The factual material about funeral spending costs is very interesting, but when it gets into "Kinship societies are wealth-destroying societies" it seems rather… unsupported? That's a sweeping statement that actually requires understanding the whole picture, and the whole picture is not being presented. Is there reason to think the author truly has all the context to make these claims?
Korea used to have something similar to this phenomenon, although it wasn’t for the funeral. When the oldest man (probably the grandfather of a big family) has his 60th birthday, the entire family had to celebrate with basically throwing a days-long party. It was like a family duty for the rest of the family, and it was embedded into the culture so deeply so they wouldn’t simply think about the alternative of having a small one. Other elders in the local community would say “well done” only when the party was big enough.
After the big celebration, the rest of the family would sit on a massive debt, which couldn’t be reimbursed with their earnings for a foreseeable future. The old man dies, and the family lives along with the agony of the debt. It used to be the case until Korea became an industrial country and a lot more people started having more than 60 yrs of life.
My mom still talks about what it used to look like in those old days.
This is not a novel observation, eg Kapuscinski's "In the Shadow of the Sun" describes the same phenomenon: it's very difficult to get ahead because anything above bare subsistence is immediately siphoned off by your kin.
It's viewing the situation through the lens of Anglo capitalist opinions.
I found the same thing when working in Cambodia; Khmer culture is very, very, family-oriented, the extended family is the main survival mechanism for Khmer people, and individual wishes are often subordinated to the family. This is their culture, Khmer people are happy with it, this is how they choose to live. The Anglo ex-pats (including me) don't understand it, find it oppressive and have a natural instinct to "liberate" Khmer people from this oppression. Took me quite a while of talking with Khmer people to realise that they look at the world very differently from me, and from that perspective this all works and is a source of joy and comfort for them. Obviously there are outliers and people who this doesn't work for, but that's also true of Anglo culture.
On a factual level the relationship between kinship societies and economic headwinds is fairly well documented [1] [2]. The mechanism is the same reason that communist/socialist societies often fail: when wealth belongs to everyone, nobody has either the incentive or the means to accumulate wealth, which prevents capital formation within the society [3].
The part that the article glosses over is that "Kinship societies destroy economic growth" is a Russell conjugate [4] of "economic growth destroys family formation". Kinship networks provide important intangible support to several important community functions, notably child-rearing. That's the whole "it takes a village to raise a child" aphorism. When you allow people to defect on their social obligations in the name of accumulating wealth, then it turns out they do, and the village suffers. It is exactly as the article said: "The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it: someone who no longer needs your help is also someone who might not help you." That's exactly what we've observed happening in modern industrialized economies, where people become increasingly atomized and those informal community organizations that create things like belonging and mutual aid (not to mention group childcare and socialization) die off as everyone chases the promotion that will let them afford ever-higher institutional childcare costs.
And this is why the fertility rate in every major industrialized country has cratered, usually right as it industrializes.
>Kinship societies are actively hostile to economic growth, because economic growth undermines the basis of kinship: that is why kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead. The funeral is a window into a system of wealth destruction that serves, above all else, to keep people poor
This reasoning is flawed. Consumer spending is not "wealth destruction" -- who makes the fantasy coffins? Who prints the banners? Local businesses!
Ghana is sitting at a 5.6% GDP growth rate; for reference developmental success India is at 6.5%. Ghana's GDP in 2000 was $5B, today it's $82.B. Its per-capita GDP has more than doubled in the same time period.
Ghana's GDP per capita is around $2000. It's only a success story because the baseline is so low, and because most of its neighbors are doing even worse.
Additionally, this is pretty much the paradigmatic case of that criticism frequently heard on the left in any other context, that GDP is not the same as quality of life. Indeed in this case it's apparently measuring the quality of death.
> Consumer spending is not "wealth destruction" -- who makes the fantasy coffins? Who prints the banners? Local businesses!
If the local businesses were instead being hired to dig holes and fill them up again... oh wait, they literally are, except they're also instructed to make very elaborate artworks and put them in the holes before shoveling in the dirt. Anyway: Can you please examine the movement of real resources rather than pieces of paper? No society gets rich by making art which is immediately destroyed.
The flip side of the flip side is that poor people in traditional societies are often trapped in toxic interpersonal dynamics from which there's no escape, because they live in the same household.
Like, in Korea, "mother-in-law vs daughter-in-law relationship issues" used to be so common that there's a single word for that. Nowadays they're getting harder to witness, unless you're a fan of weekend k-dramas.
Lots of valid criticisms of the oft touted "happiness index."
Off the top of my head from something I read a while back: Finland is listed as one of the happiest countries, but also has a higher rate than normal of prescribed anti psychotics and anti depressants, and also has high rates of alcoholism and suicide. Something isn't lining up there.
My own anecdotal experience as well conflicts. When I travel through Scandinavia, people seem... Fine. Friends I have there say you're basically not allowed to talk to strangers, at all, everyone is meant to just quietly ignore each other. Meanwhile the deeper I go into Vietnam, even deep into where people still live on stilt houses made by hand tools, the happier and more sociable people are. My friends say the same of various countries in Africa.
Loneliness and aloneness are almost separate phenomenon. I've felt my loneliest in the middle of Manhattan and completely fulfilled when on a solo hike in the Grand Tetons.
I don’t actually think so. I think if you apply rigor to those results you find that they don’t stand up. The field of sociology applies rigor selectively. Few of its results actually hold up.
I don’t even think the loneliness epidemic is real. The science is really not that strong.
Thats what people on one side of the argument like to think, patting themselves on their back for their own decisions. I am old enough to have seen it many many times.
There is no simple win - each person is different, each family is different, where one thrives the other has absolutely miserable time imprisoned with no way out.
world is not black and white and neither are people, dont dumb it down like that since you miss what reality looks like.
I’m not trying to get pity, but it would be mistaken to say that I brought it on myself. My wife didn’t bring it on me either. We simply eroded over time. But when marital bonds erode, it turns out they take family bonds with them; or at least, her side of the family. My side isn’t much, so hers was my primary source of social interaction.
This is a self inflicted wound in the sense that I could have formed a lot of social bonds with people other than my wife. And I tried to, sometimes. But when you’re spending 20 years with one person, it’s hard to make time for anything else, especially if you want to do good work (in the researcher sense).
So it’s more of a “pick two: family, friends, work”. I went the family and work route. I don’t regret it, but it means that now all that’s left is work, which can be a hollow existence.
Luckily, modern society has a surplus of ways to help motivated people form social bonds. Once I get my car back, I’ll be going to the local therapy groups, one of which is wood crafting. Random hobbies like that with random people sounds fun.
The thing to avoid seems to be dating apps. Jumping from one relationship into another is universally known as a bad idea. I’m hoping that casting a wide net (going to groups, reading clubs, DnD, or other activities) will fill the void.
Honestly though, what helps the most is that I have a daughter. She’s almost 3. I’m very happy we had her, and just remembering that she’ll have a nice life helps me appreciate my own.
Modern society makes it easier than ever to isolate yourself. I spend my days sitting in a house alone, having Amazon drop off USB-C cables, with my biggest social interaction of the week being the door to door salesman (who, ironically, is trying to sell me a door) that’s coming by tomorrow. That’s the default state; you have to push back against it, and that’s hard. But it’s probably mistaken to say that those who go with the flow are suffering from self inflicted wounds. Societal flow used to be towards social groups (church being the most obvious example) instead of paths that end in loneliness.
That should be always supremely easy and never contain work, unless you are maybe working in medical care or education. Given education path normally leaves a lot of free time then just the former.
I would maybe add fourth - oneself, unless one is a proper exreovert. Requires least of the time, but its most important for long term mental health.
There's a happy medium between the "everyone in the family shares absolutely everything" that less individualistic societies have and the "everyone in the family is alone" that more individualistic societies tend to have.
The US, in particular, is on the far end of that spectrum, because of the cultural emphasis on work and self-reliance. The happy medium, in my opinion, is trading off some work for some friends. In many cases within US culture, at least, you might be trading off an amount of time that yields a marginal reward at work but a much larger reward in friendship, simply because that's how diminishing returns tend to work.
This article seems to establish that kinship leads to the failure of wage growth and ultimately wealth, people will hide their wages because people will ask for money. This seems like the issue rather is is that wealth accumulation in sub-saharan africa is limited to a small subset of population, I don't think this wealth tax by family members exists when you have a larger group of individuals making more money.
You can observe this in the US, and presumably in the rest of the world, when wealth is concentrated to individuals, your family will probably ask you for money. The difference is here, there is less income inequality and more people have the ability to make more money.
I do like the look into funeral culture, but I don't think this assumption that kinship and family-peity is the cause of the lack of economic mobilty.
The difference is that it's pretty acceptable for you to reject family requests for money, it doesn't make you a pariah and being a pariah doesn't carry the same consequences when non-family institutions govern society.
The article spends a lot of time belaboring this point: you don't have to do what your family asks you to do in developed countries. On the other hand, becoming outcast from your family in a kinship-dominated society means you have nowhere else to turn to which is enormous pressure.
