> Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms – what archaeologists call culture – were fundamentally integrated into technological solutions in this part of Peru in ancient times. Isolating and removing the tools from that knowledge made them less effective.
Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms may have helped indigenous people perpetuate the solutions/technologies. Studying and understanding those may help people - today - to more quickly understand those solutions. But it's not like a thorough understand ing and application of these technologies - today - require us to "maintain technology and culture coupling" as this _archeologist professor_ implies.
The Spanish may have made wrong assumptions at first and failed to replicate the solution, but if we still see it being used today, that's because the colonist eventually learned - without perpetuating the culture (not to the same extend as the indigenous)
Exactly - just because they used culture, or religion, to underpin that stuff - doesn’t mean we need to. Doesn’t mean we need to use the same culture, or even the same religion, for that matter. “This is what works, and this is why it works, and this is the benefit, and this is why it’s worthwhile” can be enough, with a minimum of pretense.
Permaculture design was developed out of systematically studying indigenous methods from around the world, and one of the insights is that how humans inhabit the land — the culture — matters a lot. If something is not aligned to human interests and norms, they won’t do it.
It goes with what Christopher Alexander understood about living architecture. How people use it matters. The whole point of pattern languages was the creation of a grammar where all possible ways in which patterns come together develop a valid, architecturally cohesive design. This allows the inhabitants themselves to make changes as their life and circumstances change, and as long as they follow the grammar, it will come out as a cohesive, functional design. Alexander also systematically studied indigenous architecture and went in with a background in mathematics. There is a reason his work influenced people working with software architecture and human-computing interactive design (but our computer systems and products does not realize the full potential of Alexander’s ideas).
There is a kind of bias at play, where we think the culture itself is rigid, and becomes out of date, and therefore, impedes progress. It does not have to be that way, and often time, the culture itself encodes ideas that are crucial. Furthermore, cultural practices can be understood or designed such that it is flexible and versatile — similar to Peru’s pre-Hispanic system of canals. If anything, it’s the bias of our modern worldview that tries to fix culture into the rigid structures just as it tries to create rigid solutions.
> if something is not aligned to human interests and norms, they won’t do it.
I won't litigate strongly against this statement because its obvious this matters, but human interests and norms are not immutable and the mechanism to change it definitely involve doing things (at some scale) that can be seen as abnormal or against (some) human interests. This tension and how it's resolved is the evolutionary pressure.
> where we think the culture itself is rigid
Well, the article cites the example of the Spanish failing for decades to irrigate the land because they dismissed the existing culture. Seems like the author has a rigid view of culture, because it seems clear to me that the syncretic culture post-conquest (Spanish ruled) was one radically different to indigenous or european ones.
Working at the scale of product design and user experience, it is easy to see what a user is doing as against their own personal interest. What I've found is that there is usually some kind of motivation for some things to be done. It might not be strictly rational, but more often than not, there is some kind of narrative or view from which that particular action, belief, or rational makes sense. They are often unexamined.
So I probably shouldn't have said "aligned to human interest", because the scope of that interest is different among individuals (for different aspect of their life). That scope is dynamic. It could be self-interested, or interest of the immediate family or community they belong to. Thank you for bringing that up.
As far as the rigidity -- I appreciate your view and comment on this. I admit too. It may be obvious to you that the post-conquest syncretic culture is different, but it was a blind spot for me. I didn't even think about that. I say all of this to say that the lens (view) in which we see all of this isn't itself always seen by the person looking through it. In my case, I know about the idea and I can still miss it.
However, I have learned tbat many arguments that talk past each other happen because the view from which people argue from are not always called out or clearly defined. There are things that can be dismissed simply because it doesn't fit the view.
Re-reading your original comment -- perhaps it's better stated that, while you don't have to couple the original culture and technology, for something to be practiced now, those technologies need to be coupled with the current-day culture.
I've been saying for a while that "Religion is a social technology". Thou Shalt Not Kill is not as universal a moral as you'd like to believe, and the other commandments are also good life advice. Even "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" serves an important purpose in keeping everyone on the same page.
Nearly every culture has a tradition of parables; Tales that reveal important truths by metaphor. Whether they be about how to interact with others, how to motivate and treat yourself, or of outside dangers.
Religion serves an important teaching purpose. Most have converged a lot; There's a lot of truths that are universal. Still, they're not all created equal. You probably shouldn't hate someone just because of their religion... Unless they're part of a death cult.
Yet pre Christian societies in Europe were arguably significantly more brutal. Establishing at least some basic principals of universal equality was a big deal (something modern atheists inherited directly from Christianity)
e.g. even amongst the civilized Greeks and and Romans foreigners who had no legal ties to their city states (some form of citizenship or diplomatic treaties with their home city) were basically treated as subhuman and could be enslaved and murdered with little to no repercussions.
Universalist religions extended that to vast geographic areas and established some basic shared principles and trust between strangers e.g. in the middle ages somebody from Scandinavia could travel to Rome on their own with relatively (of course still significant) little risk of being robbed, enslaved or murdered while being able to rely on hospitality from complete strangers/foreigners during his trip.
Of course the Romans already had something similar by the 100s AD (non citizens and slaves were of course excluded) but political systems are much more fragile than religions.
We ran the experiment the ussr and china where thoroughly atheistified and decultured. And the results are in. Both societies are thoroughly amoral and horrifying. There are murderous religions, but christianity got tamed pretty well.And i say that and i hate the jesuszombies with a passion.
“Culture is just the way things are done around here”
Peer review is culture. Work place legislation is culture.
The article argues that trying to extract technology and reapply it, without the culture, is a fools errand.
It’s trivially true: you can’t just teach some people to code and expect them release an app that can scale to millions of users. It requires culture to function and deliver.
We need to understand the culture required to deliver the technology, not just the technology itself.
I for one would be very interested to hear about how different types of labour organisation were required to deliver their water.
problem of today is not having enough knowledge, books, ... for storing that stuff or for generating more appropriate stuff to work with modern knowledge they did not had, but problem is not having workforce big enough to do this stuff AND live in current economic system on top of physical/planetwide system.
there is just too may people and only two things can solve that problem - A) what stalin, hitler, did [ graph in GIF https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH_C_MORTACRACIES.GIF ] B) culture of not having 4 children and having need to live energy expensive life.
after hitler in west, reforms were made.
after lenin in east, stalinist came.
so without having everybody on board choosing B)... what is the answer? and you can not be peruan-style farmer when you have terrorists pumping oil from ground , building tanks, drones, paying people to burn buildings, cars, writing nonsense "red-pilling" people ...
