Are the circumstances that promote material well-being the opposite of those that promote tight social connection? My take-away from listening to this fascinating discussion between Russ Roberts and Sebastian Junger is that such a trade-off does exist.
It seems that social connection is at its highest in small-scale groups facing hardship. That is the opposite of the recipe for prosperity.
“small-scale groups facing hardship”
Am I correct to assume that people find it more satisfying working for a small startup over a large company? Does that imply that when it comes to jobs rather than society, this encourages specialization which is good for prosperity?
I’d expect to find somebody a lot smarter than me to be able to tie neuroscience, Henri Girard-ish things and whatever underlies the Dunbar Number together to explain all this.
I suspect that people thought of the Internet ( I did at least ) that it wouldn’t inflame our naturally tribal impulse.
Any trade-off between social connection and prosperity is muted by hedonic adaptation. By and large, individuals are resilient in hardship and ungrateful in prosperity. Shocks or major objective changes in circumstances—for example, an adverse medical diagnosis, unexpected incarceration, a substantial promotion, winning the lottery—have strong initial impacts, which then fade. Individuals differ in their propensities to happiness; some are blessed with sunny dispositions, some are roller-coasters, some are loners, some tend to brood, some want to be unhappy, and so on. Perhaps there are genetic components to individual happiness levels and hedonic adaptation?
Perhaps?
The figures I’ve seen bandied about are that 50% of your mood / happiness is from your genetic endowment. 10% is from events, including the most serious adverse or positive events.
40% *can* come from your behavior and things at least theoretically under your control, but you really have to work at it. Martin E. P. Seligman has written on this, I’m sure.
For example, every day at the end of the day you can review your day, choose three positive experiences, and tie them to your volition, to things you chose to do. The “Three Blessings” Exercise, it’s probably called by Seligman’s group at Penn. This is all oldish by now, at least 10 years old in the overall scheme of things.
Is this as much of a problem in Europe? I have suspected that driving everywhere, while convenient, detracts a lot from getting to know your neighbors and neighborhood.
That’s not it. There are plenty of people who live in high rises in big cities and walk or take public transit everywhere, and they still have no idea who lives in their own building, or even the apartment right next door. It’s a socialization problem, and time and space segregation and compartmentalization for functional purposes problem.
Socialization is enhanced when there is more overlap for interaction. For example, school may be for ‘education’, and after-school sports may be for ‘athletics’, and church may be for ‘religion’, and the houses may be for ‘shelter’, but it’s easy for kids to make and keep close – sometimes lifelong – friends when they see the same other kids at school, church, sports, and around the neighborhood for palling around. That other kid isn’t just one of hundreds of strangers with high turnover you randomly pass in the halls or on the street, he’s a long-term fixture of your life across multiple domains, which plays into human social-psychological impulses adapted to manage long-term relationship with higher stakes a bigger payoffs and penalties for social success and failure, respectively.
Besides close family (which doesn’t provide a lot of peer-type interaction), the closest things most Americans have to this are their work (or ‘institutional’) colleagues, and the more of one’s life such institutional experience demands from you and your peers, the more village / tribe-like it feels, which provides a kind of instinctive comfort zone that, even while one thinks one is suffocating from claustrophobia and lack of privacy and just wants to bail out to the other, atomized anonymity side where the grass is greener, when people actually leave, they discover pretty quickly they feel terrible, isolated, lonely, uprooted, and aimless, and it can take a long time to adjust, and some never quite recover. Prison and the military are two good examples of that, but start-up culture seems to be similar in some respects.
The essay makes a good case, but it’s incomplete. Consider: American society has enjoyed material well-being, and the circumstances which promote it, for generations. However, most of the worry about ‘tribalism’ and social solidarity and lack of tight social connections is recent.
So clearly one needs to add a few more wrinkles to the story and, specifically, ask what has changed lately, and especially within the last half century.
For candidates we have the “Four Forces”, and also 1. The ongoing decrease of religion, 2. Women mostly participating in the workforce instead of staying home, 3. The internet, 4. The ongoing decrease in the experience of traditional nuclear family life, to include lower fertility, 5. The increasing heterogeneity of the population, and 6. The increasing obnoxiousness and impact of identity-based ideology.
In addition to that, there is the paradox of choices which I mentioned in my Benedict Option review. In theory, adding more choices means I should always be able to improve my welfare because either I can stick with what I’ve got or find something which suits my preferences even better.