Corinne Hofmann is a Swiss woman who married a Kenyan Samburu warrior named Lketinga Leparmorijo and had a daughter. She opens a shop but they lose money because Lemalian gives too much credit to friends and neighbors, and because they have to pay bribes to the mini-chief. Lemalian argues that this is no problem because she has more money in Switzerland. The mini-chief demands that Carola hires his teenage nephew as a shop assistant. She has to accept this although she does not need him and he does not work hard. After some time, when he is just drinking beer and not working, she fires him. Later he returns and attacks her. A local judge rules that she has to pay two goats for firing him, but the boy's family has to pay her five goats to compensate for the attack.
The article's description of kinship sounds a bit like family based governance and taxation. Only with say a western government their enforcers will happily imprison anyone not giving what the government ("kin") says is owed, and those who resist being violently dragged jailed typically find a fate even worse.
The western version then of being a pariah for not paying up is violence rather than ostracization and shame. Of course until you get rich enough that you can corrupt the government itself.
> with say a western government their enforcers will happily imprison anyone not giving what the government ("kin") says is owed
Big difference between taxation and patronage is when the rules are known. You generally know ex ante what you should owe in taxes. With patronage, if you have a windfall, the rules adjust to require you give it away.
I think author's point is that wealth drives investment which drives economic growth. In the case of lavish funerals - warranted in kinship societies - the wealth is spent on relatively unproductive investments bearing high opportunity cost. The corollary and author's secondary point is the ineffective resource allocation e.g. through nepotism.
My main (oversimplified!) takeaway from the article is that kinship societies prioritize inherently local processes that inhibit global processes. For example, they prefer keeping internal cohesion through ritual celebration rather than maximizing economic upside through education and specialization. This makes sense - the latter requires a higher degree of trust and stability. Increasing the degree of trust and stability seems to be an evolutionary process. I found Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel [1] to give some amazing insights about this.
Anyway, another lens to look at kinship relationships through is as a resilience strategy to volatile conditions. Any given stress (drought, job losses, etc) are unlikely to affect everyone equally, so the network functions as a safety net under many conditions.
Venture capital applies a similar strategy in the other direction if you squint a bit. It's impossible to predict who will succeed a priori, so the capital is spread to many different bets simultaneously in the hope that the successes outweigh the failures over time. Many of the "rituals" in the VC ecosystem (ghost hiring, puffery, fad chasing, etc) aren't particularly useful for any individual company's success, but I don't think many people here on HN are going to argue it's not economically effective as a whole.
Ghana's GINI index is only a couple points higher than the US (43 vs 41), and the same as Mexico.
I don't think wealth inequality explains this at all. But what rigid social institutions of any kind tend do is inhibit mobility. Moreover, kinship groups like this tend to lock-in relative wealth by lineage--the wealthiest family of a kin group from 3 generations ago will be much more likely (relative to other cultures) to be the wealthiest family 3 generations from now. Greater mobility means productivity increases faster, which raises absolute wealth for everybody even if relative wealth disparities across the entire population remain constant.
> even if relative wealth disparities remain constant.
Relative wealth disparity increases as absolute wealth increases because below a minimum level of income people starve. IE you can’t make 1/10th the median wage in a subsistence economy long term you just die. But a homeless person can survive for decades in the US on ~500$ a month.
> IE you can’t make 1/10th the median wage in a subsistence economy long term you just die. But a homeless person can survive for decades in the US on ~500$ a month.
There are two things I'd like to know more about for this:
1. Is the homeless person doing their survival in an area with a markedly lower median wage than the median wage their income is being measured against? (i.e. is "1/10 the median wage" an illusion created by including foreign communities in the 'median wage'?)
2. Is the homeless person's low income measured by excluding their income from in-kind handouts ("someone kind bought me a sandwich") and foraging ("I found a pizza in the dumpster")?
I don't think social factors are not necessarily a nonfactor, more that this article claims that income equality within kinship groups is a forcing function for lack of economic growth. My claim is that the inequality that these countries face not just between each other within the nation but in our globalized economies, access to resources, capital and labor and thus the downstream effects of smaller markets, less need for labor will lead to less growth. I think you can have economic growth with kinship society if more people within the kinship have greater access to wealth growing, the issue here is that there's limited resources and the kinship society exists as an effect of less resources than the other-way around
> the wealthiest family of a kin group from 3 generations ago will be much more likely (relative to other cultures) to be the wealthiest family 3 generations from now.
I am not sure if this claim is true as well, wealth generally does stay within family lineages across cultures, generally people losing their wealth or even gaining it is an outlier. See any landed gentry in Europe, Asia
Actually; you can see this in America, as income continues to be more concentrated, and more unequal, economic productivity for an individual does go down as there's less opportunity to accrue wealth as before.
> I am not sure if this claim is true as well, wealth generally does stay within family lineages across cultures, generally people losing their wealth or even gaining it is an outlier. See any landed gentry in Europe, Asia
Your examples tend to prove the effect of kinship structures, which were much stronger historically across all cultures, especially outside NW Europe (where nuclear family dynamics go back millennia, which some people argue is not merely coincidental with the emergence of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution).
The relevant question isn't whether wealth stickiness exists, but the magnitude of the effect and how it changes.
Kinship groups can absolutely be useful and beneficial, but as a rigid social institution it can also take on a life of its own, as for any social institution. We can't have meaningful discussions about this stuff without understanding magnitudes and context, otherwise its too easy to cynically equivocate.
Strong extended kinship ties are associated with less economic prosperity all over the world, it just in Africa but Pakistan, the Middle East, etc.
There is a plausible argument that it’s causal. Europe had weaker kinship ties—for various reasons, including the Catholic church’s ban on cousin marriage—back in the middle ages, before Europe began pulling away from the rest of the world in terms of GDP per capita. Even within the U.S., communities with weak kinship ties (e.g. Northeastern Anglo-Protestants) are more economically successful than communities with stronger kinship ties and clan structures (e.g. Appalachians).
Arguably, more atomized societies with weak kinship ties foster the development of civil institutions and governments to compensate for the social structural functions that would otherwise be performed by kinship networks.
> There is a plausible argument that it’s causal. Europe had weaker kinship ties—for various reason
Explain China[1] and its steep ascent, blowing past all European countries, and soon - the USA.
1. Or India, to a lesser extent. There's a lot of recency bias when it comes to economic outcomes, as if we're at the end of history. I'm guessing at least one 19th century British industrialist/gentleman probably praised their Anglo-Saxon heritage and the Protestant (Anglican) faith as necessary ingredients to national wealth, as opposed to the fallen Catholic empires of Spain and Portugal, or the heathens in Africa, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle and far East.
> Explain China[1] and its steep ascent, blowing past all European countries, and soon - the USA
The communist party broke down traditional family structures, and replaced kinship ties with the state. To the point of massive intervention in family formation itself, through the one child policy.
It’s not about Anglo-Protestantism per se, but about a general progression towards atomized societies with weak family bonds. Multiple different cultural changes pushed in that same direction. Protestantism was one, but before that so was the Catholic Church: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/roman-catholi....
Anecdotally, I can also attest to it. I know lots of "finally successful" folks who end up spending their wealth keeping their siblings and extended family afloat. There's no real safety net for them in the USA.
Sure, wealth accumulation is limited to a subset of the population there, but this is true everywhere. The reasoning error here is thinking in terms of absolute incomes across the group, rather than the relative incomes of the members.
Yes, people in the US make more money, on average, than the average Ghanaian, but the relative incomes of a family are just as disparate as those of Ghanaians. If someone in the US gets a better job, the whole family doesn't suddenly also get better jobs.
This is why the kinship system is so economically counterproductive: The collective expectation effectively levels everyone down; any individual who begins to accumulate wealth faces pressure to redistribute it across the group. Nobody can grow their fortune, because that requires both having some fortune initially and being able to make investments that compound it. If the kinship group makes sure your fortune can't increase, any compounding you manage to do doesn't matter, because the initial capital always stays small.
It seems this only matters in economic systems with compound interest, like capitalism.
In gift economies, all these distinctions are meaningless. The bounty of a funeral would be a direct representation of the deceased's popularity (likely established through their generosity) as well as their family's ability to convice people to e.g. spend time making s beautiful coffin, bring food, play music.
Yes, the State economy is capitalist, but the family groups are clearly operating under some kind of Communism. The article itself mentions it - "nothing you own is actually yours, everything is owned by the family." Thus wealth accumulation not really being possible, a hallmark of a communistic economy.
This is my experience with extremely rural areas or tightly knit / kinship / indigenous cultures as well. They happen to live on territory within a given State that's inevitably capitalist because the entire world is, but take a closer look and you'll realize it's almost an entirely different country within the village. A local example to me: everyone assumes the tribal leaders of Taiwanese indigenous towns are super wealthy landowners because their name is on every lot and house in the village. The reality: the villages own everything in common, and when government officials show up asking who owns what, the villages don't really know how to answer, so the government official then asks "ok well who's the leader?" And then getting that answer, just puts that name down for everything.
