Primitive communism: Marx’s idea that societies were naturally egalitarian and communal before farming is widely influential and quite wrong (plus Ruth Benedict on property rights)

By Manvir Singh. He is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Excerpts:

"It was on that first trip that [anthropologist Kim] Hill saw the Aché share their meat. A man returning from a hunt dropped an animal in the middle of camp. Another person, the butcher, prepared piles for each family. A third person distributed. ‘At the time, it seemed kind of logical to me,’ Hill said. The scene reminded him of a family barbecue where everyone gets a plate.

Yet the more he lived among the Aché, the more astonishing food-sharing seemed. Men were forbidden from eating meat they’d acquired. Their wives and children received no more than anyone else. When he later built detailed genealogies, he discovered that, contrary to his expectations, bandmates were often unrelated. Most importantly, food-sharing didn’t just happen on special days. It was a daily occurrence, a psychological and economic centrepiece of Aché society.

What he started to see, in other words, was ‘almost pure economic communalism – and I really didn’t think that was possible.’"

"In 1985, he started working with another group, the Hiwi of Venezuela. He didn’t expect dramatic differences from the Aché. The Hiwi, too, were hunter-gatherers."

"Then, there was food-sharing. In the primitive communism of the Aché, hunters had little control over distributions: they couldn’t favour their families, and food flowed according to need. None of these applied to the Hiwi. When meat came into a Hiwi village, the hunter’s family kept a larger batch for themselves, distributing shares to a measly three of 36 other families. In other words, as Hill and his colleagues wrote in 2000 in the journal Human Ecology, ‘most Hiwi families receive nothing when a food resource is brought into the village.’

By exercising control over distributions, hunters convert meat into relationships

Hiwi sharing tells us something important about primitive communism: hunter-gatherers are diverse. Most have been less communistic than the Aché. When we survey forager societies, for instance, we find that hunters in many communities enjoyed special rights. They kept trophies. They consumed organs and marrow before sharing. They received the tastiest parts and exclusive rights to a killed animal’s offspring.

The most important privilege hunters enjoyed was selecting who gets meat. Selective sharing is powerful. It extends a bond between giver and recipient that the giver can pull on when they are in need. Refusing to share, meanwhile, is a rejection of friendship, an expression of ill will. When the anthropologist Richard Lee lived among the Kalahari !Kung, he noticed that a hunter named N!eisi once ignored his sister’s husband while passing out warthog meat. When asked why, N!eisi replied harshly: ‘This one I want to eat with my friends.’ N!eisi’s brother-in-law took the hint and, three days later, left camp with his wives and children. By exercising control over distributions, hunters convert meat into relationships.

To own something, we say, means excluding others from enjoying its benefits. I own an apple when I can eat it and you cannot. You own a toothbrush when you can use it and I cannot. Hunters’ special privileges shifted property rights along a continuum from fully public to fully private. The more benefits they could monopolise – from trophies to organs to social capital – the more they could be said to own their meat.

Compared with the Aché, many mobile, band-living foragers lay closer to the private end of the property continuum. Agta hunters in the Philippines set aside meat to trade with farmers. Meat brought in by a solitary Efe hunter in Central Africa was ‘entirely his to allocate’. And among the Sirionó, an Amazonian people who speak a language closely related to the Aché, people could do little about food-hoarding ‘except to go out and look for their own’. Aché sharing might embody primitive communism. Yet, Hill admits, ‘the Aché are probably the extreme case.’

Hunters’ privileges are inconvenient for narratives about primitive communism. More damning, however, is a starker, simpler fact. All hunter-gatherers had private property, even the Aché.

Individual Aché owned bows, arrows, axes and cooking implements. Women owned the fruit they collected. Even meat became private property as it was handed out. Hill explained: ‘If I set my armadillo leg on [a fern leaf] and went out for a minute to take a pee in the forest and came back and somebody took it? Yeah, that was stealing.’

Some proponents of primitive communism concede that foragers owned small trinkets but insist they didn’t own wild resources. But this too is mistaken. Shoshone families owned eagle nests. Bearlake Athabaskans owned beaver dens and fishing sites. Especially common is the ownership of trees. When an Andaman Islander man stumbled upon a tree suitable for making canoes, he told his group mates about it. From then, it was his and his alone. Similar rules existed among the Deg Hit’an of Alaska, the Northern Paiute of the Great Basin, and the Enlhet of the arid Paraguayan plains. In fact, by one economist ’s estimate, more than 70 per cent of hunter-gatherer societies recognised private ownership over land or trees.

