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Comment by kenferry | Hacker News Reader

The factual material about funeral spending costs is very interesting, but when it gets into "Kinship societies are wealth-destroying societies" it seems rather… unsupported? That's a sweeping statement that actually requires understanding the whole picture, and the whole picture is not being presented. Is there reason to think the author truly has all the context to make these claims?

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Korea used to have something similar to this phenomenon, although it wasn’t for the funeral. When the oldest man (probably the grandfather of a big family) has his 60th birthday, the entire family had to celebrate with basically throwing a days-long party. It was like a family duty for the rest of the family, and it was embedded into the culture so deeply so they wouldn’t simply think about the alternative of having a small one. Other elders in the local community would say “well done” only when the party was big enough. After the big celebration, the rest of the family would sit on a massive debt, which couldn’t be reimbursed with their earnings for a foreseeable future. The old man dies, and the family lives along with the agony of the debt. It used to be the case until Korea became an industrial country and a lot more people started having more than 60 yrs of life. My mom still talks about what it used to look like in those old days.

So it was just the head of the family?

What if there were several of these birthday parties in succession due to siblings dying?

In Mexico you have quincenaras with like 500 people and a dress that's worn for 1 day that costs like $2,000.

Sounds like an Indian wedding ... upper-middle class indians now spend around Rs. 50 lakhs (around USD 55,555) for a wedding here in South India.

This is not a novel observation, eg Kapuscinski's "In the Shadow of the Sun" describes the same phenomenon: it's very difficult to get ahead because anything above bare subsistence is immediately siphoned off by your kin.

Fewer homeless, I bet.

The flip side is that it's very difficult to fall too far behind as well. Your kin have an obligation to support you, too.

Your pack falls behind, and has nothing to eat during food supply shocks like the one that's almost certainly coming.

On a factual level the relationship between kinship societies and economic headwinds is fairly well documented [1] [2]. The mechanism is the same reason that communist/socialist societies often fail: when wealth belongs to everyone, nobody has either the incentive or the means to accumulate wealth, which prevents capital formation within the society [3].

The part that the article glosses over is that "Kinship societies destroy economic growth" is a Russell conjugate [4] of "economic growth destroys family formation". Kinship networks provide important intangible support to several important community functions, notably child-rearing. That's the whole "it takes a village to raise a child" aphorism. When you allow people to defect on their social obligations in the name of accumulating wealth, then it turns out they do, and the village suffers. It is exactly as the article said: "The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it: someone who no longer needs your help is also someone who might not help you." That's exactly what we've observed happening in modern industrialized economies, where people become increasingly atomized and those informal community organizations that create things like belonging and mutual aid (not to mention group childcare and socialization) die off as everyone chases the promotion that will let them afford ever-higher institutional childcare costs.

And this is why the fertility rate in every major industrialized country has cratered, usually right as it industrializes.

[1] https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/md/awi/forschung/paper_e.bulte...

[2] https://edepot.wur.nl/14918

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

Why are you acting like a vast majority of the population are capitalists? You're describing the actions of less than 1% of the worlds population, acting like it's the norm of human history and not the extreme aberration that it is. Not too mention we're living in the corporatist neoliberal dream that is a massive hellscape for workers where income inequality is at the highest levels, worse than the gilded age, where your single life is determined by factors the majority of workers can never control since the system is designed to benefit capitalists at the expense of everyone else.

Why are you assuming capital formation is even beneficial for people? Poor workers in Arkansas do not benefit when Ford sells their crappy wares around the world. Children in Utah aren't getting a better education when Zuckerberg sells more ads.

>Why are you acting like a vast majority of the population are capitalists?

Anyone who has saved money to buy something that makes them more productive is a capitalist. At least for any meaningful definition of the word. It's not 1%, it's some very large minority or even majority.

>Why are you assuming capital formation is even beneficial for people? Poor workers in Arkansas do not benefit when Ford sells their crappy wares around the world.

The guy that squirrels away $20,000 so he can buy a food truck, or hell, $300 for a hot dog cart is a capitalist. Every programmer here that ever bought a new laptop or phone acquired the "means of production" for the jobs they work.

The thing about marxists is, unfortunately, they're still stuck in the 1850s with him, trying to solve the problems of the 1850s, and refusing to engage in reality with any of us who don't want to live in the 1850s with them.

>And this is why the fertility rate in every major industrialized country has cratered, usually right as it industrializes.

I'm pretty sure it's actually because industrialization is upstream of the education and supply chains to make hormonal birth control widely available, and being pregnant and giving birth is an incredibly challenging, risky, and frequently unpleasant burden that's only shouldered by half our population.

It's viewing the situation through the lens of Anglo capitalist opinions.

I found the same thing when working in Cambodia; Khmer culture is very, very, family-oriented, the extended family is the main survival mechanism for Khmer people, and individual wishes are often subordinated to the family. This is their culture, Khmer people are happy with it, this is how they choose to live. The Anglo ex-pats (including me) don't understand it, find it oppressive and have a natural instinct to "liberate" Khmer people from this oppression. Took me quite a while of talking with Khmer people to realise that they look at the world very differently from me, and from that perspective this all works and is a source of joy and comfort for them. Obviously there are outliers and people who this doesn't work for, but that's also true of Anglo culture.

> It's viewing the situation through the lens of Anglo capitalist opinions.

Came here to say this. It's a very narrow perspective that shows in sub headlines like "Kinship societies are wealth-destroying societies".

One could also take the lens of "Kinship societies are making people's wealth more equal to reduce competition and jealousy, increase harmony and happiness" – although I have no data whether these people are genuinely more happy. It quotes some business-oriented Ghanians who seem quite unhappy about sharing their wealth. And yet, the perspective of indivual wealth over group wealth is assumed and never critically reflected upon.

I'm not saying that their way is better or something like that. I just think that reading the article is a good exercise in reflecting on one's own views on life and wealth.

> It's viewing the situation through the lens of Anglo capitalist opinions.

Yes and while I find the article to be quite insightful on the whole, I can't take it seriously as an anthropological study.

There is a strong ethnocentric bias that the author failed to declare / acknowledge, which reduces the credibility of his claims. Also there is little supporting data.

It also assumes a myopic version of wealth. Rich people haaate when poor people do work for each other for free, because there is no opportunity to add a middleman.

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