Edit: oh I see what you mean, right now, people are using cash to pay for e.g. the DJ. Yes, probably true because it's literally costing them money. My point there was that it's possible that an older tradition from a pre capitalist system that worked fine then is not compatible with how capitalism works. Many things aren't.
> My point there was that it's possible that an older tradition from a pre capitalist system that worked fine then is not compatible with how capitalism works. Many things aren't.
Oh, yes, agreed there. I can imagine that these communities were very insular in the past, so there wasn't really anything to own that wasn't what they could immediately see and touch around the village. Then again, there wouldn't be a need for this ritualistic spending back then, so the spending seems to be a direct reaction to capitalism arriving to these societies.
If she wouldn't have put down her foot, they would have sucked her dry ( our money) we set a budget and they got what they got... But I can easily see other people/ wifes not setting boundaries and spending a ton of money..
That was a very interesting read. I appreciate when anyone tries to dig into the actual why of culture instead of just leaving it at face value. I get the impression this is more of a working theory than factual on the sociological side, because I do think there's a lot of counter-arguments to be made about strong kinship networks that are otherwise wealthy and prosperous.
And there's a pretty obvious parallel in wealthy nations: the lavish wedding. There are many examples of otherwise modest to low income couples, even with support of their families, putting on weddings they can't really afford but they do it anyway because of social mores. Maybe there's a clear connection between those examples and strong kinship networks. Or maybe its back to peer pressure and keeping up with the joneses.
Basically my whole family have signed our bodies over to the local medical school. They make all the arrangements and pay for everything as soon as they're notified upon death. They'll normally give you the ashes upon cremation after a year or so, but personally I've given them permission to completely skeletonize me and keep the skeleton indefinitely.
This helps society by helping student doctors learn, and it removes all funeral hassles and expenses. We can still do more low-key memorial ceremonies without needing a body. I realize this path doesn't work for everybody, especially those with certain religious beliefs, but we all just love the idea.
This is what both my parents and myself did. When my mum was diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma, it was one less thing to worry about arranging and trying to find money for.
She went from diagnosis to death in two months so things were a bit disorienting and just getting a RESPECT form (aka DNR) completed was such a struggle as everyone I spoke to had no record of my previous conversation with the last person I spoke to.
When mum was admitted to the hospice, despite explaining the arrangements we’d made and showing them the paperwork, it was only by chance that one evening I happened to overhear a nurse mention that mum had ascites, which is one of the few things that disqualified her from being able to donate her body. I googled it and realised we would need to arrange and pay for her body to be collected, stored and cremated.
She died the next morning and luckily I was able to get that sorted about 2 hours earlier. I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that if you go through the process of arranging to donate your body to a teaching hospital (which you must do yourself ahead of time) don’t assume it’s on medical records or that anyone will advise you that the body isn’t suitable for donation for any reason. Like all NHS-related things in the UK, the systems are breaking or broken and so are the poor staff, so you need to advocate for whoever needs it and never assume what you said one day will be passed on to the next shift.
I'll just mention that when my mom was starting to deteriorate, my dad hired a healthcare advocate and set up legal authorities such that if he was incapacitated when mom needed medical decisions in hospice, or logistical details about funeral arrangements, the advocate could represent what mom and dad had discussed prior as their wishes.
Then, a year or so after my mom passed it became clear dad was heading that way, and he set up the same arrangements with the same advocate.
It was a great decision. The advocate shielded the family from a lot of unpleasant details, allowing us to focus on spending as much quality time with dad in his final weeks. In particular it was a huge benefit for my aunt, who's the oldest surviving part of that branch of our family, was very close to my father, and struggled through severe emotional turmoil in the situation. Without that advocate and dad's prior wishes being made very clear, she would have felt duty bound to try to run his cremation and remembrance personally in a way that would have been even more horrific for her.
So for anyone who is facing these situations on the horizon, I strongly suggest looking into something like this. Having a 3rd party that isn't the hospice staff, and that isn't a relative in emotional duress, was fantastic. The advocate dad chose previously was managing director of a care home, and switched to doing advocate work as a sort of soft retirement. So she knew in detail how all of that world works and was excellent at getting stuff done for dad.
That sounds like a very rewarding job. Sure, you have to deal with the grief that so many death-adjacent fields have to, but at least you get the satisfaction of really helping people through those terrible times.
And for folks that do want to bury the body, it can be done way cheaper than the funeral industrial complex would have you believe. Our church keeps a simple coffin on hand that the family can use at cost. And we have folks who will prepare the body and bring it to the church. The only part we don't usually do is dig the grave. Cemeteries usually include that in the cost of the plot.
The author traveled through Cameroon and documented, among other things, the realities of having a backlog of dead one must properly bury.
Turns out not everyone can afford putting their deceased relatives in a freezer - especially for extended periods of time, so sometimes the dead are stored in a separate storage area next to the home until the living gather the necessary funds.
In America we spend that money on weddings. Lots of young people wipe their savings on getting married, at one of the most critical times in life (just before starting a family). It often prevents them having kids or buying a home for years.
Ha, have you been to an indian wedding in India? Now that’s big big money. And the societal pressures to make it so are huge .. American weddings are so tame and sensible by comparison.
Far better to spend those $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !
> have you been to an indian wedding in India? Now that’s big big money
Are Indian families spending multiples of annual incomes on weddings? They're lavishly done. But the cost of labour, land and e.g. fresh flowers is also ridiculously cheaper in India than in the West.
> Far better to spend those $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !
Is it though? Can you elaborate why you think that?
To me, they seem to serve basically the same purpose. They are both, at the end of the day, a way for family & friends to get together and bond over a person/people.
You can always find disaster stories about couples who wipe out their savings and put themselves in a precarious financial situation for a wedding they can’t afford, but it’s actually super common.
Traditional weddings costs are paid in part or full by the parents. Many well off young people pay their own way. If neither is an option it’s also common to have a smaller or home-grown wedding.
If you know enough people we can all likely think of someone who overspent and regretted it, but I disagree that it’s the common cultural thing to do. It’s a topic where righteous people like to heap scorn on others for doing it, though.
It's still very irrational no matter who pays. The article is looking at a society-wide wealth here isn't it?
I mean a party? Thousands and thousands of dollars for just one day?
I did the irrational thing, paid a lot for my wedding and it was really special. My family is much closer to her family because of it. From me and my wife's rational self-interested perspective, it makes no sense: we would be in a better position financially had we not splurged a little for the wedding. Our house could be bigger. We could have more optimally allocated our capital.
However, the family bonds being strong outweighs all of that. When we zoom out a little bit and look at our extended family and friend group, it all makes sense. These are the people who will help raise our kids, take care of us when we are down on our luck, etc. The 50 people who attended can, because of our big expensive wedding, put faces to each others' names. It was a fun party for us, but it actually served a very important purpose. This value will not be registered in the GDP number.
I'm poking fun at the article. That first of all, we (the enlightened, modern, etc) spend an absolute metric fuckton ton of money on irrational meaningless shit, due to social pressure. I would point the author of the article to homeopathic medicine, which is a 10b market; just ten of these equals the GDP of Ghana. Do a ctrl-f for colonialism or imperialism or extraction and... yeah, sure. They must be poor because they do quirky things at funerals.
Yes, we spend a lot on weddings, but not as much (adjusted for income) as they do on funerals. In Ghana they spend 2.3x-9x the yearly median income[1] on a funeral. The median income in the US is $45,140[2], so if we were to spend the same amount relative to income on weddings as they do on funerals, that would mean our weddings would be $103k-$406k.
It's so funny you say that. Was literally just chatting to my wife the other day about how mediocre weddings are. You spend $20-$50k basically LARPing as landed British gentry, and end up having less fun than the average 21st, Christmas or New Year's. So much more stress in planning too.
My wife and I are not party people. We would never host a part with 100 friends and family for any reason other than our wedding.
It felt really special to see all my friends and family out there in the audience supporting my wife and I sharing our vows to each other. I was grinning like an idiot the whole ceremony because I was just so happy.
I had always loved going to my cousin's weddings. No one in my family is religious anymore (my uncle was a priest but left the priesthood, I was raised atheist), but we all do take marriage pretty seriously. I have 10 cousins and 4 sets of aunts and uncles, and all of them are still married to their first spouse. It felt very special to join that club. I was the second to last cousin to get married (I am also the second to youngest).
All my cousins had amazing weddings, too. They were all big parties that we had a lot of fun at. I felt like it was my turn to host one, and it felt magical. We got married at the downtown library, which is a special place for us. We love taking our kids there and showing them where we were married.
Having spent that money hasn't really changed my life in any significant way. I don't think anything would be different if I had an extra $60k. For the price of a nice car, we got a magical night that we will never forget, wonderful memories, and a fantastic way to celebrate our commitment to each other. It was a once in a lifetime thing. Way more valuable to me than a nice car.
