Why class societies are the rule, not the exception

Post by mtts » Fri, Sep 30, 2011, 6:55 AM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #27

paxcoder wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my point is that unequal distribution of food in case of a natural disaster is not an absolute factor, it's only one of the possible scenarios that affect the preservation of a system.

Yes of course there are lots of other factors, and history itself is a series of accidents. The point of this paper is that, all else being equal, a stratification in the distribution of food seems to improve the resilience of agricultural societies. The reason this may be important, in my view, is that it offers a model for what may have happened in the Ubaid period, when previously egalitarian agricultural societie…

The traditional, Marxist, explanation does not contradict this paper's model. If the traditional explanation is true, and I don't see why it couldn't be, this paper merely adds to it "and that gave the society as a whole a survival advantage".

Post by yzhengyu » Mon, Oct 03, 2011, 2:03 AM UTC

temphn wrote: post #8

yzhengyu wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News at eleven, "Horatio Alger myth continues to appeal to fairness bias", "Middle class continue to toil under the mindset that they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires". Raw numbers collected over decades of research disprove this handily. While working hard is a factor, there are other phenomena which will just as easily impair upwards social mobility. There's a reason they call it "poverty trap" For an intro…

Malcom "igon value" Gladwell is probably not the person one wants to cite on an empirical or technical matter. http://monkeysuncle.stanford.edu/?p=541 Pinker’s term: “The Igon Value Problem” is a clever play on the Eigenvalue Problem in mathematics. You see, Gladwell apparently quotes someone referring to an “igon value.” This is clearly a concept he never dealt with himself even though it is a ubiquitous tool in the…

I am well aware of his flaws. I actually placed a higher weight on the accessibility of Gladwell's work. He might not be an economist/sociologist who studied the problem, but the fact that he is able to introduce difficult concepts to a larger audience with his writing is a plus to him and not a minus.

Re: Why class societies are the rule, not the exception

Re: Why class societies are the rule, not the exception