USA was lucky not having wars, and not having war in USA was 99.999% because of geography - no land bridge. and 0.001% of "tyrrany" of state not allowing mass murder in rest of the world (yes redpill-ing oil here). but culture is changing, state no longer cares about that 0.001% (or atleast seem so ).
we do not care about transporting muck into our fields so we do not need to manufacture fertilizers. so yeah culture is not important but it is. he means culture as a "we do care about sitting next to your field and thinking about it [but that means not spending time programming healthcare system systems] and we do care about earth" [even without hippie drugs]
>While they may be identical in form, a Spanish canal isn’t a Moche canal.
>Spanish canals operated in a temperate climate and were managed by individual farmers who could maintain or increase their water flow. The Moche and Chimu canal was tied to a complex labor system that synchronized cleaning and maintenance and prioritized the efficient use of water. What’s more, Moche canals functioned in tandem with floodwater diversion canals, which activated during El Niño events to create niches of agricultural productivity amid disasters.
The second paragraph belies the previous: Spanish canals obviously were not "identical in form" when you can point out so many differences.
But it would also be pretty unreasonable to equate the early Spanish colonists, who were a few pirates and scoundrels that used iron and horses to conquer and control an empire where they were outnumbered by a thousand to one, to the modern Peruvians. Many lessons have been learned since then and modern Peru's political problems pale in comparison to the brutality of the sixteenth century.
The more likely reason that the situation is different today is just that Peru's population density (34 million in the country) and agricultural production vastly exceeds anything that existed under the Inca (maximum about 12 million across an empire that included parts of modern Ecuador and Bolivia). The Peruvians themselves are no stranger to attempting to copy the pre-colonial infrastructure practices, with mixed results. Of course if you grow less, you can better avoid running out of water. But this is no solace.
The inca aqueduct network is seriously impressive even in the current age. Some of it almost a thousand years old and still transporting spring water miles with no pumps, without a civilization to maintain it.
IDK if it was inka but I was in a town called Ollataytombo or something like that for a week and they had this adorable little aqueduct that ran straight through town and people washed their clothes and whatnot in it. Loved how a lot of those mountain towns had them.
If there was a genius ruler, it was Pachacuti, seriously, dude was the Caesar of South America, extremely underrated in how he managed the Incan Empire and all of the infrastructure that was built in his reign.
He also directed the creation of the road system in the empire... it would have been interesting to see how he instead of his descendants would have dealt with the Spanish had they arrived when he was alive, I think that the outcome might have been different, at least for the initial wave of Spanish
Modern concrete could last as long ad Roman concrete, if not for the fact that we use rebar which inevitability corrodes and is the limiting factor in how long those structures can last. But that same rebar allows us to create structures that the Romans never could have. Concrete structures with huge spans and thin walls.
It's not that we don't know how to build things which last long. Rather, we choose not to because building that way has tradeoffs we usually don't want to make. This is also the reason we make things out of concrete and rarely out of meticulously stacked rocks.
Part of the shorter lifespan is that our cities grow much faster. Why build infrastructure that last 200 years if it needs to be ripped up in 50 due to no longer meeting population demands?
When they transported 100% of the output of a spring there’s no need to update the infrared as a city grows there was no way to go past 100%. Dams have the same kind of limits and are regularly designed for 150+ year lifetimes. The Hoover Dam is just about to turn 90 and it’s likely to last another 100 years.
Quite a lot of the built environment is designed for 100+ year lifespans. When it isn’t there’s often very good reasons. It’s kind of amazing we get road bridges to last as long as they do when you consider the physical and chemical assault they’re constantly under all while trying to minimize weight and cost.
Building a bridge that spans a wide road or river is extremely expensive without using iron or steel. If you do, that limits the lifespan because they corrode.
We never forgot how to build stone bridges, we stopped doing it most of the time because nobody wants to pay for it.
Iron bridges can easily last 100+ years with maintenance, faster replacement is generally cheaper which is why you see exposed metal on so many highway bridges.
Traffic on traditional stone bridge designs would quickly destroy them.
This is true. I was thinking of things like roads, water mains, sewer pipes, and even homes.
Yeah a house that lasts 200 years sounds good in principle, until you think about the kind of material and energy efficiency advances we’ve had in just the last 25.
There was a lot of insistence that the indigenous method was better, but no actual evidence that it was, nor even arguments as to why it would be (besides some vague allusions to it being “more flexible”).
A lot of these noble savage narratives emerge from Latin American studies (history, archaeology, literature, etc.), particularly among Mexican and American-educated academics. There is truth to the idea that the complexity of indigenous systems is unappreciated by the general public, but there’s always this underlying fetishization of a pseudo-magical indigenous “way of knowing” contrasted with the (historically far-better performing) European scientific method. Indigenous cultures are redeemed from European military conquests by insisting that the European way of knowing is myopic and selfish (being focused on profit over sustainability, the individual over the community, etc.) in contrast to the indigenous way of knowing, which is holistic and communitarian.
The author does have publications related to these irrigation systems, though, so maybe she has a valid point to make and the article just didn’t land for me.
If you study this stuff in the americas it’s depressing as the Spanish in particular slaughtered people and culture so completely and unimpeded for so long. The evil and barbarism of this colonial episode is difficult to fathom. The 20th century horror show of slaughter ran in relatively short episodes… this imperial era ran for hundreds of years.
Because you’re left with archeological evidence, whose interpretation is always very conservative, and limited oral tradition, it’s easy to veer into legend, because honestly that’s that who have to work with.
The disease aspects are inseparable from colonialism. Here's a quote from a recent survey on the matter [0] that describes the current understanding much better than I would:
The contours of Indigenous depopulation were shaped not only by disease but also by complex colonial factors including violence, forced labor, exorbitant taxation, malnutrition, and dislocation. Archaeology has shown that Native populations were not destined to be decimated but were made vulnerable through the policies, choices, and behaviors of colonists.
Diseases imo are empathized because they contribute to the body count and have an “act of god” nature to them. It’s an easier story than to describe a type of industrial genocide.
