Humans value conformity more than we care to admit. There are a couple of studies in this vein, but one from Baylor shows that people in groups punish others who are more generous, even when the generosity benefits everyone[1].
The author makes an interesting point about people who dislike their work begrudging people who do meaningful things (in their judgement). Throughout our history, we have had an idealized vision of the average American in the back of our heads -- first it was the farmer, creating food for their family. Then it became the factory worker, creating cars for the masses -- now it may be the programmer, making the software that powers our world.
The interesting thread here is creation. We live in a country that idealizes making things and taking risk/responsibility. Yet society is heavily geared towards conformity, and work is an extension of that. Even tech startups are increasingly becoming a systematic, codified industry. Is it no wonder that there is some resentment of people who are perceived to truly be free to create?
This is why something like basic income[2] is so interesting. Once we are freed from having to conform to society in order to meet our basic needs, what will we be able to do? The cynic would say that people will all collect their checks and accomplish nothing. The optimist would say that everyone would start creating new art, music, machines, etc. I think somewhere in between, but that somewhere in between is still vastly more interesting than what we have now.
The largest and most instructive one is, I think, Facebook. And tumblr. To a lesser extent reddit. For shits and giggles, 4chan and SA.
And if you look at the latter of those, you'll see kids making things by themselves in large amounts. You could take that as support for basic income - everybody under 18 pretty much lives on basic income and then some. A lot of them make really fun things and publish on the internet.
My hunch is that if we do get basic income, it will take one to two generations before the floodgates really open and our problem will not be people being too uncreative, but exactly the opposite.
The idea that the cat memes and horrendously inane linkbait headlines that litter the social internet might be representative of the creativity that could be unleashed in even greater volume with basic income is the best argument in favour of "worthless" mid level marketing managers and the forty-hour workweek I've ever heard.
Don't get me wrong, I've seen dilettantes' blog articles that are more thought provoking than supposed social science classic writings, but in general the more user-generated areas of the internet - populated by adults as much as kids - we'd still mostly waste the free time we got anyway.
(I've been distracted from a bit of volunteering I was going to do in order to add a comment on a social site that won't be read by anyone after tomorrow, and probably won't be remembered by many ten minutes after they've finished reading it. QED, I guess)
Your comment is definitely interesting, and I will remember it for more than 10 minutes. But the real question isn't "is what people do in their free time a good thing?", it is "is what they could do in their free time better for society than what they are doing at work now?" What are the hidden personal (not using your time optimally, lower happiness, etc) and societal (more stress, higher medical bills, etc) costs of people constantly doing things they hate? Not saying I have an answer, but it would be nice to find out.
That's a little bit unkind. I mean, I'm naturally inclined to believe you, but the more I think about it, the more I think it's wrong.
4Chan might be dismissed as "cat memes", but it's also a massive worldwide experiment in totally anonymous communication. That is a very new thing, and although you might not find cat memes to be all that impressive, intrinsically they aren't much different from poetry: cat memes and poetry are both about expressions as an art form.
Linkbait headlines suck too, sure, but it's also a symptom of an effort to get more people to read news than ever have before. How well-read was your average teenager in 1900? And now? There are totally average people walking around now with nearly encyclopedic knowledge of multiple subjects, in their heads, and what they cannot recall from that article they read the other day with the linkbait headline, they can still look up on a mobile device.
I totally don't get the whole doge thing. It's the first social fad that has come along that has made me feel old. I can't relate to it, it's alien, it's foreign, it's weird, it doesn't make any sense. But, I think probably that's just because I don't understand it, not because it isn't interesting.
Cat memes are fun. Mid level marketing managers impede my product's progress.
I'm also not entirely convinced making cat memes all day would be wasting time - if you do it long enough, you'll evolve it into a proper art form. The whole reason you have cat or any other kind of memes is because they let you succintly communicate something that's both new and would otherwise take a lot of explaining. It kind of sucks though when other people then take your meme and run with it making it say other things and diluting its meaning until it's nothing more than a reference to an echo of itself, posted only to show how hip you are with these new memes. Which is why cat memes (outside of one or two very specific images) and rage comics (all of them) are not welcome on 4chan any more.
