Graeber [0]: Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that. Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing? Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it? Samoan: And why would I want to do that? Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine, and dry copra faster, and make even more money. Samoan: Okay. And why would I want to do that? Missionary: Well, you’d be rich. You could buy land, plant more trees, expand operations. At that point, you wouldn’t even have to do the physical work anymore, you could just hire a bunch of other people to do it for you. Samoan: Okay. And why would I want to do that? Missionary: Well, eventually, with all that copra, land, machines, employees, with all that money—you could retire a very rich man. And then you wouldn’t have to do anything. You could just lie on the beach all day. [0]: https://timothynoah.substack.com/p/the-guy-who-explained-what-money?s=r https://timothynoah.substack.com/p/the-guy-who-explained-wha...

GrumpyNl 5y ago
That's a nice write up, bookmarked to share, thank you.
- vkou 5y ago
  It's missing the second part of the story, where a more pliable Samoan is identified, the missionary enters into a capital-business-acumen partnership, the two bribe the government to take control of all of the productive coconut-growing land, and the first Samoan gets to enjoy the rest of his life as a wage laborer. He will do backbreaking labour for 70 hours a week, until he dies at ~55. Idleness is all well and good, until someone with guns decides that they'd rather have you spend those hours earning a profit for them, instead of lazying around.
api 5y ago
This line of reasoning is the same as the line of reasoning behind the idea that hunter-gatherers had it better than we do. It works until: - Your kid breaks their leg. - A natural disaster destroys your home. - You get cancer. - Psychopathic marauders sack your town and rape and kill everyone. - A draught causes a famine. - Your baby is born with a birth defect. ... and so on. I strongly suspect that humanity set off on its endless hedonic treadmill ride to the stars not because we were dissatisfied with the median of the status quo but because we were dissatisfied with the edge cases. Today's technophilia is framed as a run toward a glittering future, but I think we started this journey by running away from random misfortune and cruel circumstances. The whole idea of running toward anything is fairly recent vintage, probably enlightenment era onward, though it has some antecedent in Christian eschatology with the idea of salvation being a novelty or in the future vs being in the past.
- pydry 5y ago
  Hunter gatherers were, if anything, healthier and almost certainly happier than their agricultural counterparts but the latter outcompeted them due to their greater ability to wage war.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  There is a lot to learn from the history of technology, but I think the real explanations are: - People working across thousands of years for independent and poorly understood reasons, that set up combinations of circumstances that suddenly clicked in to place. (Initial breeding of animals and plants for agriculture, mathematicians unknowingly laying the groundwork for mathematical sciences.) - People working to further their own immediate interests. (Every industrial development.)
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Haha, joke is on us, masters of the world: Those listed "edge cases" are just as dangerous to even Americans in the land of for-profit health care and psychotic housing values. So back to the Samoans, you are now working near-slave-labor to be exposed to the same effective dangers, abstracted via financialized debt.
- bmitc 5y ago
  Hunter gatherers did have it better than the early agricultural societies. They worked much less during any given day, lived longer, and were healthier. Hunter gatherer societies can live as long as people in modern, developed societies. You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. With those, it makes a human life almost a tragedy, stretched out due to modern medicine and protocols keeping people alive.
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    I think you mean better than early North American settlers. Agriculture is quite old, and integral to the birth of Civilization. Not really clear what the disparity might have been at the onset, though it might have been a hybrid system. It seems that even some indigenous societies in the Americas experimented with agriculture. > You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. That might say something about developments in technology, or wealth inequality - not so much society revolving around agriculture.
recuter 5y ago
I'll do you one better, worth a read: https://www.ninalp.com/ART/Papers/How_Much_Land_Does_A_Man_Need-Leo_Tolstoy.pdf https://www.ninalp.com/ART/Papers/How_Much_Land_Does_A_Man_N... Of course, the author started out wealthy. Incidentally doing nothing occasionally adds up to something, where-as doing something often amounts to nothing. Most of you are reading this at work after all. Maybe there is something to how we define terms and measure things.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Aunche 5y ago