Read about the Mit'a system that was perverted by the colonial government to essentially improve the return on assets of the colony versus slaves or other means of cheap labor. It broke down the society of the native population completely and made it impossible for them to respond or react to disasters.
but then why romanticise what was destroyed ? Why not go at the world with a realistic view, which is that the "new world" was exactly the same as the old with dominant landempires holding colonies and tributories, aristocrats holding slaves, that where the landbound spaniards to their neighbors. Just because they have been genocided into a blank slate and you rightfully despise the acts of the genociders, does not mean you get to paint a utopia on the disfigured corpse. The hideaways of chaco canyon speak of slavers expeditions.
I didn’t. Why do you feel compelled to engage in “both sides” fallacy?
The Spanish Empire killed about 55M people or 90% of the indigenous population in a hundred years. That’s a scale of slaughter and suffering unprecedented even by the murderous ways of modern society, greater than even the Roman slaughter in Gaul.
Why is it so difficult for you to imagine that perhaps some of those 50 million people perhaps knew something? We’ll never know for sure, as everyone was killed and most aspects of their societies were destroyed.
As bad as the Spaniards were, the Aztec's neighbors despised the Aztecs and their brutality so much that they willingly and gladly allied with the first viable challenger to their rule.
I imagine this is just a symptom of infallible argument/humanities departments rewarding group think narratives (colonialism = definionally ultimate evil) with grant money. Doesn't take long for academics to understand the game.
Same thing with climate change, i've come across a pile of random definitely-not-climate-science papers (macre econ development divergence in hipanola, property rights in subsaharan africa, unrelated culutral anthropoly etc) that allude to climate change as the key driver for the phenomenon observed. Clearly NSF and NIH wanted a very certain set of content published.
> Same thing with climate change, i've come across a pile of random definitely-not-climate-science papers
The author describes herself in these terms:
> While I’m an archaeologist, I consider my research to be directed at the modern-day climate crisis. I investigate how resilient farming systems emerge and adapt to climate change and natural disasters. My fieldwork takes place on the north coast of Peru, where I study ancient irrigation in arid farming zones.
She doesn’t have any other social media profile so I don’t want to be overly cynical about her motives. Anyway, I think the climate angle is potentially huge in a lot of these fields.
There has been a trend in academia in the last few decades to focus on holistic analysis. This has led to a lot of academics trying to tie their research to disparate issues for both grant money and social status, but I also suspect that a lot of it is born of a genuine to come up with a grand unified theory of all the world’s problems. You see it with figures like Aldous Huxley around the mid-20th century (Huxley’s conclusion in his final novel, Island, is that “Nothing short of everything will do,”). The new wave that seems to have started in the 2010s has taken on a considerably more political bent (“Everything is political,” “Climate change is a product of white supremacy,” intersectional feminism, etc.).
These theories aren’t necessarily “wrong,” but the scholarship they produce is so bad that they are hard to take seriously.
Modern is tough because it isn’t hundreds of years ago.
Around me, The High Bridge between Bronx and Manhattan was built pre Civil War and abandoned for decades and still standing (and now is use again). The Hell Gate Bridge was built by the NY Central Railroad and will probably outlast the US.
Lots of 19th century infrastructure will be around for centuries, if you look at the the path of the Erie and Lackawanna railroad routes, many bridges and other infrastructure will be standing hundreds of years from now. Lots of interstate infrastructure will function for hundreds of years in rural areas with low traffic, well beyond their engineered lifespan.
Stone is the most durable material and structures are overbuilt. Steel is much cheaper but requires maintenance.
It seems like that's an impossibility, since you would need to find something in the current era that has been abandoned, rather than decommissioned...
There are a few examples that might fit, some earthworks, (tunnels, breakwaters, dams) and navigation markers come to mind (costal, but we also put retro reflectors on the moon).
Yeah, I was thinking about Vauban's fortifications, but if any of those had been abandoned, it's specifically because they would have been mostly useless after WW1 (= non-functional).
Hmm, any Vauban-like fortifications in Ukraine that would have suddenly found a new use since 2014 ?
> Can you point to an engineering feat in modern times which is still functional after hundreds of years of neglect?
Why would anyone build something only to neglect it? If one of the requirements was "it shall work for 500 years and never be maintained", then I'm sure you could get plenty of things designed and built for that requirement. It's just that it's a lot more expensive and not particularly useful, so nobody bothers.
> the lack of respect in your position is certain.
Pointing out there are other possibilities isn't a lack of respect. If you believe A or B could have happened, you see someone say B happened, it is fair to say that A might have happened as well, that doesn't mean you believe B couldn't have happened.
> Can you point to an engineering feat in modern times which is still functional after hundreds of years of neglect?
Off the top of my head:
1. Various aqueduct systems constructed by the Roman Empire are still in use today.
2. Persian qalats.
3. The Grand Canal in China.
4. Roman Roads
5. Hawaiian aquaculture systems
6. Aboriginal Australian fish traps
Monumental architecture (e.g. the Pyramids) would make the list substantially longer.
> Even if academia is swinging to a "too respectful" position
The issue isn’t that they are attributing accomplishments to these civilizations, but instead that they are attributing these accomplishments to a way of knowing that is purportedly superior to that of the Europeans, which is just farcical when you consider that every modern technology has either been invented or scaled based on European models of thinking (e.g. the scientific method, mass production, free market capitalism, etc.)
Like I said, this is mostly just a product of Mexican and American humanities departments being populated by people with an axe to grind; there aren’t any STEM graduates in South America concerned with the mystical knowledge that their ancestors are purported to have possessed.
I am not sure of their operational status today, but in Medieval Western Europe, it was Carmelite communities who built aqueducts; even as they struggled to reform themselves during the Counterreformation, religious communities were undertaking large-scale engineering projects, because they controlled enough labor workforce, as well as technology and supply chains, to make that happen.
I would be unsurprised if the Carmelite Orders likewise invested significant maintenance in the old Roman construction, and learned from it as well.
Hundreds of years, whether of neglect or not, means that it wasn't "in modern times". And, in modern times, hundreds of years of neglect is hard to come by. Either it's maintained, or it's torn down, because we haven't had civilization-ending catastrophies in modern times. So I would not expect to be able to show you many examples, because the pool of candidates is so small.
I think that most people that are "scientific" are unable (because of our education) to _try_ to think about the validity of this way of _understanding_.
