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Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

davidoks.blog

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Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article's description of kinship sounds a bit like family based governance and taxation. Only with say a western government their enforcers will happily imprison anyone not giving what the government ("kin") says is owed, and those who resist being violently dragged jailed typically find a fate even worse. The western version then of being a pariah for not paying up is violence rather than ostracization and shame…

> with say a western government their enforcers will happily imprison anyone not giving what the government ("kin") says is owed Big difference between taxation and patronage is when the rules are known. You generally know ex ante what you should owe in taxes. With patronage, if you have a windfall, the rules adjust to require you give it away.

[deleted]

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#112

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…

I'm kind of astonished that you think this, there are lots of studies about intergenerational economic mobility in the USA compared to other places.

https://www.chicagofed.org/research/content-areas/mobility/i... for instance.

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/4/1179

Anecdotally, I can also attest to it. I know lots of "finally successful" folks who end up spending their wealth keeping their siblings and extended family afloat. There's no real safety net for them in the USA.

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#113

It’s interesting how this is framed as a “bad deal” (being apart of a kinship society) without taking time to breakdown the cost of being on your own in Ghanaian society, especially when healthcare, credit harm and other emergencies are broadly unaffordable in individualist, capitalist American society.

Every kinship society is dramatically worse off than non-kinship societies across the whole world by a factor of ten.

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am so glad we had a big wedding. It was so much fun, and all my friends and family had a blast.

It's so funny you say that. Was literally just chatting to my wife the other day about how mediocre weddings are. You spend $20-$50k basically LARPing as landed British gentry, and end up having less fun than the average 21st, Christmas or New Year's. So much more stress in planning too.

I don't know. If you had 50 friends, reserved space at a decent restaurant, and got a DJ you could totally have a good time for what's been solidly under $10k even until recently in most of the country. Outfits + photographer + rings add, but there's obviously a lot of latitude to have a really fun time in that price bracket depending on what you like. And there are all kinds of alternatives. We have some friends who went to Italy with a wedding party of about 8 people (family and close friends) and had a great time. I don't think it was cheap, but it was probably below the low end of the $20k if some of the wedding party paid their own way and they had a really fun Italian vacation. We also have friends who just borrowed someone's house, got a pile of food delivered and had basically a game night wedding thing.

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#115

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?

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

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am so glad we had a big wedding. It was so much fun, and all my friends and family had a blast.

Are you otherwise well off? How do you define "big?"

We do pretty well, although it is expensive living in LA.

We had a little over 100 people, our wedding was at the downtown library, and we spent about $60k. It didn't really hurt our ability to buy a house a few years later, an extra $60k would not have changed our budget at all.

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#118
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing with engagement rings, it's just a stupid fake tradition created by DeBoers in the 1950s that costs an inordinate amount of money for nothing. I really hope that lab grown diamonds puts that entire industry out of business.

Lab corundum is where it's at. Almost as hard as diamond (Mohs 9), but much less prone to cracking than diamond. It's available in tons of colors (most famous are blue and red -- sapphires and rubies). Lab-grown is so much better than natural that the way they identify natural is by looking for imperfections that lab versions don't have. Oh, and diamonds burn while aluminum oxide does not. There's no need to go broke…

I definitely think sapphire is the best gemstone for rings given the huge variety of colors and reasonable synthetic rough prices. My only gripe is that green shades that look nice are hard to find in synthetics.

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#119
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economies mentioned in the article are capitalist economies.

Yes, the State economy is capitalist, but the family groups are clearly operating under some kind of Communism. The article itself mentions it - "nothing you own is actually yours, everything is owned by the family." Thus wealth accumulation not really being possible, a hallmark of a communistic economy. This is my experience with extremely rural areas or tightly knit / kinship / indigenous cultures as well. They hap…

> My point there was that it's possible that an older tradition from a pre capitalist system that worked fine then is not compatible with how capitalism works. Many things aren't.

Oh, yes, agreed there. I can imagine that these communities were very insular in the past, so there wasn't really anything to own that wasn't what they could immediately see and touch around the village. Then again, there wouldn't be a need for this ritualistic spending back then, so the spending seems to be a direct reaction to capitalism arriving to these societies.

Re: Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

#120
post #93
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 get…

It seems this only matters in economic systems with compound interest, like capitalism. In gift economies, all these distinctions are meaningless. The bounty of a funeral would be a direct representation of the deceased's popularity (likely established through their generosity) as well as their family's ability to convice people to e.g. spend time making s beautiful coffin, bring food, play music.

> economic systems with compound interest

You mean like reality? The power law exists. Runaway growth is natural. Or would you claim that planets and stars are secretly capitalists?

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