I don't know. If you had 50 friends, reserved space at a decent restaurant, and got a DJ you could totally have a good time for what's been solidly under $10k even until recently in most of the country. Outfits + photographer + rings add, but there's obviously a lot of latitude to have a really fun time in that price bracket depending on what you like. And there are all kinds of alternatives. We have some friends who went to Italy with a wedding party of about 8 people (family and close friends) and had a great time. I don't think it was cheap, but it was probably below the low end of the $20k if some of the wedding party paid their own way and they had a really fun Italian vacation. We also have friends who just borrowed someone's house, got a pile of food delivered and had basically a game night wedding thing.
I know the kinds of weddings you speak of, and it’s sad, and hard to disagree.
Even more sad that for $20-$50k you /could/ have a super unique, awesome and even low-stress wedding (ok that last part depending on parents/relatives may be impossible), yet so many are the same songs (you know them all), same venues (estate, banquet hall, rooftop, etc), same food.
We do pretty well, although it is expensive living in LA.
We had a little over 100 people, our wedding was at the downtown library, and we spent about $60k. It didn't really hurt our ability to buy a house a few years later, an extra $60k would not have changed our budget at all.
I think people often spend too much on weddings, but even expensive weddings (IMO) are still in the same cost bracket as a relatively boring and reliable car. If buying a reliable car sets you back years... I view it more so as a sign that income levels are too low and people are trying to counter signal "poor stigma." (That said, weddings are also the kind of thing where extracting time from your kinship group can drastically lower costs. Rent a pavilion in a camp ground, have a bunch of people bring grills and some speakers and you can basically keep things pretty cost contained.) And of course upper class weddings are a whole different thing.
This seems very different that what the article describes.
Sure, some young people may spend more than they can really afford on their wedding, but this still seems like a personal choice - tons of people have cheap weddings (or gasp, elope). I don't think may people are cutting back on eating (when they already suffer from malnutrition) to have a big wedding like how the article describes funerals in Zimbabwe.
Plus, I think the relatively few cases in the US where young people do feel intense family pressure to overspend on a "big wedding" show similar dynamics and downsides to the "kinship societies" that the article is really about.
Same thing with engagement rings, it's just a stupid fake tradition created by DeBoers in the 1950s that costs an inordinate amount of money for nothing.
I really hope that lab grown diamonds puts that entire industry out of business.
Lab corundum is where it's at. Almost as hard as diamond (Mohs 9), but much less prone to cracking than diamond. It's available in tons of colors (most famous are blue and red -- sapphires and rubies). Lab-grown is so much better than natural that the way they identify natural is by looking for imperfections that lab versions don't have.
Oh, and diamonds burn while aluminum oxide does not.
There's no need to go broke when you can buy a superior product for less money.
I definitely think sapphire is the best gemstone for rings given the huge variety of colors and reasonable synthetic rough prices. My only gripe is that green shades that look nice are hard to find in synthetics.
I found a lot of the points being made against kinship networks are also easily made against traditional wealth-oriented cultures.
"The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it"
Seems like the exact monetary pressures someone from the west would feel, except it comes from bosses rather than family. Minimum wage needing to exist as a thing is a clear example of that.
The author is trying to generalize this narrative, but it still sounds pretty specific to Ghana and some other African societies. Chechnya and Dagestan are mentioned, but I struggle to remember any demonstrative wealth destruction practices there. Also what about other historic kinship societies (e.g. Scottish, Italian?)
> Also what about other historic kinship societies (e.g. Scottish, Italian?)
Low sample size but I know a few Sicilian families and there was a bit of intergenerational living, paying for family members to emigrate etc but it always seemed very focussed on working hard so that the next generation had it better.
Some were a bit showy with their wealth but most lived modestly - my Dad theorised that in rural Sicily early last century, showing your wealth would probably ear-mark you for a shake-down or some other targeted crime, so people learned to live modestly and keep their wealth quiet.
The article talks about the failure mode of kinship groups, but doesn't go into the fact that new migrants often enter into kinship networks that help them succeed. You see the same in religious communities as well - people pitching in not to leech off one another but to help everyone move ahead.
Maybe the problem is with Ghanaian values and not kinship itself.
I think mutual aid organizations and friendly societies of various kinds among American immigrants (at least historically) benefited from a strong selection effect: people willing to immigrate to a faraway country without a welfare system in pursuit of opportunity and wealth. That population is highly self-selected for work ethic, risk tolerance, and self-discipline. Those values probably stabilize social dynamics and minimize the wealth immolation and tall-poppy effects described in the article.
In other words, if everyone in a mutual aid society is a crab who crossed half the world and an entire ocean to escape the bucket, eventually said crabs stop acting like you'd expect crabs in a bucket to act, and their social dynamics are consequently less suffocating.
Very loosely related novel recommendation: "Ways of Dying" by South African author Zakes Mda was a revelation. I've since read a few other books by him and he's become one of my favorite novelists.
I'm your usual HN-brained copious scifi novel/science non-fic reader, typically.
I always wonder how much of the West's wealth(- holding capabilities) come from centralising and rationalising our superstitions through central authorities like the church.
People should look again at how we Muslims bury. Not only is it much "green" but also cheap and doesn't waste land forever. There is wisdom in simplicity.
It's the opposite of the article. Wrap the body in a cloth. Bury as fast as possible. Bury as cheap as possible. One headstone and one footstone. No buildings on it though the headstones recently have names.
Recently there's been more intricate graves and sometimes tombs, but time by time, people fall back to the original traditions. After all, the big caliphs who ruled empires were buried under two stones.
It’s interesting how this is framed as a “bad deal” (being apart of a kinship society) without taking time to breakdown the cost of being on your own in Ghanaian society, especially when healthcare, credit harm and other emergencies are broadly unaffordable in individualist, capitalist American society.
Lots of buzzwords in your comment, but pointless. This is a complete waste of money, and a burden on the living to ‘show off’ their status. The ancient egyptian kings at least had the resources, power and wealth to build their pyramids..
You're talking about funeral costs; the author generalizes _a_lot_ from funeral costs to "kinship societies are bad". That's the leap the comment you're replying to is discussing.
You got some strangely negative reactions, but I agree; the article has not accounted for the safety net effect of a kinship society. It’s a glass half empty view, and there is a glass half full view too. The article is also not considering the country’s economics or the government or geopolitcal history, which others here are pointing out. It’s an interesting thought, but seems premature (and a bit sad) to jump to the conclusion that tight bonds are the cause of poverty, when there are clearly more forces involved.
There's also this strange suggestion that it's somehow wrong of family to ask a wealthy family member for money - your parents especially sacrificed their bodies and some aspect of their lives to birth and raise you, and your entire family supports each other. To hoard wealth in light of that seems not only abhorrent, it also seems diseased, like a disorder of selfishness.
The factual material about funeral spending costs is very interesting, but when it gets into "Kinship societies are wealth-destroying societies" it seems rather… unsupported? That's a sweeping statement that actually requires understanding the whole picture, and the whole picture is not being presented. Is there reason to think the author truly has all the context to make these claims?
Korea used to have something similar to this phenomenon, although it wasn’t for the funeral. When the oldest man (probably the grandfather of a big family) has his 60th birthday, the entire family had to celebrate with basically throwing a days-long party. It was like a family duty for the rest of the family, and it was embedded into the culture so deeply so they wouldn’t simply think about the alternative of having a small one. Other elders in the local community would say “well done” only when the party was big enough. After the big celebration, the rest of the family would sit on a massive debt, which couldn’t be reimbursed with their earnings for a foreseeable future. The old man dies, and the family lives along with the agony of the debt. It used to be the case until Korea became an industrial country and a lot more people started having more than 60 yrs of life. My mom still talks about what it used to look like in those old days.
This is not a novel observation, eg Kapuscinski's "In the Shadow of the Sun" describes the same phenomenon: it's very difficult to get ahead because anything above bare subsistence is immediately siphoned off by your kin.
The flip side is that it's very difficult to fall too far behind as well. Your kin have an obligation to support you, too.
Fewer homeless, I bet.
It's viewing the situation through the lens of Anglo capitalist opinions.
I found the same thing when working in Cambodia; Khmer culture is very, very, family-oriented, the extended family is the main survival mechanism for Khmer people, and individual wishes are often subordinated to the family. This is their culture, Khmer people are happy with it, this is how they choose to live. The Anglo ex-pats (including me) don't understand it, find it oppressive and have a natural instinct to "liberate" Khmer people from this oppression. Took me quite a while of talking with Khmer people to realise that they look at the world very differently from me, and from that perspective this all works and is a source of joy and comfort for them. Obviously there are outliers and people who this doesn't work for, but that's also true of Anglo culture.
On a factual level the relationship between kinship societies and economic headwinds is fairly well documented [1] [2]. The mechanism is the same reason that communist/socialist societies often fail: when wealth belongs to everyone, nobody has either the incentive or the means to accumulate wealth, which prevents capital formation within the society [3].