But certain ‘consumer’ choices are not really individually consumed. They are a matter of social or collective consumption, and their value for an individual’s welfare is like the network effects of the value of a telephone system or social media platform in that it depends on how many of the other people I care about are also consuming it. If I give everyone more choices, I can actually make everyone worse off in the new equilibrium, not better, if they don’t in practice settle on the same option.
This is part of the inherent welfare-eroding problem of liberty and ‘individualism’ in terms of enabling a counterproductive amount of opportunity to deviate from conformity, and is why human instincts are mimetic and is part of why it is adaptive for so many groups immediately form cultures which insist, one way or the other, on a high degree of commonality, uniformity, and conformity.
The trouble is that even suggesting that many of these recent changes had negative consequences is extremely politically incorrect, and critiquing them or suggesting they be reversed is completely unthinkable.
1. The ongoing decrease of religion, 2. Women mostly participating in the workforce instead of staying home, 3. The internet, 4. The ongoing decrease in the experience of traditional nuclear family life, to include lower fertility, 5. The increasing heterogeneity of the population, and 6. The increasing obnoxiousness and impact of identity-based ideology.
Outside of #1 and #5, the big issue on saying these are trends is a lot of them have not moved a lot during the last 20 – 30 years:
2) Isn’t women labor participation rate relatively flat the last 25 years? (And we exaggerate the number of women not working before 1980 as it was 40% in the late 1950s.)
4) Isn’t the decrease in nuclear families simply people putting marriage until ~30? And note divorce rates are lower today than 20 – 45 years ago. So most people are going towards a nuclear family but taking longer. Also fertility in the US has bounce between 1.6 to 2.2 babies per female the last 45 years so it is not a new trend.
3 & 6) I bet a lot of this is not society has become more identity politics driven but the internet is amplifying these trends. In reality, I remember the late 1970s and 1980s there was much more distinct racism in our nation but the internet made it easier to find and expose.
5) Isn’t the reality of the increase in minority populations mostly (80%) higher birth rates. In terms of California and Texas, the Hispanic-Americans is around 40% today but even in 1990 it was 25 – 30%. Yes if you compare demographics over decades you see changes but it is slow moving.
Just as “employment rate” (around 60%) shows a disconnect from the “unemployment rate” (less than 4%), the divorce rate is connected to those who chose marriage. Today, the parents of over 70% of black kids, and over 30% of white kids, do NOT choose marriage — thus, if they split it is not “divorce”.
For “families”, the key metrics should be what percentage of kids live with a) married bio parents; b) married but not bio parents; c) unmarried man and woman (together for X years; 1? 2??); d) single parent (serial non-married relationships); e) adult non-parent.
Family is where “tight” social connections start: blood thicker than water. Yet the USA supports kids leaving at 18 for college, and starting their own families or single adult lives away from their parents. Maybe “needing” some money sometimes, but not needing anything else.
A huge part of a close social connection is “feeling needed”. Material well-being allows most individuals to reduce their “need” for others — so that others do NOT feel needed. The loss of being individually needed is the biggest tradeoff loss at higher levels affluence. I suspect it’s a big part of the early deaths for recently retired folk; they stop work because they’re no longer needed, so then they lose reasons to live. Conversely, with a pet that “needs” them, they DO have a reason to live, and stay healthy, and so they do more of that.
How can society change so we get material well being AND being needed?
I suppose the growing number of 20 and 30 somethings living with parents is mitigating this loneliness business somewhat. The stigma of living with parents is declining as well, so it’s not like it’s obviously offset by status anxiety (“I’m a loser.”)
Space colonization. Perhaps too hard, but that would be a mechanism for people to experience hardship and tight social bonding without lowering material well-being.
I suspect the frontier (as you allude to with respect to Indian tribes) offer just such an outlet in the past. As humanity got wealthier people continued to colonize the frontier in small tight-knit bands. The industrial revolution proceeded apace without detracting from the shared goal of exploration and colonization.
Other avenues might include seasteading. Probably living on a sea platform would provide close social bonding.
There’s a reason why offshore rig jobs are 14 days on 21 days off.
It seems that social connection is at its highest in small-scale groups facing hardship. That is the opposite of the recipe for prosperity.
File this under “The Post WW2 boom and prosperity” is a historical outlier in most historical economies. After the expereiences of WW2 and the Great Depression, everybody simply felt a better with their lives and communities. (And isn’t being in the Army at war the most extreme example of a tight social connection. If you don’t trust your follow soldiers that has huge problems for you.)
I doubt we are predisposed to tribal life, in the sense of a genetic marker; meaning no X axis.