The respect for property rights is clearest when someone violates them. To appreciate this, consider the Mbuti, one of the short-statured (‘pygmy’) hunter-gatherers of Central Africa.

The Ute of Colorado whipped thieves. The Ainu of Japan sliced their earlobes off

Much of what we know about Mbuti society comes from Colin Turnbull, a British-American anthropologist who stayed with them in the late 1950s."

"his writings still undermine claims of primitive communism. He described a society in which theft was prohibited, and where even the most desperate members suffered for violating property rights.

Take, for instance, Pepei, a Mbuti man who in 1958 was 19 years old and still unmarried. Unlike most bachelors, who slept next to the fire, Pepei lived in a hut with his younger brother. But instead of collecting building materials, he swiped them. He snuck around at night, plucking a leaf from this hut and a sapling from that. He also filched food. He was an orphan after all, and a bachelor, so he had few people to help him prepare meals. When food mysteriously disappeared, Pepei always claimed to have seen a dog snatch it.

‘Nobody really minded Pepei’s stealing,’ wrote Turnbull, ‘because he was a born comic and a great storyteller. But he had gone too far in stealing from old Sau.’

Old Sau was a skinny, feisty widow. She lived a couple of huts down from Pepei, and one night caught him skulking around in her hut. As he lifted the lid of a pot, she smacked him with a pestle, grabbed his arm, twisted it behind his back, and shoved him into the open.

Justice was brutal. Men ran out and held Pepei, while youths broke off thorny branches and thrashed him. Eventually Pepei broke away and ran into the forest crying. After 24 hours, he returned to camp and went straight to his hut unseen. ‘His hut was between mine and Sau’s,’ wrote Turnbull, ‘and I heard him come in, and I heard him crying softly because even his brother wouldn’t speak to him.’

Other foragers punished stealing, too. The Ute of Colorado whipped thieves. The Ainu of Japan sliced their earlobes off. For the Yaghan of Tierra del Fuego, accusing someone of robbery was a ‘deadly insult’. Lorna Marshall, who spent years living with the Kalahari !Kung, reported that a man was once killed for taking honey. Through violence towards offenders, foragers reified private property.

Is primitive communism another seductive but incorrect anthropological myth? On the one hand, no hunter-gatherer society lacked private property. And although they all shared food, most balanced sharing with special rights. On the other hand, living in a society like the Aché’s was a masterclass in reallocation. It’s hard to imagine farmers engaging in need-based redistribution on that scale.

Whatever we call it, the sharing economy that Hill observed with the Aché does not reflect some lost Edenic goodness. Rather, it sprang from a simpler source: interdependence. Aché families relied on each other for survival. We share with you today so that you can share with us next week, or when we get sick, or when we are pregnant. Hill once saw a man fall from a tree and break his hip. ‘He couldn’t walk for three months, and in those three months, he produced zero food,’ Hill said. ‘And you would think that he would have starved to death and his family would have starved to death. But, of course, nothing happened like that, because everybody provisioned him the whole time.’

This is partly about reciprocity. But it’s also about something deeper. When people are locked in networks of interdependence, they become invested in each other’s welfare. If I rely on three other families to keep me alive and get me food when I cannot, then not only do I want to maintain bonds with them – I also want them to be healthy and strong and capable.

Interdependence might seem enviable. Yet it begets a cruelty often overlooked in talk about primitive communism. When a person goes from a lifeline to a long-term burden, reasons to keep them alive can vanish. In their book Aché Life History (1996), Hill and the anthropologist Ana Magdalena Hurtado listed many Aché people who were killed, abandoned or buried alive: widows, sick people, a blind woman, an infant born too soon, a boy with a paralysed hand, a child who was ‘funny looking’, a girl with bad haemorrhoids. Such opportunism suffuses all social interactions. But it is acute for foragers living at the edge of subsistence, for whom cooperation is essential and wasted efforts can be fatal.

