I am Ugandan. These kind of burials are unheard of in my country. The Author is labeling this an “African” thing which is just the usual daft nonsense. A number of Ghanaian and Nigerian tribes bury their dead like this , it is more a celebration of life. This is like taking something a small town in Louisiana does and declaring it an “American” tradition.
1 million% agree - I've lived in Ghana and a number of other countries in West and Southern Africa. I've sadly attended many funerals in each place. These photos that visually drive the sense of opulence are entirely of Ghanaian fantasy coffins. I've only ever attended Ghanaian funerals with regular square coffins, and makers of fantasy coffins are rare, as is their use. Primarily by Ga people, who because they are from around Accra, tourists and foreigners have easier access to them. Already off to a biased start.
Beyond the poor writing of making this an "Africa" practice, it's also limited to Christians, and affluent ones at that. The Muslim burials I've attended are modest to the point of being barely even ceremonial.
While families do pour resources into funerals in Zim and other neighboring countries, it's doing things like hiring professional wailers and church groups to sing - paying the living for a service. Totally without irony, this is called "economic development" in other contexts. Families are hiring caterers, hiring drivers, keeping textile makers booked, supporting churches, hiring choral groups, printing banners. These a jobs for the living that also cement the family as stalwart members of the community. Almost none of the money is being buried in the grave and thus wasted. Typical "Africa is bad and weird" article - ill-informed, out of context data, and a Western-focused "only what I say is right" perspective.
It turns into a general rant about kinship societies - which again, are hardly unique to Africa, and aren’t hobbling economic development in other places, which means the author’s core thesis is likely untrue.
I mean, if we’re treating anecdotes as facts - my grandfather - British - used to send most of his pay packet from the navy back to support his mother and his grandmother - and one can hardly argue that the U.K. hasn’t seen economic development.
Shit, I was 19 years old, supporting my mother, my great aunt, and my sister. A few decades on, retired millionaire. It put me in such dire straits that I was forced to work several jobs and then start businesses in my spare time until one stuck. Best thing that ever happened to me.
Societies which have the Clan, the family as the biggest institution building unit, are crippling societies they are part of wherever they go.
Family units can not build nations. Only societies that can build meta-families can. You will never be part of the institution of Saud if you are not born into it.
His article has a link to an article about Uganda called How the deceased are robbing
the living. [1]
I know approximately nothing about Uganda, and I have no way of evaluating the article. Especially since I haven’t read it yet. But it does contradict Madradavid’s statement that these kind of burials are unheard of there.
I did read that article; it is just a generic article about how funerals are expensive, you could replace Kampala with New York, and it would still hold.
My point is that the Author has picked a practice by a couple of tribes on a Continent so diverse and large you could fit the states, the UK, and still have space for 30 or so more countries, and passed it off as the norm.
Funerals can be expensive, anywhere. I don't want you going away with the impression that all these poor Africans are using up all their hard-earned savings to throw these outlandish burial ceremonies.
That counter argument is valueless. Yes, it might be unequally spread but unless you can proof the locality of the phenomena the cliche still communicates. Not everything in the west is California but thanks to hollywood it is.
That sounds like a reversal of the burden of the proof to me. David Oks is claiming in his blog that "funerals keep Africa poor". The job of showing whether it is widespread and generally true in Africa belongs to David Oks, not to Madradavid.
Articles about two countries cannot be more true than the lived experience of actual residents of Africa. I am Kenyan as well, that article describes something very specific to individual communities in some countries in West Africa, it is foreign to me. The largest expense of funerals that I've experienced in my life is usually paying the medical expenses of the deceased (if the person had been ill for a long time) and feeding the funeral attendees (we do usually get a huge crowd and they generally get lunch).
Another data point: maybe 35-40% of people in Africa identify as Muslim. They usually bury people the same day they die or at worst the next day, and there is no elaborate coffin, usually just a cloth sheet.
My wife is Sotho from South Africa. While there were certainly a bunch of, to me, very strange practices when my FiL died, it was nothing like what was mentioned in the article.
That said, funeral insurance is extremely common in SA, as even normal burials can be pretty expensive.
> That said, funeral insurance is extremely common in SA, as even normal burials can be pretty expensive.
This is off-topic, but how does funeral insurance even work? You're guaranteed to die at some point, right? To me, insurance is there to hedge against something not very likely, but expensive. The odds are you're going to pay money in, and never see it back (if you don't get sick / crash your car / whatever).
