November 15, 2011

Does capitalism reduce fitness? (part II)

Rasmus Nielsen responds to my commentary of his students' ‘rEvolutionary Biologists say: Capitalism Reduces Fitness!’ sign and the blog post associated with it:
Dienekes was shocked by this travesty and decided to make a blog post about it. To my surprise his outrage was not about the social conditions in West Oakland but rather about the loose use of fitness employed in the blog. He took the statement by my students and postdocs literally and pointed out that if you include all the different components of fitness, and not just viability, there is in fact no good scientific evidence that the absolute fitness of individuals growing up in capitalist societies is reduced.
I largely ignore economics and politics in this blog, not because I have no interest in them, but because this is an anthropology blog. And, while I'm sure social conditions in West Oakland may be in great need of improvement, it's not my business to improve them; apparently there are plenty of kind souls working toward that goal already.

It is one thing to hold a political opinion as an individual and another to link that opinion to one's scientific discipline. An electrical engineer, a medical doctor, and a biologist may think that capitalism is a terrible or wonderful system, but if they attempted to link that opinion with electrical engineering, medicine, or biology, I would like to see the evidence for it.

The people in question explicitly linked their political opinions with evolutionary biology, both by ascribing those opinion to "rEvolutionary biologists" and by explicitly linking their dismissal of capitalism to fitness, a central concept in evolutionary biology.

Dr. Nielsen continues:
Most of the students and postdocs in my group are from Europe, and many have not been here for long. They have perhaps not quite gotten use to American political discourse and may not express themselves in a way that most Americans find convincing. But at least they haven’t quite lost their sense of empathy and care for other people. I figure that if I keep them here, in an American academic environment, for a couple of years more they will get cured of that problem and will be able to concentrate fully on their research careers without getting distracted by the economic and social problems they encounter in the neighborhoods around campus on their commute from and to work. If I push them hard, the may even eventually end up getting real jobs and move up in the East Oakland hills. They will then never have to worry about the problems in West Oakland again, and can spend all their time making sure they include all components of fitness when making blog posts.

Last time I checked, both East Oakland and West Oakland, and indeed the entire United States have a capitalist economy. If someone cares why people in West Oakland have a different life expectancy than those in East Oakland, they must seek the explanation elsewhere, and not in their common economic system. If they wanted to examine the influence of capitalism on life expectancy, they could, perhaps, compare South vs. North Korea, two countries with similar populations, that also happen to have a difference in life expectancy of about 10 years, with capitalist South Koreans outliving non-capitalist North Koreans.

9 comments:

Michael Balter said...

"Last time I checked, both East Oakland and West Oakland, and indeed the entire United States have a capitalist economy. If someone cares why people in West Oakland have a different life expectancy than those in East Oakland, they must seek the explanation elsewhere, and not in their common economic system."

I get a lot out of reading this blog, but this statement is amazing for its obfuscation of reality. A key and increasing feature of capitalism is vast income inequality, and thus capitalism is a perfect explanation for the differences between East and West Oakland.

Dienekes said...

I get a lot out of reading this blog, but this statement is amazing for its obfuscation of reality. A key and increasing feature of capitalism is vast income inequality, and thus capitalism is a perfect explanation for the differences between East and West Oakland.

Incorrect. There is income inequality in capitalism in general, but that tells us nothing why there is income inequality between East and West Oakland in particular.

msomel said...

be explicit. if you believe social class differences are rooted in genetic differences, say that openly.

Dienekes said...

be explicit. if you believe social class differences are rooted in genetic differences, say that openly.

A simple "I was wrong" would have sufficed.

As for class differences they are rooted in many different variables, and I see no a priori reason to exclude genetic differences as at least a partial explanation. What the specific causes are in Oakland, I have no idea, or particular interest.

Roy said...

Micheal, read Roubini on China's destruction of its middle class. It's so 20th century to cling to Lenin and Wilson's defining ideological differences. It should be apparent by now that the scum that has risen to the top of all the ponds is what we need to remove..

AdygheChabadi said...

East and West Oakland are culturally different it seems...

Companies are attracted to areas with easy access to major highways and low crime and violence.

East Oakland appears to be rife with crime and violence and so naturally companies are not going to migrate to those areas.

West Oakland appears to be more stable and less crime-plagued as of now...and so a process of gentrification has begun to take place there.