I like to think that societies in Latin America (and, importantly, all around the world) survived thousands of years not because of luck, but because the cultures (language, traditions) they developed had ingrained the "scientific knowledge" necessary to survive in the conditions that lived in. An important part of it was that they did not see only as rulers and owners of the world, but only as one part of it. That is one of the basis of what people call magical thinking, but it is sound once you stop disqualifying it just because the word "magical" is in it.
And, I mean, literally, only those who could adapt and understand their world to survive, survived. The knowledge maybe was not as fast evolving as the scientific methods allows to be, but it is, ultimately, the same method. Try, fail, and repeat. Those who were successful survived.
The knowledge ingrained in the culture, traditions and understanding accompanying it was, and _is_, a fundamental part of the solutions that allowed them not to only survive, but to thrive in their environments.
The first comment in this post says that you do not need the culture to carry out the solutions. That may be true, but it does miss that our culture is the strongest (after "basic necessities") incentives we have to choose some things over others. Or understanding of the world is our culture, and our understanding of the world is what makes us take some actions instead of others. You might be able to mimic technical solutions, but to fully understand them, you need the culture that developed them, as it is _literally_ the understanding of the world that allowed the solutions to exist.
The claim actually made was that culture, not just technology, is what made these irrigation systems successful. It's an interesting insight.
Perhaps we can learn lessons from ancient cultures about how we might be able to efficiently manage our resources and achieve more with what is available. Is that so far fetched an idea?
I understand what you’re saying. I’m not sure that the distinction is all that important, however. Culture is just a form of technology.
> Perhaps we can learn lessons from ancient cultures about how we might be able to efficiently manage our resources and achieve more with what is available. Is that so far fetched an idea?
I don’t mean to imply that European models get everything right, but I think it would be far-fetched to bet against these models; historically, they’ve worked, and they’ve worked far better than any other model. The author does have a paper she linked to (which I missed on my first reading), so she might have a more compelling case to make than I originally assumed.
It's really weird to come across such articles, because they always add this mystic to these cultures that actually ends up coming across as the generic "in touch with nature" noble savage archetype
I mean, weren’t they? My kids can name more superheroes and Pokémon than animals and plants. My neighbors don’t notice when it doesn’t rain in March and April (when there should be 22 rainy days) and get annoyed when it does because it ruins the nice weather.
Why would your neighbors worry about rain, unless they are farmers or otherwise directly impacted?
We've generally abandoned "being in touch with nature" for focusing on specific niches, and it's so incredibly more efficient that you can have large groups of people who focus on systems based on purely made up things, like sports.
If they both needed the probability of rain three days from now, who do you think would fare better, the ancients with their ancient wisdom, or your neighbors with modern sensors and meteorological models?
You may be thinking about a short term need only. Longer term (annual and more) if you are in a state that is susceptible to drought and wildfires, you would worry about the lack of rain during a period when it is supposed to rain. The rain fills aquifers and increases soil moisture content which carry you through the dry season.
In general, yes. But most advanced societies delegate these topics because it's very inefficient if you and everyone else studies wild fires, rain patterns, deer impact on soil compression and what not -- it'll be much more efficient if a few study it deeply and then present the results and concrete actions.
Division of labor goes for division of scientific labor, too.
Granted, there seems to be an increasing trust issue in taking those results as true, but that's a separate issue.
Oooh yes let’s be efficient. Only thing that’s important. No curiosity, sense of awe or belonging to something greater. Let’s do away with art unless it’s funded by Netflix and has a direct effect on subscription numbers. We could and should have both.
Sure, but one is much more important than the other. You can commit 50% of your resources as a society towards art and religion and the other half to science and production, and your standard of living will be much lower than if you committed 10% towards art and religion.
The disconnect between observation and understanding is the whole point; without western ideas like trends, records, and measurement, you can have no better understanding than, "sometimes wet, sometimes not".
The only part in tune with nature is that in bad periods the population dies back.
The Spanish colonists would have no problems with those things though, they just were out of their element there but people were in touch with nature almost everywhere until very recently.
That single sentence, which is the totality of the description given in the long and winding article, doesn't actually explain anything - the efficient use of water is the obvious goal of any irrigation system, especially in a desert. But how did it efficiently use water? The only hint of information is "synchronized cleaning and maintenance", and not a word on synchronized how or with what, or why this should help.
It's like describing how a car works with just "it is efficiently designed to help you travel faster, and uses skilled maintenance workers".
I know nothing about the subject, but it only took me a few minutes to follow references to find what looks like it might be the answer that you are looking for ?
A language is a map to reality, a survival strategy in a changing world. More languages equals more chances of surviving (and thriving!).
The depth of intelligence in a human language developed and tested over millennia is truly incredible, more than I believe most of us can appreciate. In a language there exist tactics/knowledge lying dormant waiting for the right circumstances for application. Human languages are not developed in a world favoring local maxima, but in a chaotic world favoring true robustness and antifragility. We would be fools to surrender a time-tested model of nature, to allow languages to die.
> Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms – what archaeologists call culture – were fundamentally integrated into technological solutions in this part of Peru in ancient times. Isolating and removing the tools from that knowledge made them less effective.
Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms may have helped indigenous people perpetuate the solutions/technologies. Studying and understanding those may help people - today - to more quickly understand those solutions. But it's not like a thorough understand ing and application of these technologies - today - require us to "maintain technology and culture coupling" as this _archeologist professor_ implies.
The Spanish may have made wrong assumptions at first and failed to replicate the solution, but if we still see it being used today, that's because the colonist eventually learned - without perpetuating the culture (not to the same extend as the indigenous)
Exactly - just because they used culture, or religion, to underpin that stuff - doesn’t mean we need to. Doesn’t mean we need to use the same culture, or even the same religion, for that matter. “This is what works, and this is why it works, and this is the benefit, and this is why it’s worthwhile” can be enough, with a minimum of pretense.
Permaculture design was developed out of systematically studying indigenous methods from around the world, and one of the insights is that how humans inhabit the land — the culture — matters a lot. If something is not aligned to human interests and norms, they won’t do it.
It goes with what Christopher Alexander understood about living architecture. How people use it matters. The whole point of pattern languages was the creation of a grammar where all possible ways in which patterns come together develop a valid, architecturally cohesive design. This allows the inhabitants themselves to make changes as their life and circumstances change, and as long as they follow the grammar, it will come out as a cohesive, functional design. Alexander also systematically studied indigenous architecture and went in with a background in mathematics. There is a reason his work influenced people working with software architecture and human-computing interactive design (but our computer systems and products does not realize the full potential of Alexander’s ideas).
