A few more thoughts on Rodman’s Lower-Class Families:
1. There is little sign that the welfare state has anything to do with ubiquitous impulsive sexual behavior in Coconut Village. Even the neediest single moms appears to receive little or no support from the government.
2. So how do the neediest single moms cope? Rodman:
What does the woman do, however, when she has children by a man and he leaves her? The separation may “solve” the man’s financial problem if he stops supporting the woman and her children, or if he contributes less to their support after his departure. It is on this point that we can explain the child-shifting pattern in Coconut Village. Since a woman is often left alone with her children, the child-shifting pattern provides her with a solution to her problem. She cannot both care and mind her children, and so she turns their care over to a female relative while she takes on the job of minding them financially.
3. Rodman never mentions evolutionary psychology, but the residents of Coconut Village are almost explicitly Darwinian (or, more precisely, Dawkinsian). Males avow extremely high sex drives and women demand financial support for their offspring. Men promise the world early on, but quickly renege. Both men and women cheat – men with anyone who will have them, women with men who are more charming or generous. The calypso songs of the island (in a 20-page appendix!) are a memetic testament to evolutionary psychology.
4. But how could the impulsive society that Rodman describes evolve in the first place? Male libido is predictable, but why do women accept such plainly unreliable partners? The best story is probably the “sexy son hypothesis.” In Coconut Village, this amounts to: Emotional susceptibility to charming men leads women to have charming sons, which ultimately gives women extra grandchildren.
5. Does this mean that Rodman is ultimately right to claim that lower-class values are socially functional? Not at all. Evolutionary psychology doesn’t claim that human psychology benefits humanity – or any sizable subset thereof. It only claims that human psychology benefits individual human’s selfish genes.
6. Doesn’t evolutionary psychology mitigate individual blame? It is hard to see how it would. Long before Darwin, human beings have been aware that humans often have wicked impulses – and affirmed our duty not to act on these impulses. How does discovering the biological origin of these impulses in any way undermine our duty to control them?
READER COMMENTS
Mark Z
Dec 13 2018 at 1:27pm
The tendency of mothers with fatherless children to make use of their extended family to raise their children seems like a common practice in most traditional cultures, as a sort of informal ‘welfare’ system. Perhaps it was more the mix of social shaming of women who had children out of wedlock and men who failed to financially support them that prevented such a system from distorting incentives, rather than the material suffering that might go with having fatherless children without a support system?
Hazel Meade
Dec 13 2018 at 3:22pm
Here’s a slightly contrarian perspective:
In economics we often think in terms of incentives in a non-judgemental way. For example we would say you can’t just pass a law saying greed is bad. Greed is human nature – you must think about the incentives that people are presented with and design systems that harness natural greed to your advantage.
It does no good to morally condemn the promiscuous sexual culture of Coconut Village, because it is simply a response to the incentives that people in that culture are presented with. Instead, you must investigate the incentive structures at work, and come up with a solution that modifies the incentive structure so that different behaviors are incentivized.
Philo
Dec 14 2018 at 8:47am
Moral condemnation can do some good. People can sometimes be shamed into behaving better.
Philo
Dec 14 2018 at 8:50am
Bryan can express a moral judgment, but he is in no position to alter the incentive structure on Trinidadian society.
Hazel Meade
Dec 14 2018 at 2:07pm
None of us are really in much position to alter incentive structures anywhere. All we can do is think and write about them intelligently and hope someone listens, whether they involve economic or sexual behavior.
Mark Z
Dec 16 2018 at 7:38am
Even from a strictly consequentialist perspective, moral condemnation (‘shaming’) may be the most merciful way to change the incentive structure, as the major alternative forms of negative reinforcement, corporal or carceral punishment, or ‘material punishment’ (simply leaving people to starve) are almost certainly more costly.
john hare
Dec 16 2018 at 11:37am
What about the possibility of positive reinforcement.
Allow private players to provide jobs appropriate to the population. Minimum wages, drug testing for employment, and myriad other regulations that interfere with the ability of some to make a living should be scrutinized.