The part that the article glosses over is that "Kinship societies destroy economic growth" is a Russell conjugate [4] of "economic growth destroys family formation". Kinship networks provide important intangible support to several important community functions, notably child-rearing. That's the whole "it takes a village to raise a child" aphorism. When you allow people to defect on their social obligations in the name of accumulating wealth, then it turns out they do, and the village suffers. It is exactly as the article said: "The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it: someone who no longer needs your help is also someone who might not help you." That's exactly what we've observed happening in modern industrialized economies, where people become increasingly atomized and those informal community organizations that create things like belonging and mutual aid (not to mention group childcare and socialization) die off as everyone chases the promotion that will let them afford ever-higher institutional childcare costs.
And this is why the fertility rate in every major industrialized country has cratered, usually right as it industrializes.
[1] https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/md/awi/forschung/paper_e.bulte...
[2] https://edepot.wur.nl/14918
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation
>Kinship societies are actively hostile to economic growth, because economic growth undermines the basis of kinship: that is why kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead. The funeral is a window into a system of wealth destruction that serves, above all else, to keep people poor
This reasoning is flawed. Consumer spending is not "wealth destruction" -- who makes the fantasy coffins? Who prints the banners? Local businesses!
Ghana is sitting at a 5.6% GDP growth rate; for reference developmental success India is at 6.5%. Ghana's GDP in 2000 was $5B, today it's $82.B. Its per-capita GDP has more than doubled in the same time period.
> Consumer spending is not "wealth destruction" -- who makes the fantasy coffins? Who prints the banners? Local businesses!
This is the parable of the broken window [1].
> Ghana is sitting at a 5.6% GDP growth rate
Ghana is a success story in large part due to having made a clear-eyed recovery after its 2015 IMF bailout.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Ghana's GDP per capita is around $2000. It's only a success story because the baseline is so low, and because most of its neighbors are doing even worse.
Additionally, this is pretty much the paradigmatic case of that criticism frequently heard on the left in any other context, that GDP is not the same as quality of life. Indeed in this case it's apparently measuring the quality of death.
> Consumer spending is not "wealth destruction" -- who makes the fantasy coffins? Who prints the banners? Local businesses!
If the local businesses were instead being hired to dig holes and fill them up again... oh wait, they literally are, except they're also instructed to make very elaborate artworks and put them in the holes before shoveling in the dirt. Anyway: Can you please examine the movement of real resources rather than pieces of paper? No society gets rich by making art which is immediately destroyed.
> Modernity is about not doing what your family says
The flip side is that rich and modern people feel lonely and sad that they don't have strong social bonds.
The flip side of the flip side is that poor people in traditional societies are often trapped in toxic interpersonal dynamics from which there's no escape, because they live in the same household.
Like, in Korea, "mother-in-law vs daughter-in-law relationship issues" used to be so common that there's a single word for that. Nowadays they're getting harder to witness, unless you're a fan of weekend k-dramas.
> flip side is that rich and modern people feel lonely and sad
The happiest countries in the world are also rich [1].
I'm not saying you can't fuck up being rich. But it's a lot harder to be fulfilled if you're poor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2025_re...
Lots of valid criticisms of the oft touted "happiness index."
Off the top of my head from something I read a while back: Finland is listed as one of the happiest countries, but also has a higher rate than normal of prescribed anti psychotics and anti depressants, and also has high rates of alcoholism and suicide. Something isn't lining up there.
My own anecdotal experience as well conflicts. When I travel through Scandinavia, people seem... Fine. Friends I have there say you're basically not allowed to talk to strangers, at all, everyone is meant to just quietly ignore each other. Meanwhile the deeper I go into Vietnam, even deep into where people still live on stilt houses made by hand tools, the happier and more sociable people are. My friends say the same of various countries in Africa.
If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Loneliness and aloneness are almost separate phenomenon. I've felt my loneliest in the middle of Manhattan and completely fulfilled when on a solo hike in the Grand Tetons.
I don’t actually think so. I think if you apply rigor to those results you find that they don’t stand up. The field of sociology applies rigor selectively. Few of its results actually hold up.
I don’t even think the loneliness epidemic is real. The science is really not that strong.
Thats what people on one side of the argument like to think, patting themselves on their back for their own decisions. I am old enough to have seen it many many times.
There is no simple win - each person is different, each family is different, where one thrives the other has absolutely miserable time imprisoned with no way out.
world is not black and white and neither are people, dont dumb it down like that since you miss what reality looks like.
Ok, so better to be poor and backward, eh ?
Hard to say. There are so many options that aren't just those two.
perhaps.
maybe. personally i would definitely not trade places
Speak for yourself.
That is more of a self inflicted wound than an intrinsic aspect of modern society.
I wish it was self inflicted. Instead, it seems to be an artifact of modern society. I posted “How to Be Alone?” exploring this issue somewhat:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47296547 690 points, 500+ comments.
I’m not trying to get pity, but it would be mistaken to say that I brought it on myself. My wife didn’t bring it on me either. We simply eroded over time. But when marital bonds erode, it turns out they take family bonds with them; or at least, her side of the family. My side isn’t much, so hers was my primary source of social interaction.
This is a self inflicted wound in the sense that I could have formed a lot of social bonds with people other than my wife. And I tried to, sometimes. But when you’re spending 20 years with one person, it’s hard to make time for anything else, especially if you want to do good work (in the researcher sense).
So it’s more of a “pick two: family, friends, work”. I went the family and work route. I don’t regret it, but it means that now all that’s left is work, which can be a hollow existence.
Luckily, modern society has a surplus of ways to help motivated people form social bonds. Once I get my car back, I’ll be going to the local therapy groups, one of which is wood crafting. Random hobbies like that with random people sounds fun.
The thing to avoid seems to be dating apps. Jumping from one relationship into another is universally known as a bad idea. I’m hoping that casting a wide net (going to groups, reading clubs, DnD, or other activities) will fill the void.
Honestly though, what helps the most is that I have a daughter. She’s almost 3. I’m very happy we had her, and just remembering that she’ll have a nice life helps me appreciate my own.
Modern society makes it easier than ever to isolate yourself. I spend my days sitting in a house alone, having Amazon drop off USB-C cables, with my biggest social interaction of the week being the door to door salesman (who, ironically, is trying to sell me a door) that’s coming by tomorrow. That’s the default state; you have to push back against it, and that’s hard. But it’s probably mistaken to say that those who go with the flow are suffering from self inflicted wounds. Societal flow used to be towards social groups (church being the most obvious example) instead of paths that end in loneliness.
Hello friend. I responded to your post and have thought about you since. Yet had you not referenced your post, I would not have made the connection.
It's too bad there's not a way to more easily recognize people on this site, a way to build more community.
> pick two: family, friends, work
That should be always supremely easy and never contain work, unless you are maybe working in medical care or education. Given education path normally leaves a lot of free time then just the former.
I would maybe add fourth - oneself, unless one is a proper exreovert. Requires least of the time, but its most important for long term mental health.
There's a happy medium between the "everyone in the family shares absolutely everything" that less individualistic societies have and the "everyone in the family is alone" that more individualistic societies tend to have.
The US, in particular, is on the far end of that spectrum, because of the cultural emphasis on work and self-reliance. The happy medium, in my opinion, is trading off some work for some friends. In many cases within US culture, at least, you might be trading off an amount of time that yields a marginal reward at work but a much larger reward in friendship, simply because that's how diminishing returns tend to work.
This article seems to establish that kinship leads to the failure of wage growth and ultimately wealth, people will hide their wages because people will ask for money. This seems like the issue rather is is that wealth accumulation in sub-saharan africa is limited to a small subset of population, I don't think this wealth tax by family members exists when you have a larger group of individuals making more money.
You can observe this in the US, and presumably in the rest of the world, when wealth is concentrated to individuals, your family will probably ask you for money. The difference is here, there is less income inequality and more people have the ability to make more money.
I do like the look into funeral culture, but I don't think this assumption that kinship and family-peity is the cause of the lack of economic mobilty.
The difference is that it's pretty acceptable for you to reject family requests for money, it doesn't make you a pariah and being a pariah doesn't carry the same consequences when non-family institutions govern society.
The article spends a lot of time belaboring this point: you don't have to do what your family asks you to do in developed countries. On the other hand, becoming outcast from your family in a kinship-dominated society means you have nowhere else to turn to which is enormous pressure.
in a kinship-dominated society means you have nowhere else to turn to which is enormous pressure.
Also enormous abuse.
Lots of people lament loss of family ties in western society.
But they completely ignore amount of abuse that comes with power of:
„you have no one else to turn to, stay with your family, we will beat you, rob you, but family is important”.
Corinne Hofmann is a Swiss woman who married a Kenyan Samburu warrior named Lketinga Leparmorijo and had a daughter. She opens a shop but they lose money because Lemalian gives too much credit to friends and neighbors, and because they have to pay bribes to the mini-chief. Lemalian argues that this is no problem because she has more money in Switzerland. The mini-chief demands that Carola hires his teenage nephew as a shop assistant. She has to accept this although she does not need him and he does not work hard. After some time, when he is just drinking beer and not working, she fires him. Later he returns and attacks her. A local judge rules that she has to pay two goats for firing him, but the boy's family has to pay her five goats to compensate for the attack.