Is funeral insurance just some form of forced savings?
Indeed it is forced savings but with the benefit of covering your funeral expenditure if it is required suddenly and unexpectedly.
For context, it might cost you $5 per month, and give you funeral cover of $500.
As OP mentioned it is very common in South Africa, likely owed to the unpredictable life expectancy. All the large insurers offer it, it’s a massive market.
Funerals are a big thing in South Africa. It can be often to the same level as a wedding, where families will take out loans to host the event. Hence the funeral insurance being common.
You go to an ATM and get advertised Funeral Cover, offered by your bank.
Might depend on the tribe, and on personal circumstances. The biggest/weirdest thing for me was the whole night vigil and brewing (Umqombothi) and cooking/roasting of the lamb to honor the elders, which had several guests, but not on a wedding level.
Funerals are huge in india too. It runs for 13 days in some communities. To be clear, the actual cremation happens immediately, but the funeral ceremonies continue for 13 days after that.
Most of the expenses are days of one-meal-a-day for guests, and the general extra expenses of having a lot of relatives over at your house. The ceremonies themselves are fairly cheap - it's mostly prayers.
However there is no insurance and so on, since the aforementioned expenses scale with usual QoL.
The writer is using the elaborate funerals as a life story to draw people into the article, because starting with an abstract discussion of African culture isn't going to draw many readers. This is a standard journalistic technique, which is why you see writers interview Gemma the soccer mom who's affected by whatever the story is rather than an academic who produces fifteen paragraphs on the societal implications of the event. This is completely normal. They're not claiming that the personal-interest bit is representative of all of Africa any more than Gemma's complaint about getting her kids to school is representative of whatever country she's in.
They don't comprehend how large Africa (or for that matter India) is nor do they comprehend diversity, in the real sense.
HN is marginally better than Reddit, where you will see bots push the usual ignorant and racist tropes, but it happens here as well, but is concealed skilfully.
It's a hivemind of a certain culture who are only taught there exist only 9 countries in the whole world: USA, Canada, South America, UK, Europe, Japan, China, Asia, Australia.
What do you mean that Africa is a continent of great diversity in cultures, languages and history? They all look poor and black to me.
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.
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.
Why are you acting like a vast majority of the population are capitalists? You're describing the actions of less than 1% of the worlds population, acting like it's the norm of human history and not the extreme aberration that it is. Not too mention we're living in the corporatist neoliberal dream that is a massive hellscape for workers where income inequality is at the highest levels, worse than the gilded age, where your single life is determined by factors the majority of workers can never control since the system is designed to benefit capitalists at the expense of everyone else.
Why are you assuming capital formation is even beneficial for people? Poor workers in Arkansas do not benefit when Ford sells their crappy wares around the world. Children in Utah aren't getting a better education when Zuckerberg sells more ads.
>Why are you acting like a vast majority of the population are capitalists?
Anyone who has saved money to buy something that makes them more productive is a capitalist. At least for any meaningful definition of the word. It's not 1%, it's some very large minority or even majority.
>Why are you assuming capital formation is even beneficial for people? Poor workers in Arkansas do not benefit when Ford sells their crappy wares around the world.
The guy that squirrels away $20,000 so he can buy a food truck, or hell, $300 for a hot dog cart is a capitalist. Every programmer here that ever bought a new laptop or phone acquired the "means of production" for the jobs they work.
The thing about marxists is, unfortunately, they're still stuck in the 1850s with him, trying to solve the problems of the 1850s, and refusing to engage in reality with any of us who don't want to live in the 1850s with them.
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.
> It's viewing the situation through the lens of Anglo capitalist opinions.
Came here to say this. It's a very narrow perspective that shows in sub headlines like "Kinship societies are wealth-destroying societies".
One could also take the lens of "Kinship societies are making people's wealth more equal to reduce competition and jealousy, increase harmony and happiness" – although I have no data whether these people are genuinely more happy. It quotes some business-oriented Ghanians who seem quite unhappy about sharing their wealth. And yet, the perspective of indivual wealth over group wealth is assumed and never critically reflected upon.
I'm not saying that their way is better or something like that. I just think that reading the article is a good exercise in reflecting on one's own views on life and wealth.
It also assumes a myopic version of wealth. Rich people haaate when poor people do work for each other for free, because there is no opportunity to add a middleman.
>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.
Thank you, TIL about the parable of the broken window.