Once that need to survive dissipated, even friends could become disposable

Consider, for example, how the Aché treated orphans. ‘We really hate orphans,’ said an Aché person in 1978. Another Aché person was recorded after seeing jaguar tracks:

    Don’t cry now. Are you crying because you want your mother to die? Do you want to be buried with your dead mother? Do you want to be thrown in the grave with your mother and stepped on until your excrement comes out? Your mother is going to die if you keep crying. When you are an orphan nobody will ever take care of you again.

The Aché had among the highest infanticide and child homicide rates ever reported. Of children born in the forest, 14 per cent of boys and 23 per cent of girls were killed before the age of 10, nearly all of them orphans. An infant who lost their mother during the first year of life was always killed.

(Since acculturation, many Aché have regretted killing children and infants. In Aché Life History, Hill and Hurtado reported an interview with a man who strangled a 13-year-old girl nearly 20 years earlier. He ‘asked for our forgiveness’, they wrote, ‘and acknowledged that he never should have carried out the task and simply “wasn’t thinking”.’)

Hunter-gatherers shared because they had to. They put food into their bandmates’ stomachs because their survival depended on it. But once that need dissipated, even friends could become disposable.

The popularity of the idea of primitive communism, especially in the face of contradictory evidence, tells us something important about why narratives succeed. Primitive communism may misrepresent forager societies. But it is simple, and it accords with widespread beliefs about the arc of human history. If we assume that societies went from small to big, or from egalitarian to despotic, then it makes sense that they transitioned from property-less harmony to selfish competition, too. Even if the facts of primitive communism are off, the story feels right.

More important than its simplicity and narrative resonance, however, is primitive communism’s political expediency. For anyone hoping to critique existing institutions, primitive communism conveniently casts modern society as a perversion of a more prosocial human nature. Yet this storytelling is counterproductive. By drawing a contrast between an angelic past and our greedy present, primitive communism blinds us to the true determinants of trust, freedom and equity. If we want to build better societies, the way forward is neither to live as hunter-gatherers nor to bang the drum of a make-believe state of nature. Rather, it is to work with humans as they are, warts and all."

Singh's article reminded me of a passage about the Kwakiutl from Ruth Benedict's book "Patterns of Culture." Click here to go to a link that has her entire book online. It indicates that they may have had strong property rights

"The tribes of the North-West Coast had great possessions, and these possessions were strictly owned. They were property in the sense of heirlooms, but heirlooms, with them, were the very basis of society. There were two classes of possessions. The land and sea were owned by a group of relatives in common and passed down to all its members. There were no cultivated fields, but the relationship group owned hunting territories, and even wild-berrying and wild-root territories, and no one could trespass upon the property of the family. The family owned fishing territories just as strictly. A local group often had to go great distances to those strips of the shore where they could dig clams, and the shore near their village might be owned by another lineage. These grounds had been held as property so long that the village-sites had changed, but not the ownership of the clam-beds. Not only the shore, but even deep-sea areas were strict property. For halibut fishing the area belonging to a given family was bounded by sighting along double landmarks. The rivers, also, were divided up into owned sections for the candlefish hauls in the spring, and families came from great distances to fish their own section of the river."

Kamala Harris Wants to Ban Price Gouging. What Do Economists Say?

The line between gouging and normal market forces can be pretty thin. And stopping it is no easy feat either.

By Justin Lahart of The WSJ.  Excerpts:

"Surveys conducted by Harvard University economist Stefanie Stantcheva show that many people—Democrats in particular—believe that corporate greed is to blame for inflation. [I have links to related posts on how people are dealing with inflation]

The food industry has pushed back hard on that belief, arguing that the rise in prices has to do with the extraordinary economic reordering caused by the pandemic, which snarled supply chains, pumped government money into the economy and spiked demand."

"While food inflation has eased some recently, prices remain much higher than they were before the pandemic. As of July, consumer prices for food at home were 26% higher than they were at the end of 2019, whereas the prices for goods excluding food and energy items were up just 14%. Food prices hit hard psychologically too—people take frequent trips to the grocery store, and can skimp only so much on what they eat."

"identifying price gouging, and crafting policies against it, can be difficult.

Rules against price-gouging can in effect become price controls. Standard economic theory shows that imposing a price ceiling on a product can discourage sellers, reducing the amount of a product that gets sold, leading to shortages. Rent-control policies are an example of a price ceiling that has become a staple of introductory economics textbooks, and as a group, most economists think rent control is a bad idea.