The article's description of kinship sounds a bit like family based governance and taxation. Only with say a western government their enforcers will happily imprison anyone not giving what the government ("kin") says is owed, and those who resist being violently dragged jailed typically find a fate even worse.
The western version then of being a pariah for not paying up is violence rather than ostracization and shame. Of course until you get rich enough that you can corrupt the government itself.
> with say a western government their enforcers will happily imprison anyone not giving what the government ("kin") says is owed
Big difference between taxation and patronage is when the rules are known. You generally know ex ante what you should owe in taxes. With patronage, if you have a windfall, the rules adjust to require you give it away.
I think author's point is that wealth drives investment which drives economic growth. In the case of lavish funerals - warranted in kinship societies - the wealth is spent on relatively unproductive investments bearing high opportunity cost. The corollary and author's secondary point is the ineffective resource allocation e.g. through nepotism.
My main (oversimplified!) takeaway from the article is that kinship societies prioritize inherently local processes that inhibit global processes. For example, they prefer keeping internal cohesion through ritual celebration rather than maximizing economic upside through education and specialization. This makes sense - the latter requires a higher degree of trust and stability. Increasing the degree of trust and stability seems to be an evolutionary process. I found Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel [1] to give some amazing insights about this.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Stee...
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a famously awful book.
Anyway, another lens to look at kinship relationships through is as a resilience strategy to volatile conditions. Any given stress (drought, job losses, etc) are unlikely to affect everyone equally, so the network functions as a safety net under many conditions.
Venture capital applies a similar strategy in the other direction if you squint a bit. It's impossible to predict who will succeed a priori, so the capital is spread to many different bets simultaneously in the hope that the successes outweigh the failures over time. Many of the "rituals" in the VC ecosystem (ghost hiring, puffery, fad chasing, etc) aren't particularly useful for any individual company's success, but I don't think many people here on HN are going to argue it's not economically effective as a whole.
Ghana's GINI index is only a couple points higher than the US (43 vs 41), and the same as Mexico.
I don't think wealth inequality explains this at all. But what rigid social institutions of any kind tend do is inhibit mobility. Moreover, kinship groups like this tend to lock-in relative wealth by lineage--the wealthiest family of a kin group from 3 generations ago will be much more likely (relative to other cultures) to be the wealthiest family 3 generations from now. Greater mobility means productivity increases faster, which raises absolute wealth for everybody even if relative wealth disparities across the entire population remain constant.
> even if relative wealth disparities remain constant.
Relative wealth disparity increases as absolute wealth increases because below a minimum level of income people starve. IE you can’t make 1/10th the median wage in a subsistence economy long term you just die. But a homeless person can survive for decades in the US on ~500$ a month.
Does this effect have a name? I wonder how you'd adust for it in a modified GINI metric.
> IE you can’t make 1/10th the median wage in a subsistence economy long term you just die. But a homeless person can survive for decades in the US on ~500$ a month.
There are two things I'd like to know more about for this:
1. Is the homeless person doing their survival in an area with a markedly lower median wage than the median wage their income is being measured against? (i.e. is "1/10 the median wage" an illusion created by including foreign communities in the 'median wage'?)
2. Is the homeless person's low income measured by excluding their income from in-kind handouts ("someone kind bought me a sandwich") and foraging ("I found a pizza in the dumpster")?
I don't think social factors are not necessarily a nonfactor, more that this article claims that income equality within kinship groups is a forcing function for lack of economic growth. My claim is that the inequality that these countries face not just between each other within the nation but in our globalized economies, access to resources, capital and labor and thus the downstream effects of smaller markets, less need for labor will lead to less growth. I think you can have economic growth with kinship society if more people within the kinship have greater access to wealth growing, the issue here is that there's limited resources and the kinship society exists as an effect of less resources than the other-way around
> the wealthiest family of a kin group from 3 generations ago will be much more likely (relative to other cultures) to be the wealthiest family 3 generations from now.
I am not sure if this claim is true as well, wealth generally does stay within family lineages across cultures, generally people losing their wealth or even gaining it is an outlier. See any landed gentry in Europe, Asia
Actually; you can see this in America, as income continues to be more concentrated, and more unequal, economic productivity for an individual does go down as there's less opportunity to accrue wealth as before.
> I am not sure if this claim is true as well, wealth generally does stay within family lineages across cultures, generally people losing their wealth or even gaining it is an outlier. See any landed gentry in Europe, Asia
Your examples tend to prove the effect of kinship structures, which were much stronger historically across all cultures, especially outside NW Europe (where nuclear family dynamics go back millennia, which some people argue is not merely coincidental with the emergence of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution).
The relevant question isn't whether wealth stickiness exists, but the magnitude of the effect and how it changes.
Kinship groups can absolutely be useful and beneficial, but as a rigid social institution it can also take on a life of its own, as for any social institution. We can't have meaningful discussions about this stuff without understanding magnitudes and context, otherwise its too easy to cynically equivocate.
Strong extended kinship ties are associated with less economic prosperity all over the world, it just in Africa but Pakistan, the Middle East, etc.
There is a plausible argument that it’s causal. Europe had weaker kinship ties—for various reasons, including the Catholic church’s ban on cousin marriage—back in the middle ages, before Europe began pulling away from the rest of the world in terms of GDP per capita. Even within the U.S., communities with weak kinship ties (e.g. Northeastern Anglo-Protestants) are more economically successful than communities with stronger kinship ties and clan structures (e.g. Appalachians).
Arguably, more atomized societies with weak kinship ties foster the development of civil institutions and governments to compensate for the social structural functions that would otherwise be performed by kinship networks.
> There is a plausible argument that it’s causal. Europe had weaker kinship ties—for various reason
Explain China[1] and its steep ascent, blowing past all European countries, and soon - the USA.
1. Or India, to a lesser extent. There's a lot of recency bias when it comes to economic outcomes, as if we're at the end of history. I'm guessing at least one 19th century British industrialist/gentleman probably praised their Anglo-Saxon heritage and the Protestant (Anglican) faith as necessary ingredients to national wealth, as opposed to the fallen Catholic empires of Spain and Portugal, or the heathens in Africa, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle and far East.
> Explain China[1] and its steep ascent, blowing past all European countries, and soon - the USA
The communist party broke down traditional family structures, and replaced kinship ties with the state. To the point of massive intervention in family formation itself, through the one child policy.
It’s not about Anglo-Protestantism per se, but about a general progression towards atomized societies with weak family bonds. Multiple different cultural changes pushed in that same direction. Protestantism was one, but before that so was the Catholic Church: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/roman-catholi....
This is the most insightful comment in this thread. Unfortunately Oks decided to use a clickbait title that made people jump to conclusions.
I'm kind of astonished that you think this, there are lots of studies about intergenerational economic mobility in the USA compared to other places.
https://www.chicagofed.org/research/content-areas/mobility/i... for instance.
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/4/1179
Anecdotally, I can also attest to it. I know lots of "finally successful" folks who end up spending their wealth keeping their siblings and extended family afloat. There's no real safety net for them in the USA.
Sure, wealth accumulation is limited to a subset of the population there, but this is true everywhere. The reasoning error here is thinking in terms of absolute incomes across the group, rather than the relative incomes of the members.
Yes, people in the US make more money, on average, than the average Ghanaian, but the relative incomes of a family are just as disparate as those of Ghanaians. If someone in the US gets a better job, the whole family doesn't suddenly also get better jobs.
This is why the kinship system is so economically counterproductive: The collective expectation effectively levels everyone down; any individual who begins to accumulate wealth faces pressure to redistribute it across the group. Nobody can grow their fortune, because that requires both having some fortune initially and being able to make investments that compound it. If the kinship group makes sure your fortune can't increase, any compounding you manage to do doesn't matter, because the initial capital always stays small.
It seems this only matters in economic systems with compound interest, like capitalism.
In gift economies, all these distinctions are meaningless. The bounty of a funeral would be a direct representation of the deceased's popularity (likely established through their generosity) as well as their family's ability to convice people to e.g. spend time making s beautiful coffin, bring food, play music.
> economic systems with compound interest
You mean like reality? The power law exists. Runaway growth is natural. Or would you claim that planets and stars are secretly capitalists?
The economies mentioned in the article are capitalist economies.
Yes, the State economy is capitalist, but the family groups are clearly operating under some kind of Communism. The article itself mentions it - "nothing you own is actually yours, everything is owned by the family." Thus wealth accumulation not really being possible, a hallmark of a communistic economy.
This is my experience with extremely rural areas or tightly knit / kinship / indigenous cultures as well. They happen to live on territory within a given State that's inevitably capitalist because the entire world is, but take a closer look and you'll realize it's almost an entirely different country within the village. A local example to me: everyone assumes the tribal leaders of Taiwanese indigenous towns are super wealthy landowners because their name is on every lot and house in the village. The reality: the villages own everything in common, and when government officials show up asking who owns what, the villages don't really know how to answer, so the government official then asks "ok well who's the leader?" And then getting that answer, just puts that name down for everything.
