I NEO-MATHUSIANI

Trigger warning: astenersi persone sensibili e disprassiche, la lettura potrebbe procurare turbamenti, irritazioni ed eczemi.

I NEO-MATHUSIANI

Ho passato la mia vita di lettore a gongolare per l’epocale sconfitta di Malthus, ma con i neo-malthusiani la storia cambia, occorre ricominciare da capo. Sfogliavo in treno alcuni di questi autori (non faccio nomi), sono piuttosto sgradevoli nel loro cinismo ma l'impianto di fondo tiene, soprattutto quando criticano il welfare state moderno.

Tanto per schematizzare il pensiero neo-malthusiano, ammettiamo che la popolazione possa essere distinta in due macro categorie: “imbranati” e “brillanti”, con questi ultimi più adatti nel procacciare risorse per sé e per la loro prole.

Ora, stando alla logica evoluzionista esistono due strategie riproduttive: massimizzare i figli (S1) e massimizzare i nipoti (S2). In S1 dirigiamo il grosso delle nostre energie nel fare figli (… come conigli), in S2 nel loro mantenimento affinché possano a loro volta fare figli. Tutti fanno entrambe le cose, sia chiaro, ma c’è chi punta più sulla prima fase e chi più sulla seconda. E’ chiaro che farai meno figli se poi devi impegnarti nel mantenerli come si deve, è altrettanto chiaro che ne farai molti se più o meno consapevolmente hai già deciso di trascurarli e lasciarli al loro destino.

Guardiamo per un attimo agli individui: chi opterà per S1? Gli “imbranati”, mi sembra logico: sarebbe uno spreco investire troppo sui loro punti deboli. E chi opterà invece su S2? I “brillanti”, mi sembra logico: è oculato investire sui loro punti di forza.

Guardiamo ora all’ambiente in cui sono immersi gli individui: quando si opterà per S1? Nei periodi di abbondanza, mi sembra logico: inutile investire troppo nel procacciarsi risorse facilmente accessibili a tutti. E quando si opterà per S2? In tempi di vacche magre: inutile fare tanti figli se sai già che non sopravvivranno.

Ora capite perché i neo-malthusiani criticano tanto il welfare state? La cosa non potrebbe essere più chiara: il welfare crea abbondanza per gli “imbranati”, S1 diventa la strategia vincente e ben presto gli “imbranati” avranno il sopravvento, ma una comunità di "imbranati" è destinata al declino. I dati sembrano confermare: con l’avvento del welfare moderno la parte “peggiore” della popolazione fa più figli.

How universal are rates of social mobility across time and societies? Rettifiche a Clark

How universal are rates of social mobility across time and societies?:



'via Blog this'

Humanomist

Possiamo spiegare la storia dicendo che ad un certo punto qualcuno ha avuto un' idea e il corso delle cose è mutato?

E' questa una spiegazione legittima?

Secondo lo splendido transenssuale Dreidre McCloskey, sì.

Le cause materiali non sono tutto e nelle dinamiche storiche s' insinua spesso un "ghost in the machine".

... We humanomists believe that humans are motivated by more than incentives...




Qui anticipa le sue conclusioni dettagliate nei due volumi in uscita che mettono a tema la Rivoluzione Industriale

A big change in the common opinion about markets and innovation, I claim, caused the Industrial Revolution, and then the modern world. The change occurred during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in northwestern Europe. More or less suddenly the Dutch and British and then the Americans and the French began talking about the middle class, high or low — the “bourgeoisie” — as though it were dignified and free. The result was modern economic growth... The outcome has falsified the old prediction from the left that markets and innovation would make the working class miserable, or from the right that the material gains from industrialization would be offset by moral corruption... The usual and materialist economic histories do not seem to work. Bourgeois dignity and liberty might... The correct explanation is ideas... The book tests the traditional stories against the actually-happened, setting aside the stories that in light of the recent findings of scientific history don’t seem to work very well. A surprisingly large number of the stories don’t. Not Karl Marx and his classes. Not Max Weber and his Protestants. Not Fernand Braudel and his Mafia-style capitalists. Not Douglass North and his institutions. Not the mathematical theories of endogenous growth and its capital accumulation. Not the left-wing’s theory of working-class struggle, or the right-wing’s theory of spiritual decline.

Yet the conclusion is in the end positive. As the political scientist John Mueller put it, capitalism — or as I prefer to call it, “innovation” — is like Ralph’s Grocery in Garrison Keillor’s self-effacing little Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon: “pretty good.”[2] Something that’s pretty good, after all, is pretty good. Not perfect, not a utopia, but probably worth keeping in view of the worse alternatives so easily fallen into. Innovation backed by liberal economic ideas has made billions of poor people pretty well off, without hurting other people.[3] By now the pretty good innovation has helped quite a few people even in China and India. Let’s keep it.