Doing nothing and relaxing in a tropical paradise sounds great until everyone else gets the same idea and wants to do the same and moves there. Then, your island is no longer self sufficient, and the only jobs locals are qualified for are low-skill services for foreign tourists.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  Not to worry, if everyone in the world sat on a beach all day, most would starve and we'd return to pre-industrial population levels.
  - onecommentman 4y ago
    Let’s calculate the amount of agricultural effort it would take to feed the average adult until age 70. To first order, corn providing calories plus adjustments. In the US, I find about two weeks of adult agricultural labor are required to feed an adult to age 70. Assume one average US farm family (1000 acres, 200 bushels/acre corn) effort feeds 25000 adults/yr, defined as adequate calories from corn (8 bushels/year to provide annual calories for one adult). So 350 food lives/yr from birth to death (75-80 yr life expectancy). Every day, a farm family (3-5 for 1000 acre farm) births a new food life. Can’t just eat corn so soybeans, vegetables, meat…count machinery, fuel, processing, shipping…let’s multiply that by a fudge factor of 3 to account for that. Two extra people for every farm family member for additional crops, distribution, shipping, fuel, machinery. So, 3-5 person/days * 3 ~ 14 days. Two weeks adult ag labor provides for 70 years of adequate food for one person. I could squeeze two weeks labor into a beach schedule sometime over 50 years to be assured to eat for the rest of my life. Lots of ways to challenge the numbers…but double, triple them, and it’s still a tiny fraction of a life. IT tech is fine, but ag tech improvements have fed, and continue to feed, the world.
- 5y ago
slothtrop 5y ago
The other side to this is that the aforementioned lifestyle is usually described as impoverished (and a product of injustice, not choice). It cannot be the case that living by meager means is at once virtuous/satisfying, and terrible. I vaguely detect a kind of cognitive dissonance about this. And to be clear, extreme poverty has its own clear definition by the UN, which does not apply here. Poverty is simply: the state of having few material possessions or little income. Presumably, like this Samoan. Does the romanticization go any further than poverty tourism? This reminds me that Thoreau is popularly denigrated today for being hypocritical, but no one seems to make the connection that it's for (more or less) the same thing. If someone is very well shielded from possible deleterious effects of the state of poverty (not including food and shelter), they're still benefiting from wealth directly or indirectly.
ManuelKiessling 5y ago
Wait, am I understanding this correctly: Graeber stole that one from Böll? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbeitsmoral https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arb...
- UglyToad 5y ago
  I initially said "with credit to Graeber" but as he acknowledges in the book it's from someone else, I guess here. I just find the Kindle UI too hostile to actually bother and pull out the full attribution so settled to "from" the book so readers could locate the citation.
user3939382 5y ago
Laying on the beach all day is a lot more enjoyable when, when you’re done, you have a nice, safe home to go back to, good food, health care, etc. It’s easy to romanticize having nothing but real life is complicated. Living primitively is simple but it’s not easy.
- meristohm 5y ago
  One counfounding factor is that we tend to normalize. There are environmental conservation groups in Wales working to keep the sheep because that's "how it's always been", when better would be to allow more beaver to grow up and shape the land so that it might be reforested again. Same with Ireland, which used to be a rainforest and home to much-larger and more numerous fish than are seen today. [0] I can imagine having a nice, safe home, with enough food and ways to maintain good health, without all the trappings I am currently entangled with and which have a cost far beyond what I feel this planet can reasonably bear as we push to the next billion people. That life would be easy enough (I'm not saying without effort, mind) because I'd have been born into it, learned the necessary skills, learned about the tens of thousands of other life-forms I live with. To transition now? I might be scared. I might miss my computer. I might think too highly of myself and less about the collective, nevermind seven or eleven or sixteen thousand generations hence. I'm at the "raise a child" stage of life and even now I (think I) accept my own death if were to happen today. The stories I care about involve humans existing alongside so much other life for thousands of years hence, with an unbroken history (oral or otherwise) so those at the end of life on earth have a really interesting story to look back on. Measuring humans in the billions and cheetahs in the thousands is not a healthy sign (for example). [0] Feral : Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, by George Monbiot See also : The Old Way : a story of the first people, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (lived with the Zhu/wasi (the slash is a click), or Ju/wasi as her mother spelled it, for about five years in the 50s and noted the changes over the decades from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist, with efforts to maintain culture along the way)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