Edit: oh I see what you mean, right now, people are using cash to pay for e.g. the DJ. Yes, probably true because it's literally costing them money. My point there was that it's possible that an older tradition from a pre capitalist system that worked fine then is not compatible with how capitalism works. Many things aren't.
> My point there was that it's possible that an older tradition from a pre capitalist system that worked fine then is not compatible with how capitalism works. Many things aren't.
Oh, yes, agreed there. I can imagine that these communities were very insular in the past, so there wasn't really anything to own that wasn't what they could immediately see and touch around the village. Then again, there wouldn't be a need for this ritualistic spending back then, so the spending seems to be a direct reaction to capitalism arriving to these societies.
Wife is from Africa, buried her dad and mom.
If she wouldn't have put down her foot, they would have sucked her dry ( our money) we set a budget and they got what they got... But I can easily see other people/ wifes not setting boundaries and spending a ton of money..
> If she wouldn't have put down her foot, they would have sucked her dry
Can you describe the escalation of asks?
That was a very interesting read. I appreciate when anyone tries to dig into the actual why of culture instead of just leaving it at face value. I get the impression this is more of a working theory than factual on the sociological side, because I do think there's a lot of counter-arguments to be made about strong kinship networks that are otherwise wealthy and prosperous.
And there's a pretty obvious parallel in wealthy nations: the lavish wedding. There are many examples of otherwise modest to low income couples, even with support of their families, putting on weddings they can't really afford but they do it anyway because of social mores. Maybe there's a clear connection between those examples and strong kinship networks. Or maybe its back to peer pressure and keeping up with the joneses.
Basically my whole family have signed our bodies over to the local medical school. They make all the arrangements and pay for everything as soon as they're notified upon death. They'll normally give you the ashes upon cremation after a year or so, but personally I've given them permission to completely skeletonize me and keep the skeleton indefinitely.
This helps society by helping student doctors learn, and it removes all funeral hassles and expenses. We can still do more low-key memorial ceremonies without needing a body. I realize this path doesn't work for everybody, especially those with certain religious beliefs, but we all just love the idea.
This is what both my parents and myself did. When my mum was diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma, it was one less thing to worry about arranging and trying to find money for.
She went from diagnosis to death in two months so things were a bit disorienting and just getting a RESPECT form (aka DNR) completed was such a struggle as everyone I spoke to had no record of my previous conversation with the last person I spoke to.
When mum was admitted to the hospice, despite explaining the arrangements we’d made and showing them the paperwork, it was only by chance that one evening I happened to overhear a nurse mention that mum had ascites, which is one of the few things that disqualified her from being able to donate her body. I googled it and realised we would need to arrange and pay for her body to be collected, stored and cremated.
She died the next morning and luckily I was able to get that sorted about 2 hours earlier. I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that if you go through the process of arranging to donate your body to a teaching hospital (which you must do yourself ahead of time) don’t assume it’s on medical records or that anyone will advise you that the body isn’t suitable for donation for any reason. Like all NHS-related things in the UK, the systems are breaking or broken and so are the poor staff, so you need to advocate for whoever needs it and never assume what you said one day will be passed on to the next shift.
I'll just mention that when my mom was starting to deteriorate, my dad hired a healthcare advocate and set up legal authorities such that if he was incapacitated when mom needed medical decisions in hospice, or logistical details about funeral arrangements, the advocate could represent what mom and dad had discussed prior as their wishes.
Then, a year or so after my mom passed it became clear dad was heading that way, and he set up the same arrangements with the same advocate.
It was a great decision. The advocate shielded the family from a lot of unpleasant details, allowing us to focus on spending as much quality time with dad in his final weeks. In particular it was a huge benefit for my aunt, who's the oldest surviving part of that branch of our family, was very close to my father, and struggled through severe emotional turmoil in the situation. Without that advocate and dad's prior wishes being made very clear, she would have felt duty bound to try to run his cremation and remembrance personally in a way that would have been even more horrific for her.
So for anyone who is facing these situations on the horizon, I strongly suggest looking into something like this. Having a 3rd party that isn't the hospice staff, and that isn't a relative in emotional duress, was fantastic. The advocate dad chose previously was managing director of a care home, and switched to doing advocate work as a sort of soft retirement. So she knew in detail how all of that world works and was excellent at getting stuff done for dad.
That sounds like a very rewarding job. Sure, you have to deal with the grief that so many death-adjacent fields have to, but at least you get the satisfaction of really helping people through those terrible times.
So sorry for your losses.
And for folks that do want to bury the body, it can be done way cheaper than the funeral industrial complex would have you believe. Our church keeps a simple coffin on hand that the family can use at cost. And we have folks who will prepare the body and bring it to the church. The only part we don't usually do is dig the grave. Cemeteries usually include that in the cost of the plot.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49198405
I was gonna post the same story. The “donate grandma to medical science” story only to find out she was used to test landmines is too wild
There's an interesting film focused on this topic:
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1499420/
The author traveled through Cameroon and documented, among other things, the realities of having a backlog of dead one must properly bury.
Turns out not everyone can afford putting their deceased relatives in a freezer - especially for extended periods of time, so sometimes the dead are stored in a separate storage area next to the home until the living gather the necessary funds.
> so sometimes the dead are stored in a separate storage area next to the home until the living gather the necessary funds
Isn't this an own goal when it comes to disease?
In America we spend that money on weddings. Lots of young people wipe their savings on getting married, at one of the most critical times in life (just before starting a family). It often prevents them having kids or buying a home for years.
Ha, have you been to an indian wedding in India? Now that’s big big money. And the societal pressures to make it so are huge .. American weddings are so tame and sensible by comparison.
Far better to spend those $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !
> have you been to an indian wedding in India? Now that’s big big money
Are Indian families spending multiples of annual incomes on weddings? They're lavishly done. But the cost of labour, land and e.g. fresh flowers is also ridiculously cheaper in India than in the West.
Per Wikipedia, the average cost of an Indian wedding is six times annual income.
> Far better to spend those $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !
Is it though? Can you elaborate why you think that?
To me, they seem to serve basically the same purpose. They are both, at the end of the day, a way for family & friends to get together and bond over a person/people.
You can always find disaster stories about couples who wipe out their savings and put themselves in a precarious financial situation for a wedding they can’t afford, but it’s actually super common.
Traditional weddings costs are paid in part or full by the parents. Many well off young people pay their own way. If neither is an option it’s also common to have a smaller or home-grown wedding.
If you know enough people we can all likely think of someone who overspent and regretted it, but I disagree that it’s the common cultural thing to do. It’s a topic where righteous people like to heap scorn on others for doing it, though.
It's still very irrational no matter who pays. The article is looking at a society-wide wealth here isn't it?
I mean a party? Thousands and thousands of dollars for just one day?
I did the irrational thing, paid a lot for my wedding and it was really special. My family is much closer to her family because of it. From me and my wife's rational self-interested perspective, it makes no sense: we would be in a better position financially had we not splurged a little for the wedding. Our house could be bigger. We could have more optimally allocated our capital.
However, the family bonds being strong outweighs all of that. When we zoom out a little bit and look at our extended family and friend group, it all makes sense. These are the people who will help raise our kids, take care of us when we are down on our luck, etc. The 50 people who attended can, because of our big expensive wedding, put faces to each others' names. It was a fun party for us, but it actually served a very important purpose. This value will not be registered in the GDP number.
I'm poking fun at the article. That first of all, we (the enlightened, modern, etc) spend an absolute metric fuckton ton of money on irrational meaningless shit, due to social pressure. I would point the author of the article to homeopathic medicine, which is a 10b market; just ten of these equals the GDP of Ghana. Do a ctrl-f for colonialism or imperialism or extraction and... yeah, sure. They must be poor because they do quirky things at funerals.
Yes, we spend a lot on weddings, but not as much (adjusted for income) as they do on funerals. In Ghana they spend 2.3x-9x the yearly median income[1] on a funeral. The median income in the US is $45,140[2], so if we were to spend the same amount relative to income on weddings as they do on funerals, that would mean our weddings would be $103k-$406k.
[1] https://remotepeople.com/countries/ghana/average-salary/
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
I am so glad we had a big wedding. It was so much fun, and all my friends and family had a blast.
It's so funny you say that. Was literally just chatting to my wife the other day about how mediocre weddings are. You spend $20-$50k basically LARPing as landed British gentry, and end up having less fun than the average 21st, Christmas or New Year's. So much more stress in planning too.
My wife and I are not party people. We would never host a part with 100 friends and family for any reason other than our wedding.
It felt really special to see all my friends and family out there in the audience supporting my wife and I sharing our vows to each other. I was grinning like an idiot the whole ceremony because I was just so happy.
I had always loved going to my cousin's weddings. No one in my family is religious anymore (my uncle was a priest but left the priesthood, I was raised atheist), but we all do take marriage pretty seriously. I have 10 cousins and 4 sets of aunts and uncles, and all of them are still married to their first spouse. It felt very special to join that club. I was the second to last cousin to get married (I am also the second to youngest).