Seems to me that Reddit and other internet communities serve as arguments against this "unleashing" of creativity, as they suffer from the 1% rule ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) ). In other words, if the idea is that Reddit serves as a microcosm of what basic income would do, then it suggests that 1% of people on basic income would be creating and 99% would be simply consuming.
So you believe that only 1% of the population enjoys or is capable of creation? That is BS.
1% of a given group A may be doing the creating, however many of the other 99% of group A may well be active in group B and be a creator there.
Additionally, I would guess that the percentage of of group that are active participants goes up as the group size goes down. In my DnD group the DM makes up ~15% of the group.
"if the idea is that Reddit serves as a microcosm of what basic income would do" then that idea seems obviously flawed to me.
>1% of a given group A may be doing the creating, however many of the other 99% of group A may well be active in group B and be a creator there.
The Free Market is structured along this assumption. 1% of people will make software, 1% will make music, 1% will farm, 1% will teach, 1% will build chemical plants, etc. etc. but they will each enjoy the other 99%'s productions. The assumption, of course, is that this will naturally fall into place. (Automation and even globalization/outsourcing threw a wrench into the system).
However, this "Law of Conformity" (mentioned in the great-grandparent comment) still applies in this 'new age' of 'basic income'. People will still converge on commonly esteemed things i.e. there will be A LOT of musicians, painters, filmmakers, etc. (many of whom will make crap stuff -- as is already noticeable on certain 'sections' of the internet).
Also,one of the real (current) reasons you never get payed a lot of money for helping people is because: the people that need the most help usually cannot pay you (or at least not pay you well).
The people buying your software, art, etc. are buying it after their own needs are well met (usually). That is the basic premise of consumerism. The morality of consumerism is an issue all on its own.
But it is also arguable that the Free market itself converges (or causes people to converge) due to this "Law of Conformity". The past few generations have pushed their kids like crazy to opt for 'better paying' careers, simply for the fact that they are 'better paying'.
Why? The Law of Conformity, I guess. :P An on topic video came out today by a fairly popular YouTuber, on the last point I mentioned (about the high-pay career pushing): http://youtu.be/16pVXq7Lscg
That's a possibility, but on the other hand you also have to factor in that the behavior of people currently on reddit is not only skewed 1) demographically, but 2) also affected by current society.
Regarding 1, I'd venture a guess that people on reddit are generally younger, and reddit as a community is bigger (especially if you stick with the 'main' reddits.). Many of my friends feel discouraged to be creative on reddit because of the sheer volume of creativity already there. They share their creativity in smaller workshops or among friends.
And considering 2, a lot of people have to use significant energy to do 'bullshit jobs', so when they come home they have little left for creative expression.
I lean towards the 'it's worth a shot' approach. I've been freelancing for a few years now, and in my constant battle against seeing my job as just a job, I notice a sharp increase in creativity when I get the 'money' part out of the way (via a fun or lucrative project), and when the job routines fades from my system (after some time spent not working actively on a lucrative-but-slightly-boring project).
Furthermore, if I look at my younger, more carefree self and at my younger siblings and their friends, I'm amazed at the creativity. They play minecraft instead of more consumer-style games, they tinker with electronics, and generally, after the novelty of 'doing nothing' wears off, seek out creativity with a passion. And this doesn't seem to be a specific subtype of people (geeks, creatives, whatever).
> it may be the programmer, making the software that powers our world
Most paid programming jobs in IT are bullshit jobs that have no benefit to anyone. They just prop up other bullshit jobs in the accounting or legal departments, duplicate work done in some other company's marketing division, make the systems compliant with some new government regulation, work around bugs put in the systems for the express purpose of generating paid after hours call outs, exist just so the workers involved can list more new technologies on their CV's, are contractor jobs doing the work of the employees who are spending their whole day trading shares or doing nothing, laundering some open source software so it can be made proprietary, ... ... ...
Any programming job of any real benefit to anyone isn't even unpaid work. Someone doing a personal pet project is really paying because of forfeited income, as also is a student paying fees to work on a research program somewhere.