There is a kind of bias at play, where we think the culture itself is rigid, and becomes out of date, and therefore, impedes progress. It does not have to be that way, and often time, the culture itself encodes ideas that are crucial. Furthermore, cultural practices can be understood or designed such that it is flexible and versatile — similar to Peru’s pre-Hispanic system of canals. If anything, it’s the bias of our modern worldview that tries to fix culture into the rigid structures just as it tries to create rigid solutions.
For a deeper reading on why that might be, I suggest: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
> if something is not aligned to human interests and norms, they won’t do it.
I won't litigate strongly against this statement because its obvious this matters, but human interests and norms are not immutable and the mechanism to change it definitely involve doing things (at some scale) that can be seen as abnormal or against (some) human interests. This tension and how it's resolved is the evolutionary pressure.
> where we think the culture itself is rigid
Well, the article cites the example of the Spanish failing for decades to irrigate the land because they dismissed the existing culture. Seems like the author has a rigid view of culture, because it seems clear to me that the syncretic culture post-conquest (Spanish ruled) was one radically different to indigenous or european ones.
Working at the scale of product design and user experience, it is easy to see what a user is doing as against their own personal interest. What I've found is that there is usually some kind of motivation for some things to be done. It might not be strictly rational, but more often than not, there is some kind of narrative or view from which that particular action, belief, or rational makes sense. They are often unexamined.
So I probably shouldn't have said "aligned to human interest", because the scope of that interest is different among individuals (for different aspect of their life). That scope is dynamic. It could be self-interested, or interest of the immediate family or community they belong to. Thank you for bringing that up.
As far as the rigidity -- I appreciate your view and comment on this. I admit too. It may be obvious to you that the post-conquest syncretic culture is different, but it was a blind spot for me. I didn't even think about that. I say all of this to say that the lens (view) in which we see all of this isn't itself always seen by the person looking through it. In my case, I know about the idea and I can still miss it.
However, I have learned tbat many arguments that talk past each other happen because the view from which people argue from are not always called out or clearly defined. There are things that can be dismissed simply because it doesn't fit the view.
Re-reading your original comment -- perhaps it's better stated that, while you don't have to couple the original culture and technology, for something to be practiced now, those technologies need to be coupled with the current-day culture.
I've been saying for a while that "Religion is a social technology". Thou Shalt Not Kill is not as universal a moral as you'd like to believe, and the other commandments are also good life advice. Even "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" serves an important purpose in keeping everyone on the same page.
Nearly every culture has a tradition of parables; Tales that reveal important truths by metaphor. Whether they be about how to interact with others, how to motivate and treat yourself, or of outside dangers.
Religion serves an important teaching purpose. Most have converged a lot; There's a lot of truths that are universal. Still, they're not all created equal. You probably shouldn't hate someone just because of their religion... Unless they're part of a death cult.
Atheists are no more murderous the Christians. Religion is not necessary for that. Or even helpful.
Yet pre Christian societies in Europe were arguably significantly more brutal. Establishing at least some basic principals of universal equality was a big deal (something modern atheists inherited directly from Christianity)
e.g. even amongst the civilized Greeks and and Romans foreigners who had no legal ties to their city states (some form of citizenship or diplomatic treaties with their home city) were basically treated as subhuman and could be enslaved and murdered with little to no repercussions.
Universalist religions extended that to vast geographic areas and established some basic shared principles and trust between strangers e.g. in the middle ages somebody from Scandinavia could travel to Rome on their own with relatively (of course still significant) little risk of being robbed, enslaved or murdered while being able to rely on hospitality from complete strangers/foreigners during his trip.
Of course the Romans already had something similar by the 100s AD (non citizens and slaves were of course excluded) but political systems are much more fragile than religions.
We ran the experiment the ussr and china where thoroughly atheistified and decultured. And the results are in. Both societies are thoroughly amoral and horrifying. There are murderous religions, but christianity got tamed pretty well.And i say that and i hate the jesuszombies with a passion.
Useful anymore, it’s not. We have education now which tells us how to society.
We use culture now.
“Culture is just the way things are done around here”
Peer review is culture. Work place legislation is culture.
The article argues that trying to extract technology and reapply it, without the culture, is a fools errand.
It’s trivially true: you can’t just teach some people to code and expect them release an app that can scale to millions of users. It requires culture to function and deliver.
We need to understand the culture required to deliver the technology, not just the technology itself.
I for one would be very interested to hear about how different types of labour organisation were required to deliver their water.
Traditions are solutions to problems that civilizations forgot they had
problem of today is not having enough knowledge, books, ... for storing that stuff or for generating more appropriate stuff to work with modern knowledge they did not had, but problem is not having workforce big enough to do this stuff AND live in current economic system on top of physical/planetwide system.
there is just too may people and only two things can solve that problem - A) what stalin, hitler, did [ graph in GIF https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH_C_MORTACRACIES.GIF ] B) culture of not having 4 children and having need to live energy expensive life.
after hitler in west, reforms were made. after lenin in east, stalinist came.
so without having everybody on board choosing B)... what is the answer? and you can not be peruan-style farmer when you have terrorists pumping oil from ground , building tanks, drones, paying people to burn buildings, cars, writing nonsense "red-pilling" people ...
USA was lucky not having wars, and not having war in USA was 99.999% because of geography - no land bridge. and 0.001% of "tyrrany" of state not allowing mass murder in rest of the world (yes redpill-ing oil here). but culture is changing, state no longer cares about that 0.001% (or atleast seem so ).
we do not care about transporting muck into our fields so we do not need to manufacture fertilizers. so yeah culture is not important but it is. he means culture as a "we do care about sitting next to your field and thinking about it [but that means not spending time programming healthcare system systems] and we do care about earth" [even without hippie drugs]
>While they may be identical in form, a Spanish canal isn’t a Moche canal.
>Spanish canals operated in a temperate climate and were managed by individual farmers who could maintain or increase their water flow. The Moche and Chimu canal was tied to a complex labor system that synchronized cleaning and maintenance and prioritized the efficient use of water. What’s more, Moche canals functioned in tandem with floodwater diversion canals, which activated during El Niño events to create niches of agricultural productivity amid disasters.
