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Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

acoup.blog

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Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#21

Post by dmbche »

mcmoor wrote: post #18
dmbche wrote: post #2

If you enjoy even a smidge of this, please look at other articles/series on their blog, ACOUP is absolutely phenomenal and I've not seen many writers (here also historian and tenured professor) both be so accessible and graspable while having a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation AND providing ample sources. 10/10 couldn't recommend more. I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoy…

I found the one for Sparta too emotionally charged for my interest. But I really really endorse most of the other ones especially ones touching in economics and logistics of ancient world. (Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)

That's an oddly specific thing to point out

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#22

Post by mcmoor »

dmbche wrote: post #21
mcmoor wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found the one for Sparta too emotionally charged for my interest. But I really really endorse most of the other ones especially ones touching in economics and logistics of ancient world. (Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)

That's an oddly specific thing to point out

It's just funny since his blog is the entire reason I learned about the difference of adjunct and tenured professor, and why a big problem in academia is that they tenure less and less and rely on lots of adjunct professors instead.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#23

Post by FearNotDaniel »

dmbche wrote: post #2

If you enjoy even a smidge of this, please look at other articles/series on their blog, ACOUP is absolutely phenomenal and I've not seen many writers (here also historian and tenured professor) both be so accessible and graspable while having a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation AND providing ample sources. 10/10 couldn't recommend more. I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoy…

> their blog

_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.

While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):

> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#24

Post by simgt »

dmbche wrote: post #2

If you enjoy even a smidge of this, please look at other articles/series on their blog, ACOUP is absolutely phenomenal and I've not seen many writers (here also historian and tenured professor) both be so accessible and graspable while having a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation AND providing ample sources. 10/10 couldn't recommend more. I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoy…

I've enjoyed Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond recently. If you have read it, how does it compare?

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#26

Post by idle_zealot »

bongodongobob wrote: post #20
Terr_ wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today [...] optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity. I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics. There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found u…

Our current regime lies through their teeth daily. Like obvious, completely made up lies. Every. Day. It's not a misunderstanding. One side is pushing for authoritarianism, one is not. One can be negotiated with by voting, the other, violence. I'm so fuckin tired of pretending there is just some kind of misunderstanding between both "sides".

No, the video makes the point that it's not really a misunderstanding, there are fundamentally different values in tension. If you believe in and value hierarchy then authoritarianism is natural and desirable, the lies are just for assuaging your less committed or more sensitive allies and befuddling your enemies.

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#27

Post by eleveriven »

The way labor availability doesn't actually help most peasant families if they don't have land to use it on. And when land is locked up by Big Men or temples or aristocrats, the system traps excess labor in a way that looks inefficient, but is actually great for those doing the extracting

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#28

Post by eleveriven »

docsaintly wrote: post #5

This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.

You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#29

Post by eleveriven »

pessimizer wrote: post #17

When you get to the end, remember that's how many to most black people lived until very recently until they were expelled from the land with nothing, due to the rise of more efficient farming techniques. The very few who owned their own land were more slowly pushed out when they were denied farm loans. Black people owned about 15 million acres of land in 1910, now they own about 1 million.

The idea that "efficiency" alone caused it glosses over how policy and power structures actively shaped who got to benefit from modern agriculture and who got left out (or pushed out).

Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

#30

Post by alexashka »

martin-t wrote: post #6
docsaintly wrote: post #5

This series will really make you examine social hierarchies, including the ones that exist today. They are no accident.

Today's social structures exist because they evolved through history and shifting incentives. I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.

We can at the very least tweak existing systems to be meaningfully better.

For example we could phase out all marketing and advertising. We could simplify and automate accounting and many other jobs. We could reduce the work week to 30 hours. We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job. Make moving down on a career ladder or switching careers entirely a common and non-humiliating occurrence, etc.

The most pertinent question to ask is - why haven't any of these already happened? What kinds of people prevent these changes from occurring and what should be done about it? Do you know any of these people - are some of them your family members. Are you one of them? Why does no one seem to ask these questions and seek answers? :)

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