In my opinion...crime has nothing to do with poverty...but one's moral state does. There are plenty of people without much money that don't engage in criminal acts. Just as there are many people with plenty of money that do engage in criminal acts.

I am not considered one of the poor by any means, but I find it very insulting and very prejudiced to say that poor people are bad people because they are poor...when, in fact, very many of them are better people, morally and spiritually, than most rich people.

If you change a people's moral state, you will change the effects said morality has on the culture. If it changes to more positive moral state then the crime and violence will likewise change in a more positive direction.

We are not allowed to say that morality has a part to play in why some neighborhoods are horrible (political correctness)...As I said, rich people are no more moral or immoral than any poor person. For an example, look at Bernie Madoff...there is no poor person equivalent to that.

I don't think taking from the rich and giving to the poor solves anything. It just makes the rich resentful that they worked hard to get what they have and others, who have not earned it, get to enjoy it. This would cause one of two things to happen (if not both): The rich will move away or they will stop doing what they do to create wealth. So what happens then? You can't force the wealthy to stay or to further create wealth.

It is much more complicated than just saying, "Capitalism is to blame." There are cultural, psychological, and moral reasons which predominate more than Capitalism.

I also agree with Dienekes about North Korea and South Korea.

One can also adduce, Laos (Communist) and Japan (Capitalist)...life expectancy in Laos is more than 20 years lower than in Japan.

As for genetic differences...I don't know if there is a "handle-money-poorly" gene or set of genes.

I think it is more educational and psychological than anything genetic.

Besides West Oakland is more than 67% African American...East Oakland is 54% African American. African Americans carry mostly Sub-Saharan genes...so if it is genetic, why would one group of African Americans prosper over another group, when, in fact, they share common genetic ancestry???

Pascvaks said...

Consider the simplistic mindset that "People are all the same; we are all of one mind." Observation does not support this except at the Super-Macro level. Below Super-Mac, consider --in rather general terms-- that there are those who see the world for what it is, in all its contradictions, and accept, and adjust, and live their lives as best they can. Also, there are those who see the world for what it is, in all its contradictions, and reject, and rile, and live to remake it as best they can. People are who they have become by their upbringing and environment (‘environment’ in every aspect - family, culture, social, religious, economic, education, et al, etc.). People are not all the same, and they are most definitely not of one mind; and they never have been. Does this explain everything about East v. West Oakland. No, but it is a start. The common denominator is ‘people‘. Everything else is all in the Mix below Super-Mac.

PS: It is not always productive to look for “one” cause; to boil everything down to dust. People are very complicated indeed. We live on one planet of many worlds with a whole bunch or strange, wonderful, ugly, beautiful, talented, stupid “people”.

apostateimpressions said...

The common a priori dismissal of any genetic factor in poverty is consistent with both i) the eugenicists' warning that industrial society would take on an ever more bottom heavy class structure because the lower classes always tend to breed faster, especially as modern society has suspended or mitigated the usual selective processes; and with ii) Nietzsche's account of the class basis of morality and his warning that we are headed for an increasingly "socialistic" future. The masses instinctively falsify reality in their own interests, not only "ethically" but also scientifically: there are no significant differences between persons or races; the masses are not to blame for their lot; the "wicked" class system is to blame; more "equality" is needed. Nietzsche warned that human greatness would be swamped in mediocrity and that social, cultural, aesthetic and genetic decline would follow. We should hope rather that a new aristocracy should arise in Europe as the basis of a higher and more sustainable culture. Read his "On the Genealogy of Morals" for some account of the class basis of morality.

http://www.amazon.com/Nietzsche-Genealogy-Morality-Cambridge-Political/dp/052169163X/

mathilda said...

It's pretty much the dominant opinion among psychologists that social status and income have a strong relationship to IQ, which is mainly inherited (also dominant POV).

Not that you'll hear this said much in public as they get screeched down by every seventies-programmed, well-meaning documentary watcher around. I had one guy (specialized in the evolution of the human brain)tell me he'd get fired if he said this stuff openly

Capitalism favours the intelligent and productive. Socialism promotes the unproductive lower classes to reproduce at the expense of the productive. Socialsm means well (formerly I was a socialist) but it doesn't understand the long term effects, and I think this is the reason socialist scientists are shrieking against any genetic input to intelligence etc. It's just poisonous to their religion.