The second paragraph belies the previous: Spanish canals obviously were not "identical in form" when you can point out so many differences.
But it would also be pretty unreasonable to equate the early Spanish colonists, who were a few pirates and scoundrels that used iron and horses to conquer and control an empire where they were outnumbered by a thousand to one, to the modern Peruvians. Many lessons have been learned since then and modern Peru's political problems pale in comparison to the brutality of the sixteenth century.
The more likely reason that the situation is different today is just that Peru's population density (34 million in the country) and agricultural production vastly exceeds anything that existed under the Inca (maximum about 12 million across an empire that included parts of modern Ecuador and Bolivia). The Peruvians themselves are no stranger to attempting to copy the pre-colonial infrastructure practices, with mixed results. Of course if you grow less, you can better avoid running out of water. But this is no solace.
The inca aqueduct network is seriously impressive even in the current age. Some of it almost a thousand years old and still transporting spring water miles with no pumps, without a civilization to maintain it.
IDK if it was inka but I was in a town called Ollataytombo or something like that for a week and they had this adorable little aqueduct that ran straight through town and people washed their clothes and whatnot in it. Loved how a lot of those mountain towns had them.
Ollantaytambo. A beautiful ancient town
Yeah Ollantaytambo was Inca. They say it was constructed as a vacation estate for Pachacutec (?) after he conquered the Sacred Valley.
If there was a genius ruler, it was Pachacuti, seriously, dude was the Caesar of South America, extremely underrated in how he managed the Incan Empire and all of the infrastructure that was built in his reign.
He also directed the creation of the road system in the empire... it would have been interesting to see how he instead of his descendants would have dealt with the Spanish had they arrived when he was alive, I think that the outcome might have been different, at least for the initial wave of Spanish
How doesn’t it just immediately become overgrown with vegetation?
By having constant flow like a river, they didn't go on and off like modern pipes.
Meanwhile the average lifetime of modern infrastructure is what, 50 years ?
Modern concrete could last as long ad Roman concrete, if not for the fact that we use rebar which inevitability corrodes and is the limiting factor in how long those structures can last. But that same rebar allows us to create structures that the Romans never could have. Concrete structures with huge spans and thin walls.
It's not that we don't know how to build things which last long. Rather, we choose not to because building that way has tradeoffs we usually don't want to make. This is also the reason we make things out of concrete and rarely out of meticulously stacked rocks.
Part of the shorter lifespan is that our cities grow much faster. Why build infrastructure that last 200 years if it needs to be ripped up in 50 due to no longer meeting population demands?
When they transported 100% of the output of a spring there’s no need to update the infrared as a city grows there was no way to go past 100%. Dams have the same kind of limits and are regularly designed for 150+ year lifetimes. The Hoover Dam is just about to turn 90 and it’s likely to last another 100 years.
Quite a lot of the built environment is designed for 100+ year lifespans. When it isn’t there’s often very good reasons. It’s kind of amazing we get road bridges to last as long as they do when you consider the physical and chemical assault they’re constantly under all while trying to minimize weight and cost.
Building a bridge that spans a wide road or river is extremely expensive without using iron or steel. If you do, that limits the lifespan because they corrode.
We never forgot how to build stone bridges, we stopped doing it most of the time because nobody wants to pay for it.
Iron bridges can easily last 100+ years with maintenance, faster replacement is generally cheaper which is why you see exposed metal on so many highway bridges.
Traffic on traditional stone bridge designs would quickly destroy them.
This is true. I was thinking of things like roads, water mains, sewer pipes, and even homes.
Yeah a house that lasts 200 years sounds good in principle, until you think about the kind of material and energy efficiency advances we’ve had in just the last 25.
Some of the water mains that bring water to New York City, from Upstate, are probably 200 years old.
Many of them are made from wood.
And no mention in the article of the ways of culture that managed the systems.
There was a lot of insistence that the indigenous method was better, but no actual evidence that it was, nor even arguments as to why it would be (besides some vague allusions to it being “more flexible”).
A lot of these noble savage narratives emerge from Latin American studies (history, archaeology, literature, etc.), particularly among Mexican and American-educated academics. There is truth to the idea that the complexity of indigenous systems is unappreciated by the general public, but there’s always this underlying fetishization of a pseudo-magical indigenous “way of knowing” contrasted with the (historically far-better performing) European scientific method. Indigenous cultures are redeemed from European military conquests by insisting that the European way of knowing is myopic and selfish (being focused on profit over sustainability, the individual over the community, etc.) in contrast to the indigenous way of knowing, which is holistic and communitarian.
The author does have publications related to these irrigation systems, though, so maybe she has a valid point to make and the article just didn’t land for me.
If you study this stuff in the americas it’s depressing as the Spanish in particular slaughtered people and culture so completely and unimpeded for so long. The evil and barbarism of this colonial episode is difficult to fathom. The 20th century horror show of slaughter ran in relatively short episodes… this imperial era ran for hundreds of years.
Because you’re left with archeological evidence, whose interpretation is always very conservative, and limited oral tradition, it’s easy to veer into legend, because honestly that’s that who have to work with.
The Spanish, the Portuguese, and most importantly, diseases that killed massive proportions of the population.
The disease aspects are inseparable from colonialism. Here's a quote from a recent survey on the matter [0] that describes the current understanding much better than I would:
[0] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97804292...Diseases imo are empathized because they contribute to the body count and have an “act of god” nature to them. It’s an easier story than to describe a type of industrial genocide.
Read about the Mit'a system that was perverted by the colonial government to essentially improve the return on assets of the colony versus slaves or other means of cheap labor. It broke down the society of the native population completely and made it impossible for them to respond or react to disasters.
but then why romanticise what was destroyed ? Why not go at the world with a realistic view, which is that the "new world" was exactly the same as the old with dominant landempires holding colonies and tributories, aristocrats holding slaves, that where the landbound spaniards to their neighbors. Just because they have been genocided into a blank slate and you rightfully despise the acts of the genociders, does not mean you get to paint a utopia on the disfigured corpse. The hideaways of chaco canyon speak of slavers expeditions.
I didn’t. Why do you feel compelled to engage in “both sides” fallacy?
The Spanish Empire killed about 55M people or 90% of the indigenous population in a hundred years. That’s a scale of slaughter and suffering unprecedented even by the murderous ways of modern society, greater than even the Roman slaughter in Gaul.