Do we whoop it up like wild pack animals on occasion? Yes, but I cannot find a marker that calls ‘whooping it up’ a tribal emotion. Tribes may or may not whoop it up more than the modern technocrat. Just as an example.
If we have a tribal nature, then we likely had it for 11,000 years, and still have it in the same dose. Tribalism dose not match any scale I can see.
Junger mentioned his wife’s family’s upbringing in communist Bulgaria as an example of material hardship promoting tight social connections. At first I laughed when i heard this because I grew up in Romania during the 1980s and remember the more anti-social pathologies (paranoia, sycophancy, deceit, etc.) we all had to develop in order to compromise with the system. But thinking about the topic some more, it’s also the case that I had remarkably close social connections during my adolescence, which I cannot even begin to compare with the seemingly bored high school existence of my American children.
But I think Junger omits one important casual factor. While it’s true that we experienced material hardship, what really created a sense of cohesion in friends and family alike, apart from the shared hatred of the system, was the knowledge of the existence of a better world (i.e., the West), where each of us had a relative that recently escaped to, and where we hoped and dreamed we could one day follow. I don’t see the same type of animating spirit driving either the left or the right (or the middle for that matter) in the West today. Instead, I see all sides despair at the world that is to come, even if their side wins politically..
Yeah, I found something missing in this. If Arnold’s thesis is right, Fishtown should be doing well (look at all that hardship), and Belmont should be doing poorly on the metrics Arnold cites. However, the opposite is the case.
Within my own life, when things were hard my parents and my parents fought about money it didn’t bring them together it brought them close to divorce.
Overcoming a hardship through your shared resourcefulness does bring people together. Both because your engaged in useful agency (your efforts and decisions were integral to the struggle) and because your overcame or could reasonably expect to overcome in the future (hope).
People in some dying West Virginia town may well have higher material standards of living then someone in Romania in the 1980s, but they know they aren’t that useful to their family or community, that the people running society know think they are useless and maybe even evil, and that all of the trends and forces in the world today can only be expected to make that worse. What, on a day to day basis, can they do to change that (don’t tell me they are going to “learn to code”).
There’s really nothing stopping anyone from forming an agrarian commune on their own, and many do. The Amish are doing pretty well these days.
I see many more left-leaning folks doing this than right leaning people, even though many such communities have had a religious basis in the past. I see left-leaning friends creating “intentional communities” even in cities, banding together to start community gardens, participating in co-op maker spaces, and organizing social gatherings and events.
By contrast, I get the impression that the Trump supporting people in that dying rural West Virginia town just aren’t doing any of that. If they’re angry at not having a sense of social connection, then why are they not engaging in the sort of shared collective enterprises that I see progressives in cities doing all the time?
It is unfortunate because these left-wing communities are usually organized around a broader anti-capitalist or social justice mission – but they do succeed in creating social connection and community. And that keeps driving the focus in an almost religious like manner – it’s the mission that holds the community together. It’s like if your only source of community is the local church, you’re just going to have to join the church, or you won’t have many friends. So people join the church not out of religious faith, but because they need a community.
(IMO, this is a nearly insurmountable hurdle if you ever want to change left-leaning people’s minds about capitalism, it’s a central tenet of the faith so if they questioned it they would be cast out of their community).
What do progressives in cities do? I’m up close to this, and a lot of these “communities” seem to be ways to engage in performative wokeness and spend way way too much money on frivolous things. Does going to your local farmers market to overpay for produce and complain about Trump really constitute some great moral and cultural advance? Does paying $5 for coffee and a bunch of money for yoga lessons constitute “hope”.
Mostly I see progressives getting their mind as numb as they can on whatever chemical they can, trying to hook up in the evening, and engaging in performative wokeness during the day (which mostly seems to involve lots of overpaying for things deemed enlightened with their professional salaries and lack of children fueling the disposable income).
The only decent community I’ve ever been a part of as an adult was a conservative religious one. But it was in a city and is mostly college graduates.
I don’t know what it’s like in West Virginia as I don’t live there, but comparing the issues faced by 95 IQ people in a declining part of the country to 115 IQ people in a dynamic part of the country doesn’t seem apples to apples.
You may not like it but many progressives do find community in political activism. Going to the farmer’s market can be a social activity. So can going to a protest march.
I do not necessarily see this as a good thing. Like I said, it’s part of what binds people into political conformism.
My point is that nothing is stopping people in rural West Virginia from creating community and making themselves useful to family and community by engaging in similar kinds of volunteer effects. Anyone can start a community garden – you can make it all hippie or organic , or you can bless the tomatos and praise god, and it’s still a garden run by volunteers.