I was thinking the same thing when reading the comments, surely that money would still benefit the economy if say it was invested in the education of a child, but it would also act as a economic multiplier as the child can now contribute more to the economy.
But I never knew there was a term for it.
Especially this line really highlights it:
> by the 2000s, many Ghanaian hospitals were earning more from storing dead bodies than from treating living patients.
Surely those resources are better spent healing the living.
> 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.
There's no good way to measure wealth creation. If people are getting what they want - if there's no extra government tax them to pay for the digging and re-filling of holes, but it's all done freely, out of desire to have it done - then it might be of some value, because they think it is.
We can say "but it plainly isn't purposeful", but the same applies to pets, vacations, every kind of art and craft, fancy cuisine, pure mathematics, dance music festivals, religion and all associated economic activity, all sports ... I'll stop there, but the two main points are: firstly, the value in life is about a lot more than moving real resources, or paper, or food and shelter; secondly, nobody knows what it is all about, man. It's hugely a matter of opinion, what's good and worthwhile. Economic activity is perhaps the ongoing process of making guesses about the answers.
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.
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.
Personal anecdote, having lived in a few very poor countries and a few relatively very wealthy ones:
1) In the poor countries, I find people are generally quite happy living their day to day lives but rate their happiness low - because they think people in wealthy countries have it so much better. I.e. they underrate their happiness because they think wealthy people must be so much happier.
2) Vice versa in the wealthier countries - so many miserable people, but, they feel that they can't complain because they see how bad things are in the poor countries.
I think these "happiness ratings" are a bunch of bullshit. Some of the happiest families and communities I've seen are in the poor countries while so many people are miserable and lonely in the wealthy countries.
I believe it is very very hard for a person to subjectively rate their own happiness. (Edit to add, especially when they are comparing their own happiness against cultures and people they have mostly only seen on TV).
So basically, you dont believe people when they talk about how they feel and what they think, because you think you know them better.
That is not how it works. If you ever had someone else project feelings they think you have on you while ignoring what you say, you would know how absurdly missing the mark they are.
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.
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 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.
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.
I’m pleased to report that the advice I got directly helped me feel optimistic about life again. The community is here, and I continue to be amazed by it. I’m grateful for you and everybody else who helped dig me out.
Feel free to shoot me an email. I was buried in dozens of emails last time (apologies if I missed anyone) but things are much slower now. Happy to hear from you or anyone else who wants to chat.
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.
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.
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.
> China and its steep ascent, blowing past all European countries, and soon - the USA.
China's GDP (PPP) is somewhere around $30k, depending on whose numbers you like, which does beat such lighthouses of Western capitalism as Albania ($25k) and Ukraina ($20k but they also have a good excuse), but isn't in any obvious danger of "blowing past" the likes of Serbia ($35k) and Bulgaria ($45k), much less the USA ($90k).
Oh, my bad - I didn't realize there were so many super-powers in Europe that the US considers peer adversaries. I suppose this century will belong to the Serbians then! The Big Mac index is what truly determines a country's trajectory.
> 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 seems like the issue rather is is that wealth accumulation in sub-saharan africa is limited to a small subset of population
At one time I lived in a predominantly black community in mosside Manchester UK.
I witnessed these kinship based rules often in daily life and even overheard conversations by and about those members of the community who succeeded, left and didn't 'pay back their obligations'.
This was deeply striking at the time and until I read this article I've never seen anyone highlight it. But it's something I think about often.
So I don't agree that this doesn't happen in the rest of the world. It's a cultural thing not a capitalism thing.
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.
This is stretching a metaphor way beyond anything plausible. Fusion in a sun is a positive feedback loop therefore... Compound interest is natural?
It's not even a good metaphor since a star is mostly a stable system. The better metaphor for human economic systems is life itself, and in life, positive feedback loops lead to things like ecosystem killing algae blooms or cancer.
Infinite growth through positive feedback loop is natural, exponential decay is natural (radioactive decay), but the thing that supports life best is homeostasis. In which case this culture's tendency to prevent wealth hoarding is actually long term the better solution than capitalist endless wealth accumulation.
This is mostly just capitalist normativism. In reality capitalism is young. Describing it as a natural order of things is like a kid born in 2002 calling TSA in airports a fundamental reality, after all, you can't have airports without TSA!
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.
A herd of goats and an apple orchard both exhibit exponential growth in production, to the limits of the supporting land (which admittedly may be reached rather quickly). Indeed this is the origin of interest: I lend you my goats for a season and expect to get back a larger herd. The argument that non-capitalist economies can't have exponential growth from investment is a non-starter.