“It can be very hard to create any price control that is not gameable,” said Michael Sinkinson, an economist at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management who was also on Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. “How do you set a price control? What is the right benchmark?”"

"Some economists contend that raising prices in these circumstances can be predatory, because supply is limited to whatever businesses have on hand. But others argue that the signal prices send are important: A jump in the price of water at an island that gets hit by a hurricane creates an incentive for water to get shipped in quickly, while an artificially low price during a time of shortage might encourage hoarding."

"the food business isn’t a monopoly—most people, but not all, have the option of going to another store if one store raises its prices too much. Among economists, said Mankiw [Harvard economist Greg Mankiw], “Our assumption is that firms are always greedy and it is the forces of competition that keeps prices close to cost.”"

Related posts:

Costco and Sam’s Club Aisles Are Full of Gen Z Shoppers: With food prices still high, shoppers look for ways to team up with roommates, neighbors and family (2024)

Inflation is mentally taxing (2024)

Inflation is mentally taxing. Dealing with a straitened budget exacts a psychological toll as well as a financial one

Store Brands Are Filling Up More of Your Shopping Cart (2024) 

People are on the look out for cheaper alternatives due to inflation

Consumers Fed Up With Food Costs Are Ditching Big Brands (2024) 

One thing that I always talked about with inflation was that one of its costs was all the things we had to do to avoid it. Consumers are making 8% more trips to different retailers as inflation continues to upend household budgets. They are going to more stores to find lower prices. But it costs time to do that and probably more money on gas.

Are Americans Worrying Too Much About Inflation? Two opposing views (2024)

The Era of One-Stop Grocery Shopping Is Over (2024)

When workers were paid twice a day and given half-hour shopping breaks (Germany, 1923) 

By mid-1923 workers were being paid as often as three times a day. Their wives would meet them, take the money and rush to the shops to exchange it for goods. However, by this time, more and more often, shops were empty. Storekeepers could not obtain goods or could not do business fast enough to protect their cash receipts. Farmers refused to bring produce into the city in return for worthless paper. The requirements to calculate and recalculate commercial transactions in the billions and trillions made it practically impossible to do business in paper Marks.

Their Student Debt Disappeared, but Their Financial Worries Persist

Millions of borrowers across the country have had all or some of their student loans eliminated by the federal government

By Terell Wright and Melissa Korn of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Borrowers who were late on payments or even defaulted on their student debt are often still digging out of other financial problems, including with their credit scores or other forms of debt. And since many weren’t making regular student-loan payments, they don’t find themselves with a new stream of cash just because the monthly bill stopped coming. 

“For the typical borrower, the forgiveness is nice but not life-changing,” said Constantine Yannelis, an associate professor of finance at the University of Chicago who studies household finance."

"Economists say it is hard to draw broad conclusions just yet, because borrowers have a range of spending habits and earnings. In addition, the bulk of those who have had their loans forgiven are still new to life without having to make the payments. 

In a July study, Yannelis and others found that borrowers experiencing student-loan forgiveness largely replaced it with other forms of debt. 

Auto-loan borrowing rose by $230, and credit-card borrowing by $220, on average. Home-loan debt also increased, which could boost wealth in the long term. 

The researchers found that borrowers whose debt was forgiven experienced almost no change in their credit scores, likely because they were taking on new loans that countered the benefit of the old ones disappearing. Many also already had a bump when the federal government paused certain student-loan payments during the pandemic, potentially limiting the impact now that their balances are erased."

How Taylor Swift Fans Broke Economics

Swifties have the same mental biases as the rest of us, making them reluctant to sell even at eye-watering prices

By James Mackintosh of The WSJ. 

One of the things the articles looks at is why people who buy tickets to a Swift concert at the original price won't sell them when "tickets were changing hands at more than eight times face value" and they would not have purchased them at that higher price if that was the original price.

Excerpts:

"This isn’t only about Taylor Swift tickets. Psychologists and behavioral-finance academics have long since established that we are all biased in favor of what we already own, valuing it more highly merely because we already have it, something they call the endowment effect.

Combine it with status-quo bias and loss aversion, and this effect handily explains why the secondary market in tickets is dysfunctional. As three luminaries of behavioral finance, Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler, put it before Taylor Swift was born: “The disadvantages of a change loom larger than its advantages.”