Sad that in Slovakia, most kids do NOT know about Communist socialism, don’t want to know the reality about it, but do have a nostalgia for the closer communities & friendships that their parents remember.
Dec 24 was a working day, before the Dec 25 Christmas holiday (which was a holiday)– it was not certain that stores would have items needed for baking, or other holiday preparations. Huge amount of stress, often some disappointment. A LOT more gratitude for the good things that were successful.
Poor people who are able to achieve some improvement, from their own efforts, are more grateful for the good the result than those who get the good result without effort. Grateful people are usually happier than the ungrateful.
“Spoiled rich kids” is the stereotype we’re talking about and seeing, as most kids in the US are, on an absolute scale, rich.
From the transcript, Russ:
We want to be in a tribe. We need to be in a tribe. And, I think there’s a temptation in modern political discourse to decry tribalism. I have. But it’s naive to think, ‘We just need to get people to stop feeling that way because it’s unhealthy.’ It’s who we are.
To be “in a tribe” is pretty clear — a tribal identity. Or multiple tribal identities.
The one that Trump and Reps is pushing is “all of American citizens” as an American Tribe. I think this is pretty good. Yes, Trump insults individuals, especially if they have attacked him, but that is not attacking the whole tribe.
Dems are trying to create a society that accepts attacking Reps, and members of the Rep Tribe. Junger describes this process in general:
when politicians and media leaders talk about other Americans–demographic groups, political rivals, whatever it may be–not with criticism: criticism’s great, right? Dislike? No problem. You don’t have to like anybody. I don’t care. But when you talk about those people with disgust and contempt, what you are really doing is you are communicating, ‘You know what? Not only do I disagree with this person; they shouldn’t even be in the group.’ Like, ‘They shouldn’t even be in the country.’
There are many examples of Dem politicians and media leaders talking this way against Reps, like accepting Scalise and others getting shot by a disturbed Dem, like a Rep getting booed in a restaurant with Dem media support, like a Carlson having his home mobbed by angry protesters threatening his wife and child. Lots of examples.
But instead Junger falsely labels it as something Trump does, with the Obama birther questions (as Obama’s 2000 book blurb dishonestly claims), as outrageous. Russ mentions Hillary calling Reps “deplorables”. Dems can find “men on the street” who say terrible things about Dems or liberals, but it’s the Dems in power & paid on TV who are against American Reps.
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While we need to be in tribes, we also need closer community. With real people that we meet and talk to — yet not necessarily that live next door. Office group is one of the areas this is happening.
I would disagree that the message that Trump actually communicates is that the US is one tribe. Maybe you could come away with that by taking some things he had said in isolation. It just seems like he is always throwing red meat to his base, which communicates that he doesn’t see the country as one tribe, but rather as many tribes with only one loyal to him.
Did Lee Kuan Yew communicate that the people of Singapore were one tribe?
On the positive column we have the following:
1) Constantly spoke about Singaporean identity and shared bonds
2) Made sure public places celebrated each of Singapores major cultures
3) Essentially outlawed identity based demagoguery
4) Made everyone engage in two years conscripted service where you were expected to work along side Singaporeans of all ethnicities/cultures
5) Tried to avoid ghettoization in public housing
Of course on the other side:
1) Was very open about his eugenic and racial views
2) Was very open about his view of Han supremacy (and didn’t allow any whining about unequal outcomes between races)
3) Allowed virtually zero illegal immigration and punished illegal immigrants and their enablers with physical torture (caning)
4) Put together an immigration policy designed to mostly keep out low IQ brown South Asians and admit high IQ Chinese Han. Again, very open about why.
5) Stated in the open that he thought multi-cultural societies couldn’t function and that it inevitably descended into each group putting itself ahead of the nation.
And on the ground any look at Singaporean election would show #5 in spades. The Han voted for LKY, while the Malays and others voted for their own candidates.
So was LKY someone who promoted a unified Singaporean tribe that put aside ethnicity and culture into a single common identity?
Or was he a Han supremecist who wasn’t shy about his eugenics or stating harsh truths?
How did his own people view those questions?
Trump says some things that people won’t say (but they are true). He also doesn’t take crap from people (even if pushing back isn’t nice). Maybe that makes those that don’t like what he says or how he pushed back uncomfortable.
But the Malays in Singapore obviously were uncomfortable with LKY because they never voted for him. Yet, somehow, despite that discomfort, things ended up working out really well. Maybe discomfort isn’t the worst thing in the world.