Exactly, under capitalism, "limit to growth" means "maladapted." Only things that grow forever are considered successful under capitalism, even if that growth is to the detriment of humans, society, the environment, laborers...
Whereas outside of capitalism, things may grow, to an extent, and then achieve homeostasis.
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.
Social pressure to do stuff like this is enormous in some families. It's not necessarily about the subjects (deceased person or the newly wedded couple) but about re-affirming the status of their relatives. Arguably the dead don't really care. But their nearest relatives definitely do care how they are perceived to be dealing with the death of the deceased. It underlines their importance and status. People come to "pay their respects". There's a whole etiquette around that.
In many cultures it used to be (or still is) quite common to treat brides as property. It's more like a financial transaction than a romantic thing. The groom's family "buys" the wife for the husband. Money changes hands sometimes. An elaborate party seals the deal. A lot of royal houses actually have a rich and colorful history with arranged marriages. And inbreeding because they jealously guarded their power by marrying cousins and managing how wealth and power is distributed via inheritance.
Of course grief and empathy with the mourning relatives is also very real and genuine and is mixed through this. Same with happiness for a newly wed couple.
And some of that empathy translates into people making sure they are there for the mourning family. So, they travel from far. And if everybody is coming, you need to make sure you don't forget to invite everybody else. People will want to be there. And that creates a need for a social gathering. And that in turn results in it becoming a big event. Which then that creates an obligation to make sure that all these people are welcomed properly. They need to be fed, entertained, etc. Or it would look bad on the family.
In short, it's all very explainable. But also a bit irrational to put yourself in debt because you are getting married or because somebody you care about passed away. Some people flip this with not wanting to impose on others with either their marriage or deaths. I'm not married and I don't believe in an after life. I've told my relatives to do what pleases them and works for them with my remains when the time comes but that I otherwise don't really care.
> In many cultures it used to be (or still is) quite common to treat brides as property.
Property is not the right word for this. Responsibility is the right word.
When a bride price is paid, you give money (or goods) to the family. In return the responsibility of the care of the woman is passed down.
This is not a traditional monetary style transaction in the way it appears.
In practice, a lot of families that accept a bride price end up returning the value in different ways. But the responsibility is passed down from parents to partner and that's why divorce is so frowned upon.
You can replace bride with dog and nothing changes.
We can sugarcoat it all the way we want, but in biblical times, when parents are under economic stress, female newborns are laid in the sun for post-natal abortion. Female offspring is a financial liability, they do not provide the same 'value' as males do. So when a father raises a women, the father gets compensated.
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..
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 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 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 $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !
> have you been to an indian wedding in India? Now that’s big big money
Are Indian families spending multiples of annual incomes on weddings? They're lavishly done. But the cost of labour, land and e.g. fresh flowers is also ridiculously cheaper in India than in the West.
> Per Wikipedia, the average cost of an Indian wedding is six times annual income
Income disributions can produce that effect even if every couple spends less than a year's income on a wedding. This article says "out of 325 families that declined into poverty in western Kenya over a period of 25 years, 63 percent cited “heavy expenses related to funerals” as a major cause." I'm curious if we have similar statisitcs of financial burdens caused by wedding expenses.
> Far better to spend those $$ 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.
In my experience (60 yrs, almost equally in India and the US) are that weddings are typically more suited as social occasions with fun, cheer, enjoyable music, food & drinks. Funerals also bring folks & families together, but its a sombre and more disciplined/rigid vibe. I know which one I prefer ..
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.
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.
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.
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.
> to have a big wedding like how the article describes funerals in Zimbabwe.
I clicked through to the linked about Zimbabwe, and the article misrepresented the research (at best). The paper notes that when families have unexpected funeral expenses, they hold onto assets if they only have one in that asset class at the expense of temporary food insecurity, which would be like not selling your only car in the face of a shock medical bill and opting for cheaper groceries/ramen.
The paper notes that when Zimbabwean more than one item in an asset class, they are likely to sell one (or more). This reads a lot like generic loss-aversion and not specific to attitudes about death, which would require to be controlled against expense type (e.g. weddings, environmental disaster or unexpected loss of income).
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.
This was an eye-opener for me when I read C.A. Gregory's Savage Money.
Our values, i.e. the things we do to gain the approval of each other, has a huge effect on how we live. Much larger than I had expected.
