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Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

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Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#71

Post by [deleted] »

mlsu wrote: post #55
Aurornis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always find disaster stories about couples who wipe out their savings and put themselves in a precarious financial situation for a wedding they can’t afford, but it’s actually super common. Traditional weddings costs are paid in part or full by the parents. Many well off young people pay their own way. If neither is an option it’s also common to have a smaller or home-grown wedding. If you know enough people…

It's still very irrational no matter who pays. The article is looking at a society-wide wealth here isn't it? I mean a party? Thousands and thousands of dollars for just one day? I did the irrational thing, paid a lot for my wedding and it was really special. My family is much closer to her family because of it. From me and my wife's rational self-interested perspective, it makes no sense: we would be in a better pos…

[deleted]

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#72

Post by yongjik »

klooney wrote: post #2

> Modernity is about not doing what your family says The flip side is that rich and modern people feel lonely and sad that they don't have strong social bonds.

The flip side of the flip side is that poor people in traditional societies are often trapped in toxic interpersonal dynamics from which there's no escape, because they live in the same household.

Like, in Korea, "mother-in-law vs daughter-in-law relationship issues" used to be so common that there's a single word for that. Nowadays they're getting harder to witness, unless you're a fan of weekend k-dramas.

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#73

Post by sfRattan »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #12

The article talks about the failure mode of kinship groups, but doesn't go into the fact that new migrants often enter into kinship networks that help them succeed. You see the same in religious communities as well - people pitching in not to leech off one another but to help everyone move ahead. Maybe the problem is with Ghanaian values and not kinship itself.

I think mutual aid organizations and friendly societies of various kinds among American immigrants (at least historically) benefited from a strong selection effect: people willing to immigrate to a faraway country without a welfare system in pursuit of opportunity and wealth. That population is highly self-selected for work ethic, risk tolerance, and self-discipline. Those values probably stabilize social dynamics and minimize the wealth immolation and tall-poppy effects described in the article.

In other words, if everyone in a mutual aid society is a crab who crossed half the world and an entire ocean to escape the bucket, eventually said crabs stop acting like you'd expect crabs in a bucket to act, and their social dynamics are consequently less suffocating.

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#74

Post by y-curious »

desecratedbody wrote: post #32
technothrasher wrote: post #14

Basically my whole family have signed our bodies over to the local medical school. They make all the arrangements and pay for everything as soon as they're notified upon death. They'll normally give you the ashes upon cremation after a year or so, but personally I've given them permission to completely skeletonize me and keep the skeleton indefinitely. This helps society by helping student doctors learn, and it remov…

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49198405

I was gonna post the same story. The “donate grandma to medical science” story only to find out she was used to test landmines is too wild

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#75

Post by forthwall »

wahern wrote: post #59
forthwall wrote: post #31

This article seems to establish that kinship leads to the failure of wage growth and ultimately wealth, people will hide their wages because people will ask for money. This seems like the issue rather is is that wealth accumulation in sub-saharan africa is limited to a small subset of population, I don't think this wealth tax by family members exists when you have a larger group of individuals making more money. You…

Ghana's GINI index is only a couple points higher than the US (43 vs 41), and the same as Mexico. I don't think wealth inequality explains this at all. But what rigid social institutions of any kind tend do is inhibit mobility. Moreover, kinship groups like this tend to lock-in relative wealth by lineage--the wealthiest family of a kin group from 3 generations ago will be much more likely (relative to other cultures)…

I don't think social factors are not necessarily a nonfactor, more that this article claims that income equality within kinship groups is a forcing function for lack of economic growth. My claim is that the inequality that these countries face not just between each other within the nation but in our globalized economies, access to resources, capital and labor and thus the downstream effects of smaller markets, less need for labor will lead to less growth. I think you can have economic growth with kinship society if more people within the kinship have greater access to wealth growing, the issue here is that there's limited resources and the kinship society exists as an effect of less resources than the other-way around

> the wealthiest family of a kin group from 3 generations ago will be much more likely (relative to other cultures) to be the wealthiest family 3 generations from now.

I am not sure if this claim is true as well, wealth generally does stay within family lineages across cultures, generally people losing their wealth or even gaining it is an outlier. See any landed gentry in Europe, Asia

Actually; you can see this in America, as income continues to be more concentrated, and more unequal, economic productivity for an individual does go down as there's less opportunity to accrue wealth as before.

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#76

Post by selimthegrim »

asadm wrote: post #51

People should look again at how we Muslims bury. Not only is it much "green" but also cheap and doesn't waste land forever. There is wisdom in simplicity.

Muslims are also obliged to attend funerals - that goes double in Punjab for someone in your biradari.

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#77

Post by thaumasiotes »

Retric wrote: post #64
wahern wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ghana's GINI index is only a couple points higher than the US (43 vs 41), and the same as Mexico. I don't think wealth inequality explains this at all. But what rigid social institutions of any kind tend do is inhibit mobility. Moreover, kinship groups like this tend to lock-in relative wealth by lineage--the wealthiest family of a kin group from 3 generations ago will be much more likely (relative to other cultures)…

> even if relative wealth disparities remain constant. Relative wealth disparity increases as absolute wealth increases because below a minimum level of income people starve. IE you can’t make 1/10th the median wage in a subsistence economy long term you just die. But a homeless person can survive for decades in the US on ~500$ a month.

> IE you can’t make 1/10th the median wage in a subsistence economy long term you just die. But a homeless person can survive for decades in the US on ~500$ a month.

There are two things I'd like to know more about for this:

1. Is the homeless person doing their survival in an area with a markedly lower median wage than the median wage their income is being measured against? (i.e. is "1/10 the median wage" an illusion created by including foreign communities in the 'median wage'?)

2. Is the homeless person's low income measured by excluding their income from in-kind handouts ("someone kind bought me a sandwich") and foraging ("I found a pizza in the dumpster")?

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#78

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #17
IncreasePosts wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is more of a self inflicted wound than an intrinsic aspect of modern society.

I wish it was self inflicted. Instead, it seems to be an artifact of modern society. I posted “How to Be Alone?” exploring this issue somewhat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47296547 690 points, 500+ comments. I’m not trying to get pity, but it would be mistaken to say that I brought it on myself. My wife didn’t bring it on me either. We simply eroded over time. But when marital bonds erode, it turns out they…

[deleted]

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#79

Post by nntwozz »

klooney wrote: post #2

> Modernity is about not doing what your family says The flip side is that rich and modern people feel lonely and sad that they don't have strong social bonds.

If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#80

Post by stavros »

forthwall wrote: post #31

This article seems to establish that kinship leads to the failure of wage growth and ultimately wealth, people will hide their wages because people will ask for money. This seems like the issue rather is is that wealth accumulation in sub-saharan africa is limited to a small subset of population, I don't think this wealth tax by family members exists when you have a larger group of individuals making more money. You…

Sure, wealth accumulation is limited to a subset of the population there, but this is true everywhere. The reasoning error here is thinking in terms of absolute incomes across the group, rather than the relative incomes of the members.

Yes, people in the US make more money, on average, than the average Ghanaian, but the relative incomes of a family are just as disparate as those of Ghanaians. If someone in the US gets a better job, the whole family doesn't suddenly also get better jobs.

This is why the kinship system is so economically counterproductive: The collective expectation effectively levels everyone down; any individual who begins to accumulate wealth faces pressure to redistribute it across the group. Nobody can grow their fortune, because that requires both having some fortune initially and being able to make investments that compound it. If the kinship group makes sure your fortune can't increase, any compounding you manage to do doesn't matter, because the initial capital always stays small.

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