Maybe “being American” like “being Singaporean” isn’t something you have to be 100% comfortable with, but you need to buy into more then you don’t buy into it.
The one that Trump and Reps is pushing is “all of American citizens” as an American Tribe. I think this is pretty good. Yes, Trump insults individuals, especially if they have attacked him, but that is not attacking the whole tribe.
Yes, right-wing republicans want everyone to say “We’re all Americans”, but they don’t want to redefine “America” to be inclusive of black culture, hispanic culture, asian culture, and other groups who don’t fit into the traditional, conservative, idea of American culture. They just want Asian Americans to stop being Asian, and Hispanics to stop being Hispanic, and Blacks to well, stop being “black” in the sense of having their own culture with it’s own music and slang. They want people to assimilate totally into “white” culture.
The impression I get is that they would like white people to act more Asian (being that they are successful and orderly).
They do want blacks and hispanics to stop behaving badly and underperforming. If their culture is part of the problem then it would be a good thing if they ditched it.
Sorry, but conservatives do have all the right answers. Promiscuity is bad, sexual restraint is good. Drug use is bad, sober living is good. Laziness is bad, industriousness is good. Divorce is bad, being married is good. Childlessness is bad, having a family is good.
These are the correct objective answers and are not open to debate. Any credible sociologist will tell you again and again that the data is in on this and the squares we’re right about what constitutes the good live, the hippies were wrong. White America basically figured this out by the 1970s and that is why White America hasn’t voted democrat since. You had to import foreigners to make up for losing the culture war.
To the extent “XYZ culture” rejects these correct answers then XYZ culture is wrong and should be rejected.
There’s much more to conservatives implicit notion of what constitutes American culture, than just those things you list. Conservatives get antsy when people say “Happy Holidays”, because they think it’s a plot to undermine Christianity. Well, maybe it is – it’s a plot to make the holiday season universally inclusive of Buddists and Hindus and Jews and Muslims – to make all those people feel like they belong in American culture. Which conservatives don’t like because they want “America” to remain a “Christian” place. They don’t want Chinese Americans who practice Buddism to feel like they belong. They want them to convert to Christianity.
America has (had) a distinct culture with regional variations. Those cultures worked well for the existing residents and they were comfortable with them. Sharing common culture is a valuable and positive thing.
When immigrants move to America there should be no expectation that American culture change to accommodate them. They wanted to come here, they can accept it as-is.
If they don’t want to change, they have the option to remain in a culture that they find comfortable.
If they move to America and find aspects of the culture uncomfortable or unpleasant, they can return to whence they came.
*from
Many Chinese Americans are third generation descendents of people who game here in the 1800s to work on railroads. Should they too feel like they don’t belong or “go back to China”?
I also want to point out that this thread started with someone claiming that Trump wanted all Americans to be one tribe, and literally within three replies it descended into “if you don’t like America just at it is you can leave!”
You don’t unify people into one tribe by telling them they don’t belong and are free to leave.
Actually it was “all American citizens” as a tribe.
Illegal aliens are not citizens
Migrant workers are not citizens
H1B wage slaves are not citizens
Just because you want to be a citizen does not mean you are and just because you ask to be a citizen doesn’t mean you can or should be.
Just because you’re unwilling or unable to recognize the distinctions doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
I’d forgotten about Hawaiian nationalism until yesterday.
I was in an art gallery, and of course curators love Hawaiian nationalists. And Pakistani nationalists. And Thai nationalists.
Go to any government art gallery or university art museum and the curators will always include nationalist painters and nationalist video artists. Maori nationalist photographers. Inuit nationalist performance artists.
Imperial America and Britain and the west generally is the enemy in all these artworks. But a nationalist artist from West Virginia or Kentucky might make the Colorado Civil Rights Commission the target of her own satirical artwork. Hypothetically.
Maybe an artist could create a series of enormous cakes in steel from the evidence cited in a recent lawsuit: “I’m thinking a three-tiered white cake. Cheesecake frosting. And the topper should be a large figure of Satan, licking a 9″ black Dildo. I would like the dildo to be an actual working model, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake. I can provide it for you if you don’t have the means to procure one yourself.”
The show could be called Colorado Civil Rights Commission v. Jack Phillips. Or something more obscure, to get it under the radar and not tip off the curators as to the actual satirical content of the work.
Curators buy art that ridicules Christians. Ridiculing government officials who harass Christians isn’t going to get you anywhere in the art world.