I think he is talking about the myth, not the reality of it. And you're absolutely right, open source software probably more than anything proves David Graeber's point.
The idea that people would punish, rather than revere unconventionally generous individuals sounds like the opposite of the "Big man" system, which has been rather well documented to exist [1]
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_man_%28anthropology%29
This is interesting. One question and one semi-question:
1. Do "Big Men" first come into any semblance of power through redistribution (I give my food to Tom down the street, now he is my first follower), or does it start some other way (My father is important, therefore I am somewhat important)?
2. I wonder if humans only punish generous behavior in their peers. I assume that leaders have a different standard, as we don't see them as "one of us", and thus we allow them to do things that we would otherwise look down upon.
2. In the corporate world at least, leaders are usually very encouraging of generosity or high-performance; it benefits their organization, after all. It's punished by peers because leaders encourage it. The peers are all in competition for a scarce resource - the leader's favor - and so when the leader bestows that on one individual for a particular accomplishment or act, that one individual ends up being resented by all their peers.
Think back to elementary school where the teacher's pet would get hammered down relentlessly by her schoolmates until she stopped speaking up in class. It's the same dynamic: overperformance leads to the lion's share of the teacher's attention, which makes your peers feel shortchanged, which results in social consequences for the overperformer.
This is also behind the conventional wisdom that "You can accomplish a lot in a big company if you don't care who gets the credit." If you overperform but then make everybody else look good, they won't resent you for it, and instead will help you out next time. That results in continued overperformance, as long as you can continue to stomach putting lots of effort in and lots of other folks getting the credit.
I don't believe anyone's been present to document the establishing of a "big man" system in these small tribes. But consider the influence of Richard Stallman. If he'd just been some guy writing his manifestos and such, I doubt he'd have much influence. Instead I think his influence came from the software he wrote, and the fact he gave it away for free.
My hunch is that the documented phenomena with punishing generous people is a "Sample population = The sort of person who attends a particular university in the United States" sort of issue.
Picking Stallman seems like a poor choice of example: he's been called a "smelly weirdo" by probably more people he can count, and I'm afraid that arguing it's all down to his politics would just be making excuses.
He instigated a few reasonably influential movements, I think influential people are maladjusted almost by definition. Whether or not he is universally adored is irrelevant to whether or not he has clout.
Yes, the feeling I got comparing the two articles is that "Big-Man" situations are subtly different from ostracizing of more generous people. For one thing, it sounds like "Big-Men" are more of mediators than actual donors.
I would say pretty much every exchange is essentially to do with your skill as a mediator, however according to the article there is definitely exchange of material goods.
But the Big Man (at least in other contexts) is conventionally generous. Lavishly so, but within conventions that impose, along with the generosity, certain obligations on the recipient.
Good point, I think the obligation side of that may be at play with the "punishing" example. It's possible that the sort of people that were recruited for the study were the kind that resented being obliged to give more than they were already.
Exactly this. The line from Lawrence of Arabia comes to mind: "I am a river to my people." The US equivalents are the mob boss (think of the opening of The Godfather, where Don Corleone hears requests from ordinary citizens) or the political boss dispensing patronage. In both cases, participation in the system of power binds the recipient into the system. Which generally increases the control of the Big Man over a resource stream.
The author makes an interesting point about people who dislike their work begrudging people who do meaningful things (in their judgement). Throughout our history, we have had an idealized vision of the average American in the back of our heads -- first it was the farmer, creating food for their family. Then it became the factory worker, creating cars for the masses -- now it may be the programmer, making the software that powers our world.
The interesting thread here is creation. We live in a country that idealizes making things and taking risk/responsibility. Yet society is heavily geared towards conformity, and work is an extension of that. Even tech startups are increasingly becoming a systematic, codified industry. Is it no wonder that there is some resentment of people who are perceived to truly be free to create?
This is why something like basic income[2] is so interesting. Once we are freed from having to conform to society in order to meet our basic needs, what will we be able to do? The cynic would say that people will all collect their checks and accomplish nothing. The optimist would say that everyone would start creating new art, music, machines, etc. I think somewhere in between, but that somewhere in between is still vastly more interesting than what we have now.
[1] http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=st... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income