The Big Economic Story of our times has not been the Great Recession of 2007–2009, unpleasant though it was. And the important moral is not the one that was drawn in the journals of opinion during 2009 — about how very rotten the Great Recession shows economics to be, and especially an economics of free markets. Failure to predict recessions is not what is wrong with economics, whether free-market economics or not. Such prediction is anyway impossible: if economists were so smart as to be able to predict recessions they would be rich. They’re not.[4] No science can predict its own future, which is what predicting business cycles entails. Economists are among the molecules their theory of cycles is supposed to predict. No can do — not in a society in which the molecules are watching and arbitraging. The important flaw in economics, I argue here, is not its mathematical and necessarily mistaken theory of future business cycles, but its materialist and unnecessarily mistaken theory of past growth. The Big Economic Story of our own times is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 adopted liberal ideas in the economy, and came to attribute a dignity and a liberty to the bourgeoisie formerly denied. And then China and India exploded in economic growth. The important moral, therefore, is that in achieving a pretty good life for the mass of humankind, and a chance at a fully human existence, ideas have mattered more than the usual material causes. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr put it recently in the opening sentence of one of his luminous books, “economic change in all periods depends, more than most economists think, on what people believe.” Left and right tend to dismiss the other’s ideology as “faith.” The usage devalues faith, a noble virtue required for physics as much as for philosophy, and not necessarily irrational... Yet innovation, even in a proper system of the virtues, has continued to be scorned by many of our opinion makers now for a century and a half, from Thomas Carlyle to Naomi Klei... We will need to abandon the materialist premise that reshuffling and efficiency, or an exploitation of the poor, made the modern world. And we will need to make a new science of history and the economy, a humanistic one that acknowledges number and word, interest and rhetoric, behavior and meaning.

Il materialista Gregory Clark concede che gli incentivi spiegano ben poco:

Economics pulls in neophytes with a grand and exciting vision of the world: people are highly responsive to incentives, differences in incentives explain all major variations in wealth and poverty across societies, and easy institutional changes will create the incentives to launch a brave new world. This is the buzz that animates Freakonomics, the book, and now the movie. This is the vision that led Roland Fryer, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, to offer students in the New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC school systems “cash for grades.”

Deirdre McCloskey earlier in her career did stellar work advancing this program in economics — her virtuoso writings recruited me to the study of the history of economies. But having over many years considered the general problem of economic growth, and the specific puzzle of the timing and location of the Industrial Revolution, McCloskey has come to a stunning epiphany. This is that incentives explain very little of the huge gaps in wealth across the world. Growth is a cultural production, a society wide embrace of “bourgeois virtues.” Specifically, she claims, growth came because the activities of marketing, profiting, and innovating have become in our society uniquely respected, admired and praised. The rise of the Bourgeois Virtues has created societies such as those of Northern Europe, so primed for growth that even though the grabbing hand of the state is on every shoulder, people continue to produce and innovate.

I fully agree with McCloskey about the surprisingly poor ability of incentives alone to account for growth. In order to hold on to the central idea that the 10,000-year delay in the Industrial Revolution from the first appearance of settled agriculture was created by a lack of incentives, economists have to maintain the collective fiction that all societies before 1800 were run along the lines of Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea. Yet, in case after case, we find, deep in the 10,000 years of economic stagnation, fully incentivized market societies.

Go to any village in Suffolk in England in the years of the Poll Tax, 1377-81 and you will find in the tax lists an abundance of traders, craftsmen, and merchants.[1] Go to the records of Oxford University in 1500 and you will find the descendants of those traders and craftsmen, revealed by surnames such as Smith and Baker, had become within a few hundred years nearly fully incorporated into the elites of medieval society. Go to Paris in 1300 and you will find living cheek by jowl with the locals Scots, English, Italians, Flemish, and Jews. Medieval cities were hives of enterprise and industry, taxed lightly by kings fearing to kill the golden goose. London, among others, was almost as polyglot in 1300 as it is today...

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Piccola storia economica dell' uomo

Sempre utile sapere la versione dell' accademia.

1. Fino al neolitico l' economia dell' uomo è imperniata sulla caccia e la raccolta (C/R).
2. Nel neolitico scoppia la rivoluzione agricola (A). Dove? Dove le condizioni geografiche e la presenza di animali addomesticabili lo consente (Europa e Asia).
3. La società R/C è egualitaria. La diseguaglianza predomina invece in A.
4. A non muta in modo sensibile il tenore di vita dell' uomo. Ad ogni accenno di miglioramento cresce la popolazione e segue un impoverimento (trappola malthusiana).
5. Con A l' uomo diventa "produttore" e nasce quindi la cultura della "produzione" e del "lavoro".
6. Le diseguagliane create da A fanno emergere una classe "superiore" che coltiva al meglio taluni valori funzionali alla produzione (razionalità, onestà, pazienza, lavoro...).
7. A incentiva gli scambi e la concentrazione degli insediamenti (ovvero più malattie e meno igiene).
8. Le condizioni igieniche dell' Europa sono particolarmente precarie. Siamo i più sporchi al mondo e questo si riflette in alti tassi di mortalità.
9. In Europa, specie in Gran Bretagna, sono i ricchi a fare i figli, molto più che i poveri. La mobilità sociale è dunque verso il basso e si crea una classe media.
10. 7-8-9 favoriscono alta rotazione demografica e mobilità verso il basso (anche dei valori).
11. L' alchimia genetica spiega il perchè del protrarsi della trappola malthusiana, il perchè la rivoluzione industriale scoppi proprio in GB e perchè l' Africa e il Sudamenrica stentino a "convergere" ancora oggi.

E la rivoluzione industriale è tutto:

Per Jared Diamond conta solo 2): geografia e animali addomesticabili sono tutto. E allora perchè la Rivoluzione Industriale non ha rappresentato una liberazione per l' Africa? No Jared, non ci convinci.

Per Douglass North contano solo le istituzioni: proprietà privata + rule of law e il benessere è assicurato. Ma le "istituzioni giuste" c' erano anche altrove - sia nel tempo che nello spazio - e non solo nell' Europa di fine '700. Evidentemente contano anche le teste.