GrumpyNl 5y ago

That's a nice write up, bookmarked to share, thank you.

vkou 5y ago
It's missing the second part of the story, where a more pliable Samoan is identified, the missionary enters into a capital-business-acumen partnership, the two bribe the government to take control of all of the productive coconut-growing land, and the first Samoan gets to enjoy the rest of his life as a wage laborer. He will do backbreaking labour for 70 hours a week, until he dies at ~55. Idleness is all well and good, until someone with guns decides that they'd rather have you spend those hours earning a profit for them, instead of lazying around.

api 5y ago

This line of reasoning is the same as the line of reasoning behind the idea that hunter-gatherers had it better than we do. It works until: - Your kid breaks their leg. - A natural disaster destroys your home. - You get cancer. - Psychopathic marauders sack your town and rape and kill everyone. - A draught causes a famine. - Your baby is born with a birth defect. ... and so on. I strongly suspect that humanity set off on its endless hedonic treadmill ride to the stars not because we were dissatisfied with the median of the status quo but because we were dissatisfied with the edge cases. Today's technophilia is framed as a run toward a glittering future, but I think we started this journey by running away from random misfortune and cruel circumstances. The whole idea of running toward anything is fairly recent vintage, probably enlightenment era onward, though it has some antecedent in Christian eschatology with the idea of salvation being a novelty or in the future vs being in the past.

pydry 5y ago
Hunter gatherers were, if anything, healthier and almost certainly happier than their agricultural counterparts but the latter outcompeted them due to their greater ability to wage war.
whatshisface 5y ago
There is a lot to learn from the history of technology, but I think the real explanations are: - People working across thousands of years for independent and poorly understood reasons, that set up combinations of circumstances that suddenly clicked in to place. (Initial breeding of animals and plants for agriculture, mathematicians unknowingly laying the groundwork for mathematical sciences.) - People working to further their own immediate interests. (Every industrial development.)
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Haha, joke is on us, masters of the world: Those listed "edge cases" are just as dangerous to even Americans in the land of for-profit health care and psychotic housing values. So back to the Samoans, you are now working near-slave-labor to be exposed to the same effective dangers, abstracted via financialized debt.
bmitc 5y ago
Hunter gatherers did have it better than the early agricultural societies. They worked much less during any given day, lived longer, and were healthier. Hunter gatherer societies can live as long as people in modern, developed societies. You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. With those, it makes a human life almost a tragedy, stretched out due to modern medicine and protocols keeping people alive.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  I think you mean better than early North American settlers. Agriculture is quite old, and integral to the birth of Civilization. Not really clear what the disparity might have been at the onset, though it might have been a hybrid system. It seems that even some indigenous societies in the Americas experimented with agriculture. > You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. That might say something about developments in technology, or wealth inequality - not so much society revolving around agriculture.

recuter 5y ago

I'll do you one better, worth a read: https://www.ninalp.com/ART/Papers/How_Much_Land_Does_A_Man_Need-Leo_Tolstoy.pdf https://www.ninalp.com/ART/Papers/How_Much_Land_Does_A_Man_N... Of course, the author started out wealthy. Incidentally doing nothing occasionally adds up to something, where-as doing something often amounts to nothing. Most of you are reading this at work after all. Maybe there is something to how we define terms and measure things.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Aunche 5y ago