For bands with less hype, this dysfunction is less important—last-minute tickets were still available for New Order this week, for example, with the added benefit for me of at least better music. But Taylor Swift tickets were in such demand when they first went on sale that they were rationed, so those allocated a ticket were grinning like they were winning. That feeling made them even less likely to sell later on.

These mental biases apply differently in different markets. In stocks, loss aversion often leads shareholders to dump their winners and hold on to losers to avoid crystallizing the loss—as though it isn’t real until the sale delivers less cash. Chartists like to draw lines on graphs showing previous tops on the basis that they provide a “resistance level”—part of the logic being that when prices get back up lots of investors will want to sell because they no longer have a loss.

In reality it is usually better to run your winners and ditch the losers, because stock prices have momentum. But that means accepting that losses are just as real whether the stock is held at the lower price or sold."

There is also an antitrust case against Live Nation Entertainment, which had "the disaster that was the launch of ticket sales for the U.S. leg of her tour last year."

Is Live Nation Entertainment a monopoly or is it guilty of monopolistic practices?  "Last year, it points out, its net profit margin was just 1.4%, far from the 20%-plus of the Big Tech oligopolies."

Would you pay $24 million for a great conversation starter?

A jersey worn by Babe Ruth (and apparently the one he wore when he hit is famous "called shot" in the 1932 World Series) just sold for $24.12 million with Heritage Auctions. That is a record for a sports collectible.

"This stuff is a great conversation starter as opposed to, you know, buying more IBM stock, investing in real estate," said Chris Ivy, Heritage Auctions' director of sports auctions, said.

The buyer was not revealed.

See Babe Ruth 'called shot' Yankees jersey fetches record $24M by Dan Hajducky of ESPN.

It seems like you could spend alot less to start a conversation.

I've had two other posts on how people spend alot of money to achieve some non-material end like prestige.

See To Go for the Gold, These Olympians Went Into the Red: Olympians patch together jobs and run up debt to fund their medal hopes. 

It reminds me of a post about a guy who went into $250,000 in debt to pay for law school.

"It's a prestige thing," he says. "I'm an attorney. All of my friends see me as a person they look up to. They understand I'm in a lot of debt, but I've done something they feel they could never do and the respect and admiration is important.""

See Would You Pay $250,000 To Get Your Friends' Respect?

ADM Stock Slips After Falling U.S. Crop Prices Eat Into Profit (how increased supply and inelastic demand can hurt farmers)

By Patrick Thomas of The WSJ.

"Archer Daniels Midland stock slipped Tuesday, after higher global grain supplies and lower U.S. crop prices sapped the agricultural company’s profit.

ADM reported adjusted per-share earnings of $1.03, on $22.2 billion of revenue, for the April-June quarter. Both undershot Wall Street forecasts.

Executives at the Illinois-based grain trader and oilseed processor said it is dealing with challenging market conditions from larger South American harvests and an expected bumper American crop. That marks a sharp reversal from recent years, when higher prices fueled soaring profits for it and other agriculture companies.

“Strong supplies out of South America have led to a rebalancing of the supply and demand environment,” said Ismael Roig, ADM’s interim chief financial officer, on a call with analysts.

At the business unit that includes ADM's agriculture-trading operations, quarterly operating profit fell 56% to $459 million. Corn prices are down more than 20% over the past 12 months, while soybeans and wheat are down more than 25%.

ADM said Tuesday that increased grain supplies from Brazil and Argentina shifted exports from the U.S. to South America. The trader is also facing higher logistics costs in Brazil, it said.

Chicago-based ADM is one of the biggest companies in the food-supply chain. It buys crops and sells them globally to countries and food companies, while running processing plants that turn crops into vegetable oil, fuel and other products. Margins for biodiesel made from soybean oil were also lower for the quarter, ADM said."

This article basically says that supply shifted to the right. This led to a big price drop because demand for farm products is often inelastic (which usually means a fairly steep demand line). Price falls alot more than quantity rises, revenue falls. Demand for food can be inelastic because we can only eat so much. Even if food were free, most of might eat a little bit more but not much.

In the graph below, which comes from Economics Help.org, we can see that price falls much more than quantity rises. See What causes price fluctuations in agricultural markets? which discusses, among other things, inelastic demand.

Before supply increases in the graph below, total revenue for farmers would have been 700 = 350*20. But afterwards, revenue is just 440 = 200*22. This might be the situation that ADM is in right now.