Why is it so difficult for you to imagine that perhaps some of those 50 million people perhaps knew something? We’ll never know for sure, as everyone was killed and most aspects of their societies were destroyed.
As bad as the Spaniards were, the Aztec's neighbors despised the Aztecs and their brutality so much that they willingly and gladly allied with the first viable challenger to their rule.
I imagine this is just a symptom of infallible argument/humanities departments rewarding group think narratives (colonialism = definionally ultimate evil) with grant money. Doesn't take long for academics to understand the game.
Same thing with climate change, i've come across a pile of random definitely-not-climate-science papers (macre econ development divergence in hipanola, property rights in subsaharan africa, unrelated culutral anthropoly etc) that allude to climate change as the key driver for the phenomenon observed. Clearly NSF and NIH wanted a very certain set of content published.
> Same thing with climate change, i've come across a pile of random definitely-not-climate-science papers
The author describes herself in these terms:
> While I’m an archaeologist, I consider my research to be directed at the modern-day climate crisis. I investigate how resilient farming systems emerge and adapt to climate change and natural disasters. My fieldwork takes place on the north coast of Peru, where I study ancient irrigation in arid farming zones.
She doesn’t have any other social media profile so I don’t want to be overly cynical about her motives. Anyway, I think the climate angle is potentially huge in a lot of these fields.
There has been a trend in academia in the last few decades to focus on holistic analysis. This has led to a lot of academics trying to tie their research to disparate issues for both grant money and social status, but I also suspect that a lot of it is born of a genuine to come up with a grand unified theory of all the world’s problems. You see it with figures like Aldous Huxley around the mid-20th century (Huxley’s conclusion in his final novel, Island, is that “Nothing short of everything will do,”). The new wave that seems to have started in the 2010s has taken on a considerably more political bent (“Everything is political,” “Climate change is a product of white supremacy,” intersectional feminism, etc.).
These theories aren’t necessarily “wrong,” but the scholarship they produce is so bad that they are hard to take seriously.
Can you point to an engineering feat in modern times which is still functional after hundreds of years of neglect?
Even if academia is swinging to a "too respectful" position (which I would dispute), the lack of respect in your position is certain.
Modern is tough because it isn’t hundreds of years ago.
Around me, The High Bridge between Bronx and Manhattan was built pre Civil War and abandoned for decades and still standing (and now is use again). The Hell Gate Bridge was built by the NY Central Railroad and will probably outlast the US.
Lots of 19th century infrastructure will be around for centuries, if you look at the the path of the Erie and Lackawanna railroad routes, many bridges and other infrastructure will be standing hundreds of years from now. Lots of interstate infrastructure will function for hundreds of years in rural areas with low traffic, well beyond their engineered lifespan.
Stone is the most durable material and structures are overbuilt. Steel is much cheaper but requires maintenance.
It seems like that's an impossibility, since you would need to find something in the current era that has been abandoned, rather than decommissioned...
There are a few examples that might fit, some earthworks, (tunnels, breakwaters, dams) and navigation markers come to mind (costal, but we also put retro reflectors on the moon).
Yeah, I was thinking about Vauban's fortifications, but if any of those had been abandoned, it's specifically because they would have been mostly useless after WW1 (= non-functional).
Hmm, any Vauban-like fortifications in Ukraine that would have suddenly found a new use since 2014 ?
> Can you point to an engineering feat in modern times which is still functional after hundreds of years of neglect?
Why would anyone build something only to neglect it? If one of the requirements was "it shall work for 500 years and never be maintained", then I'm sure you could get plenty of things designed and built for that requirement. It's just that it's a lot more expensive and not particularly useful, so nobody bothers.
> the lack of respect in your position is certain.
Pointing out there are other possibilities isn't a lack of respect. If you believe A or B could have happened, you see someone say B happened, it is fair to say that A might have happened as well, that doesn't mean you believe B couldn't have happened.
> Can you point to an engineering feat in modern times which is still functional after hundreds of years of neglect?
Off the top of my head:
1. Various aqueduct systems constructed by the Roman Empire are still in use today.
2. Persian qalats.
3. The Grand Canal in China.
4. Roman Roads
5. Hawaiian aquaculture systems
6. Aboriginal Australian fish traps
Monumental architecture (e.g. the Pyramids) would make the list substantially longer.
> Even if academia is swinging to a "too respectful" position
The issue isn’t that they are attributing accomplishments to these civilizations, but instead that they are attributing these accomplishments to a way of knowing that is purportedly superior to that of the Europeans, which is just farcical when you consider that every modern technology has either been invented or scaled based on European models of thinking (e.g. the scientific method, mass production, free market capitalism, etc.)
Like I said, this is mostly just a product of Mexican and American humanities departments being populated by people with an axe to grind; there aren’t any STEM graduates in South America concerned with the mystical knowledge that their ancestors are purported to have possessed.
I am not sure of their operational status today, but in Medieval Western Europe, it was Carmelite communities who built aqueducts; even as they struggled to reform themselves during the Counterreformation, religious communities were undertaking large-scale engineering projects, because they controlled enough labor workforce, as well as technology and supply chains, to make that happen.
I would be unsurprised if the Carmelite Orders likewise invested significant maintenance in the old Roman construction, and learned from it as well.
> in modern times
> hundreds of years of neglect
Hundreds of years, whether of neglect or not, means that it wasn't "in modern times". And, in modern times, hundreds of years of neglect is hard to come by. Either it's maintained, or it's torn down, because we haven't had civilization-ending catastrophies in modern times. So I would not expect to be able to show you many examples, because the pool of candidates is so small.
You might look no further than Spain. There are dams built by the Romans which are still operating.
Of course nothing that's literally from the modern period is centuries old, but that's a tautology!
perhaps "modern times" are modern because they adapt to the times, innovate, and replace what is old with what is new in pursuit of improvement.
[dead]
I see your point and I agree. Grabber “the dawn of everything” comes to mind on that “noble savage” phenomenon
That being said : there is something to be said about the Spanish cargo culting those canals in that specific plain… and failing to maintain it.
While we know it was fertile for generation before.
The article hint at private ownership being a factor? I could see that.
But 100% agree : I spend the article asking “ok, what is the culture then”
But it looks like it happen: irrigation work Spanish take over irrigation it stop working
I suspect sabotage was a bit factor, too.