Doing nothing and relaxing in a tropical paradise sounds great until everyone else gets the same idea and wants to do the same and moves there. Then, your island is no longer self sufficient, and the only jobs locals are qualified for are low-skill services for foreign tourists.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
phendrenad2 5y ago
Not to worry, if everyone in the world sat on a beach all day, most would starve and we'd return to pre-industrial population levels.
- onecommentman 4y ago
  Let’s calculate the amount of agricultural effort it would take to feed the average adult until age 70. To first order, corn providing calories plus adjustments. In the US, I find about two weeks of adult agricultural labor are required to feed an adult to age 70. Assume one average US farm family (1000 acres, 200 bushels/acre corn) effort feeds 25000 adults/yr, defined as adequate calories from corn (8 bushels/year to provide annual calories for one adult). So 350 food lives/yr from birth to death (75-80 yr life expectancy). Every day, a farm family (3-5 for 1000 acre farm) births a new food life. Can’t just eat corn so soybeans, vegetables, meat…count machinery, fuel, processing, shipping…let’s multiply that by a fudge factor of 3 to account for that. Two extra people for every farm family member for additional crops, distribution, shipping, fuel, machinery. So, 3-5 person/days * 3 ~ 14 days. Two weeks adult ag labor provides for 70 years of adequate food for one person. I could squeeze two weeks labor into a beach schedule sometime over 50 years to be assured to eat for the rest of my life. Lots of ways to challenge the numbers…but double, triple them, and it’s still a tiny fraction of a life. IT tech is fine, but ag tech improvements have fed, and continue to feed, the world.
5y ago

slothtrop 5y ago

The other side to this is that the aforementioned lifestyle is usually described as impoverished (and a product of injustice, not choice). It cannot be the case that living by meager means is at once virtuous/satisfying, and terrible. I vaguely detect a kind of cognitive dissonance about this. And to be clear, extreme poverty has its own clear definition by the UN, which does not apply here. Poverty is simply: the state of having few material possessions or little income. Presumably, like this Samoan. Does the romanticization go any further than poverty tourism? This reminds me that Thoreau is popularly denigrated today for being hypocritical, but no one seems to make the connection that it's for (more or less) the same thing. If someone is very well shielded from possible deleterious effects of the state of poverty (not including food and shelter), they're still benefiting from wealth directly or indirectly.

ManuelKiessling 5y ago

Wait, am I understanding this correctly: Graeber stole that one from Böll? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbeitsmoral https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arb...

UglyToad 5y ago
I initially said "with credit to Graeber" but as he acknowledges in the book it's from someone else, I guess here. I just find the Kindle UI too hostile to actually bother and pull out the full attribution so settled to "from" the book so readers could locate the citation.

user3939382 5y ago

Laying on the beach all day is a lot more enjoyable when, when you’re done, you have a nice, safe home to go back to, good food, health care, etc. It’s easy to romanticize having nothing but real life is complicated. Living primitively is simple but it’s not easy.

meristohm 5y ago
One counfounding factor is that we tend to normalize. There are environmental conservation groups in Wales working to keep the sheep because that's "how it's always been", when better would be to allow more beaver to grow up and shape the land so that it might be reforested again. Same with Ireland, which used to be a rainforest and home to much-larger and more numerous fish than are seen today. [0] I can imagine having a nice, safe home, with enough food and ways to maintain good health, without all the trappings I am currently entangled with and which have a cost far beyond what I feel this planet can reasonably bear as we push to the next billion people. That life would be easy enough (I'm not saying without effort, mind) because I'd have been born into it, learned the necessary skills, learned about the tens of thousands of other life-forms I live with. To transition now? I might be scared. I might miss my computer. I might think too highly of myself and less about the collective, nevermind seven or eleven or sixteen thousand generations hence. I'm at the "raise a child" stage of life and even now I (think I) accept my own death if were to happen today. The stories I care about involve humans existing alongside so much other life for thousands of years hence, with an unbroken history (oral or otherwise) so those at the end of life on earth have a really interesting story to look back on. Measuring humans in the billions and cheetahs in the thousands is not a healthy sign (for example). [0] Feral : Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, by George Monbiot See also : The Old Way : a story of the first people, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (lived with the Zhu/wasi (the slash is a click), or Ju/wasi as her mother spelled it, for about five years in the 50s and noted the changes over the decades from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist, with efforts to maintain culture along the way)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]