And inexpensive housing managed such that parasites don’t drive up costs and reduce availability. Same for transportation, safe bike, scooter and walking paths for a start. Education for use instead of time served schooling delivered by competitive sources could get those costs to a fraction of current.
I really want to go on but the short version is. Make it possible for people to live un-subsidized. Create paths for them to escape if they are willing to try. Don’t burden functional society with endless agencies that self perpetuate by avoiding true solutions.
Hazel Meade
Dec 17 2018 at 4:58pm
I do think that social shaming has important roles to play in society. But it would be nice to see a more detailed analysis of why shaming in particular, might work in this instance if that’s the case. I do agree that the behavior is not “functional”, though. I think the Rodman may be saying “functional” when what he really means is “makes sense given the incentive structure”. He’s really just trying to say we should just try to analyze the situation without applying moral judgements to understand why it’s happening. It’s just coming across badly because he made a poor word choice with the word “functional”.
Jay
Dec 13 2018 at 5:45pm
How does discovering the biological origin of these impulses in any way undermine our duty to control them?
That question only makes sense from a moral realist perspective. Until we achieve agreement on what moral duties are (good luck with that), it can’t even be meaningfully discussed. I view moral duties as a social construct, and I have no basis to judge whether a distant tribe has socially constructed the duties of fatherhood in an acceptable manner. If it works for them, good. If they decide that it doesn’t, they can change it. If they have a never-ending argument about whether it works or not and how it should be changed, they’re just like us.
Mike H
Dec 14 2018 at 9:02am
I don’t believe everyone needs to be a moral realist before anyone is allowed to talk about the world as if moral realism is true. Bryan is simply talking to other moral realists. If you’re not convinced of moral realism, and thus Bryan’s argument is a non-starter for you, that is essentially your problem. The rest of us who are convinced of moral realism will go on discovering truth. Everyone doesn’t have to be convincible for moral realism to be true.
Jay
Dec 14 2018 at 6:32pm
If your moral realism can’t convince an open minded skeptic of its truths, and if different communities of moral realism can’t convince each other of their own truths (e.g. Muslims and Quakers probably can’t), then your version of moral realism is indistinguishable from social constructivism. You believe that you have moral truths that cannot be convincingly explained to outsiders, and as a social constructivist I agree with you – while noting that lots of other people have lots of different moral truths that they cannot convincingly explain to either of us. From my perspective, your truths look much like anyone else’s.
So go ahead and talk to the others who share your particular view of moral realism*, but don’t imagine that a Coconut Villager would have any reason to care about your critique of his lifestyle.
*Not that you or Caplan said what that view is
Alex
Dec 15 2018 at 12:03am
How do you reconcile moral realism with behavioral genetics? You have no way of knowing how difficult it is for other person to change his behavior.
I recommend this book:
https://www.amazon.ca/Blueprint-How-DNA-Makes-Who/dp/0262039168/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1544850146&sr=8-1&keywords=robert+plomin
Jay
Dec 15 2018 at 9:45am
My point was that, while discussions of morality are fine, it’s necessary to either implicitly or explicitly state what moral framework you’re working in. Otherwise you get libertarians and social justice activists and Catholics and postmodernists all talking past each other.
Shawn C Buell
Dec 14 2018 at 9:50am
So, the welfare state as we grasp it is a financial redistribution scheme.
In this case, the welfare state emerges as a subsidy in the form of labor extracted from senior women in the community.
Now, perhaps you could argue that this is the most productive mode of labor which these senior members of the community are capable of providing and it’s simply a “division of labor” problem which spontaneously emerges, but it’s hard to argue in my estimation that it leads to intergenerational savings or capital formation. It’s merely a downwards transfer of value in the form of labor enforced by cultural expectation.
Julie K
Dec 26 2018 at 8:19am
“Emotional susceptibility to charming men leads women to have charming sons, which ultimately gives women extra grandchildren.”
But if initially some women are susceptible and some are not, the charming sons are not guaranteed to succeed.
Comments are closed.