I think that most people that are "scientific" are unable (because of our education) to _try_ to think about the validity of this way of _understanding_.
I like to think that societies in Latin America (and, importantly, all around the world) survived thousands of years not because of luck, but because the cultures (language, traditions) they developed had ingrained the "scientific knowledge" necessary to survive in the conditions that lived in. An important part of it was that they did not see only as rulers and owners of the world, but only as one part of it. That is one of the basis of what people call magical thinking, but it is sound once you stop disqualifying it just because the word "magical" is in it.
And, I mean, literally, only those who could adapt and understand their world to survive, survived. The knowledge maybe was not as fast evolving as the scientific methods allows to be, but it is, ultimately, the same method. Try, fail, and repeat. Those who were successful survived.
The knowledge ingrained in the culture, traditions and understanding accompanying it was, and _is_, a fundamental part of the solutions that allowed them not to only survive, but to thrive in their environments.
The first comment in this post says that you do not need the culture to carry out the solutions. That may be true, but it does miss that our culture is the strongest (after "basic necessities") incentives we have to choose some things over others. Or understanding of the world is our culture, and our understanding of the world is what makes us take some actions instead of others. You might be able to mimic technical solutions, but to fully understand them, you need the culture that developed them, as it is _literally_ the understanding of the world that allowed the solutions to exist.
The claim actually made was that culture, not just technology, is what made these irrigation systems successful. It's an interesting insight.
Perhaps we can learn lessons from ancient cultures about how we might be able to efficiently manage our resources and achieve more with what is available. Is that so far fetched an idea?
I understand what you’re saying. I’m not sure that the distinction is all that important, however. Culture is just a form of technology.
> Perhaps we can learn lessons from ancient cultures about how we might be able to efficiently manage our resources and achieve more with what is available. Is that so far fetched an idea?
I don’t mean to imply that European models get everything right, but I think it would be far-fetched to bet against these models; historically, they’ve worked, and they’ve worked far better than any other model. The author does have a paper she linked to (which I missed on my first reading), so she might have a more compelling case to make than I originally assumed.
I would say it reversed. Technology is _just one_ form of culture.
Episteme vs metis ?
https://samzdat.com/2017/05/22/man-as-a-rationalist-animal/
(The free market does sound closer to metis... but is also EXTREMELY focused on the short term, see : negative externalities. )
Very well stated.
It's really weird to come across such articles, because they always add this mystic to these cultures that actually ends up coming across as the generic "in touch with nature" noble savage archetype
I mean, weren’t they? My kids can name more superheroes and Pokémon than animals and plants. My neighbors don’t notice when it doesn’t rain in March and April (when there should be 22 rainy days) and get annoyed when it does because it ruins the nice weather.
Why would your neighbors worry about rain, unless they are farmers or otherwise directly impacted?
We've generally abandoned "being in touch with nature" for focusing on specific niches, and it's so incredibly more efficient that you can have large groups of people who focus on systems based on purely made up things, like sports.
If they both needed the probability of rain three days from now, who do you think would fare better, the ancients with their ancient wisdom, or your neighbors with modern sensors and meteorological models?
You may be thinking about a short term need only. Longer term (annual and more) if you are in a state that is susceptible to drought and wildfires, you would worry about the lack of rain during a period when it is supposed to rain. The rain fills aquifers and increases soil moisture content which carry you through the dry season.
In general, yes. But most advanced societies delegate these topics because it's very inefficient if you and everyone else studies wild fires, rain patterns, deer impact on soil compression and what not -- it'll be much more efficient if a few study it deeply and then present the results and concrete actions.
Division of labor goes for division of scientific labor, too.
Granted, there seems to be an increasing trust issue in taking those results as true, but that's a separate issue.
Oooh yes let’s be efficient. Only thing that’s important. No curiosity, sense of awe or belonging to something greater. Let’s do away with art unless it’s funded by Netflix and has a direct effect on subscription numbers. We could and should have both.
> We could and should have both.
Sure, but one is much more important than the other. You can commit 50% of your resources as a society towards art and religion and the other half to science and production, and your standard of living will be much lower than if you committed 10% towards art and religion.
Define standard of living
The degree of wealth and material comfort available to a person or community
That is a sad and myopic way of seeing things imo
I would say they would worry if they were even remotely in touch with nature.
The disconnect between observation and understanding is the whole point; without western ideas like trends, records, and measurement, you can have no better understanding than, "sometimes wet, sometimes not".
The only part in tune with nature is that in bad periods the population dies back.
The Spanish colonists would have no problems with those things though, they just were out of their element there but people were in touch with nature almost everywhere until very recently.
It fits today's narrative better.
> The Moche and Chimu canal was tied to a complex labor system that synchronized cleaning and maintenance and prioritized the efficient use of water.
There's also a link which points to more details but it doesn't look to be accessible: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
That single sentence, which is the totality of the description given in the long and winding article, doesn't actually explain anything - the efficient use of water is the obvious goal of any irrigation system, especially in a desert. But how did it efficiently use water? The only hint of information is "synchronized cleaning and maintenance", and not a word on synchronized how or with what, or why this should help.
It's like describing how a car works with just "it is efficiently designed to help you travel faster, and uses skilled maintenance workers".
I know nothing about the subject, but it only took me a few minutes to follow references to find what looks like it might be the answer that you are looking for ?
https://www.proquest.com/ openview/768dad5fa2923211ed1128cfa33d5a29/1?cbl=18750&diss=y&pq-origsite=gscholar
(It does sound like a great idea for a layman-focused documentary, and I would be surprised if none exist yet.)
Oh sure - but given that that is what the article is purportedly about, it would be nice if it had been included in the text itself.
[dead]
A language is a map to reality, a survival strategy in a changing world. More languages equals more chances of surviving (and thriving!).
The depth of intelligence in a human language developed and tested over millennia is truly incredible, more than I believe most of us can appreciate. In a language there exist tactics/knowledge lying dormant waiting for the right circumstances for application. Human languages are not developed in a world favoring local maxima, but in a chaotic world favoring true robustness and antifragility. We would be fools to surrender a time-tested model of nature, to allow languages to die.
> Ancient beliefs, behaviors and norms – what archaeologists call culture
I've always referred to that as "Social Infrastructure."[0]
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/infrastructure/#social_inf
I think a lot of differences between populations can be explained by differences in culture values. I don't see too much research on this ever.
[dead]