All my cousins had amazing weddings, too. They were all big parties that we had a lot of fun at. I felt like it was my turn to host one, and it felt magical. We got married at the downtown library, which is a special place for us. We love taking our kids there and showing them where we were married.
Having spent that money hasn't really changed my life in any significant way. I don't think anything would be different if I had an extra $60k. For the price of a nice car, we got a magical night that we will never forget, wonderful memories, and a fantastic way to celebrate our commitment to each other. It was a once in a lifetime thing. Way more valuable to me than a nice car.
I don't know. If you had 50 friends, reserved space at a decent restaurant, and got a DJ you could totally have a good time for what's been solidly under $10k even until recently in most of the country. Outfits + photographer + rings add, but there's obviously a lot of latitude to have a really fun time in that price bracket depending on what you like. And there are all kinds of alternatives. We have some friends who went to Italy with a wedding party of about 8 people (family and close friends) and had a great time. I don't think it was cheap, but it was probably below the low end of the $20k if some of the wedding party paid their own way and they had a really fun Italian vacation. We also have friends who just borrowed someone's house, got a pile of food delivered and had basically a game night wedding thing.
I know the kinds of weddings you speak of, and it’s sad, and hard to disagree.
Even more sad that for $20-$50k you /could/ have a super unique, awesome and even low-stress wedding (ok that last part depending on parents/relatives may be impossible), yet so many are the same songs (you know them all), same venues (estate, banquet hall, rooftop, etc), same food.
Are you otherwise well off? How do you define "big?"
We do pretty well, although it is expensive living in LA.
We had a little over 100 people, our wedding was at the downtown library, and we spent about $60k. It didn't really hurt our ability to buy a house a few years later, an extra $60k would not have changed our budget at all.
The good thing is you can have a big wedding without going into debt (assuming you’re rich or don’t mind public parks)
I think people often spend too much on weddings, but even expensive weddings (IMO) are still in the same cost bracket as a relatively boring and reliable car. If buying a reliable car sets you back years... I view it more so as a sign that income levels are too low and people are trying to counter signal "poor stigma." (That said, weddings are also the kind of thing where extracting time from your kinship group can drastically lower costs. Rent a pavilion in a camp ground, have a bunch of people bring grills and some speakers and you can basically keep things pretty cost contained.) And of course upper class weddings are a whole different thing.
a couple can have a really big wedding for a really decent price if they plan everything themselves / with family
if they go through a planner, the 'coordination' eats most of the budget, almost entirely so if 'their people' get involved with setup / teardown
My wife and I eloped at the city hall. Our wedding was $0.
This seems very different that what the article describes.
Sure, some young people may spend more than they can really afford on their wedding, but this still seems like a personal choice - tons of people have cheap weddings (or gasp, elope). I don't think may people are cutting back on eating (when they already suffer from malnutrition) to have a big wedding like how the article describes funerals in Zimbabwe.
Plus, I think the relatively few cases in the US where young people do feel intense family pressure to overspend on a "big wedding" show similar dynamics and downsides to the "kinship societies" that the article is really about.
Same thing with engagement rings, it's just a stupid fake tradition created by DeBoers in the 1950s that costs an inordinate amount of money for nothing.
I really hope that lab grown diamonds puts that entire industry out of business.
Lab corundum is where it's at. Almost as hard as diamond (Mohs 9), but much less prone to cracking than diamond. It's available in tons of colors (most famous are blue and red -- sapphires and rubies). Lab-grown is so much better than natural that the way they identify natural is by looking for imperfections that lab versions don't have.
Oh, and diamonds burn while aluminum oxide does not.
There's no need to go broke when you can buy a superior product for less money.
I definitely think sapphire is the best gemstone for rings given the huge variety of colors and reasonable synthetic rough prices. My only gripe is that green shades that look nice are hard to find in synthetics.
I found a lot of the points being made against kinship networks are also easily made against traditional wealth-oriented cultures.
"The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it"
Seems like the exact monetary pressures someone from the west would feel, except it comes from bosses rather than family. Minimum wage needing to exist as a thing is a clear example of that.
The author is trying to generalize this narrative, but it still sounds pretty specific to Ghana and some other African societies. Chechnya and Dagestan are mentioned, but I struggle to remember any demonstrative wealth destruction practices there. Also what about other historic kinship societies (e.g. Scottish, Italian?)
> Also what about other historic kinship societies (e.g. Scottish, Italian?)
Low sample size but I know a few Sicilian families and there was a bit of intergenerational living, paying for family members to emigrate etc but it always seemed very focussed on working hard so that the next generation had it better.
Some were a bit showy with their wealth but most lived modestly - my Dad theorised that in rural Sicily early last century, showing your wealth would probably ear-mark you for a shake-down or some other targeted crime, so people learned to live modestly and keep their wealth quiet.
The article talks about the failure mode of kinship groups, but doesn't go into the fact that new migrants often enter into kinship networks that help them succeed. You see the same in religious communities as well - people pitching in not to leech off one another but to help everyone move ahead.
Maybe the problem is with Ghanaian values and not kinship itself.
I think mutual aid organizations and friendly societies of various kinds among American immigrants (at least historically) benefited from a strong selection effect: people willing to immigrate to a faraway country without a welfare system in pursuit of opportunity and wealth. That population is highly self-selected for work ethic, risk tolerance, and self-discipline. Those values probably stabilize social dynamics and minimize the wealth immolation and tall-poppy effects described in the article.
In other words, if everyone in a mutual aid society is a crab who crossed half the world and an entire ocean to escape the bucket, eventually said crabs stop acting like you'd expect crabs in a bucket to act, and their social dynamics are consequently less suffocating.
Very loosely related novel recommendation: "Ways of Dying" by South African author Zakes Mda was a revelation. I've since read a few other books by him and he's become one of my favorite novelists.
I'm your usual HN-brained copious scifi novel/science non-fic reader, typically.
I always wonder how much of the West's wealth(- holding capabilities) come from centralising and rationalising our superstitions through central authorities like the church.
My mom's funeral was ~23k in Chicago, US.
As a reference to how much that is - she made minimum wage her whole life (<44k).
It's obscene how much money there is in death.
Reminds me of that article from a few days ago about Chinese people buying apartments to store cremated ashes due to high cemetery costs: https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/arti...
Interesting - I knew about the fancy coffins (I'd seen pictures of them years ago) but had no idea about the rest of it.
People should look again at how we Muslims bury. Not only is it much "green" but also cheap and doesn't waste land forever. There is wisdom in simplicity.
It's the opposite of the article. Wrap the body in a cloth. Bury as fast as possible. Bury as cheap as possible. One headstone and one footstone. No buildings on it though the headstones recently have names.
Recently there's been more intricate graves and sometimes tombs, but time by time, people fall back to the original traditions. After all, the big caliphs who ruled empires were buried under two stones.
Muslims are also obliged to attend funerals - that goes double in Punjab for someone in your biradari.
As westerners we must look at this as a weapon that's being imported into our countries.
when I'm dead just throw me in the trash
the western mind cannot comprehend kinship...
Meanwhile I want to be tossed into a hole bare naked with a tree planted on top of me.
It’s interesting how this is framed as a “bad deal” (being apart of a kinship society) without taking time to breakdown the cost of being on your own in Ghanaian society, especially when healthcare, credit harm and other emergencies are broadly unaffordable in individualist, capitalist American society.
Lots of buzzwords in your comment, but pointless. This is a complete waste of money, and a burden on the living to ‘show off’ their status. The ancient egyptian kings at least had the resources, power and wealth to build their pyramids..
You're talking about funeral costs; the author generalizes _a_lot_ from funeral costs to "kinship societies are bad". That's the leap the comment you're replying to is discussing.
There are definite problems with the American system, but what is considered unaffordable healthcare there is lavish compared to much of the world.
You got some strangely negative reactions, but I agree; the article has not accounted for the safety net effect of a kinship society. It’s a glass half empty view, and there is a glass half full view too. The article is also not considering the country’s economics or the government or geopolitcal history, which others here are pointing out. It’s an interesting thought, but seems premature (and a bit sad) to jump to the conclusion that tight bonds are the cause of poverty, when there are clearly more forces involved.
Every kinship society is dramatically worse off than non-kinship societies across the whole world by a factor of ten.
Indeed, in fact so many Americans go to Ghana because it’s much nicer to live with the healthcare you get there.
The USA system is hardly the only alternative.
There's also this strange suggestion that it's somehow wrong of family to ask a wealthy family member for money - your parents especially sacrificed their bodies and some aspect of their lives to birth and raise you, and your entire family supports each other. To hoard wealth in light of that seems not only abhorrent, it also seems diseased, like a disorder of selfishness.
No.
Sounds like failed priorities, spending that much on dead people, rather than the living.
Call it a membership fee to an institution that actually cares about you and everyone you care about for life.
Over here we have extractive taxation