Some people (not limited to Africa -- common also in e.g. rural India) value lifecycle rituals, like coming-of-age parties, marriages, and funerals. Those are the reasons they make money. They don't make money for something else and then blow it on a funeral. They made money specifically for the funeral.
I make money to be able to eventually unchain myself from the daily grind and spend my later years doing armchair research. Some people near me make money to buy a fancy home and pay eyewatering amounts of mortgage interest to their bank. And some people further from me make money to spend on lavish funerals.
It's easy to feel superior about any of these, but I struggle to see how one is better than the other. They're all restricting the way we live and imposed on us from society, they're just different from each other.
You struggle to see how a society which has a system where you put requests from other people ahead of your own healthcare is not equal to one where you take care of yourself?
Did you see the examples that those women started actually getting healthcare as soon as they had their own bank account?
The picture you paint is about respecting what people do with their surplus money. The picture the article paints is that in those societies you don't even take care of your basic needs and you never get to have surplus money. So debating which use of surplus money is better is besides the point.
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 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.
In South Africa, health insurance is prohibitively expensive, but you can get funeral insurance as a value added service from your data plan provider, bank, or even your favourite football team. It is extremely common, so there’s just more money going around. That said all the other points made around the kinship society are still valid. Its also very like that they contribute to the proliferation of funeral insurance themselves.
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.
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.
seriously, i've never understood spending so much money on rituals like burial or marriage, might as well set it on fire. i'd just do aquamation or mushroom burial, whichever's the best mix of green/cheap.
It's a way of dealing with the fear of death. "When I die, an event will be organized for me and then I'll go to heaven". The living need to do that to maintain the illusion.
Colonialism blocked endogenous capitalist classes from developing freely in Africa. Internal dynamics should be understood in the context of the actual history of Africa.
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.
I lifted or paraphrased the terms from the benefits that the author ascribes to kinship society; not sure how that’s buzzword-y unless you are referring to “individualist, capitalist” which seems like a pretty fair description of broadly held American societal values related to wealth.
Regardless the question still stands and I’ll put it more plainly: Do the lifetime costs and contributions(including the accrued funeral costs) to a kinship society outweigh the shared benefits? That would be my criteria for an overall “bad deal”.
And this is no shot at the author because I appreciate the exposure to another culture, but if the framing is the highest earners in a kinship society subsidize the lowest, there is also a question of the extent to which the high earners were successful in spite of or due to their kinship society membership.
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.
I am Ugandan. These kind of burials are unheard of in my country. The Author is labeling this an “African” thing which is just the usual daft nonsense. A number of Ghanaian and Nigerian tribes bury their dead like this , it is more a celebration of life. This is like taking something a small town in Louisiana does and declaring it an “American” tradition.
1 million% agree - I've lived in Ghana and a number of other countries in West and Southern Africa. I've sadly attended many funerals in each place. These photos that visually drive the sense of opulence are entirely of Ghanaian fantasy coffins. I've only ever attended Ghanaian funerals with regular square coffins, and makers of fantasy coffins are rare, as is their use. Primarily by Ga people, who because they are from around Accra, tourists and foreigners have easier access to them. Already off to a biased start.
Beyond the poor writing of making this an "Africa" practice, it's also limited to Christians, and affluent ones at that. The Muslim burials I've attended are modest to the point of being barely even ceremonial.
While families do pour resources into funerals in Zim and other neighboring countries, it's doing things like hiring professional wailers and church groups to sing - paying the living for a service. Totally without irony, this is called "economic development" in other contexts. Families are hiring caterers, hiring drivers, keeping textile makers booked, supporting churches, hiring choral groups, printing banners. These a jobs for the living that also cement the family as stalwart members of the community. Almost none of the money is being buried in the grave and thus wasted. Typical "Africa is bad and weird" article - ill-informed, out of context data, and a Western-focused "only what I say is right" perspective.
Case in point, India has been bemoaned for its lavish wedding traditions - until someone decides it's time to praise it for being a significant part of GDP. https://www.kenresearch.com/articles/india-wedding-industry-...
It turns into a general rant about kinship societies - which again, are hardly unique to Africa, and aren’t hobbling economic development in other places, which means the author’s core thesis is likely untrue.
I mean, if we’re treating anecdotes as facts - my grandfather - British - used to send most of his pay packet from the navy back to support his mother and his grandmother - and one can hardly argue that the U.K. hasn’t seen economic development.
Shit, I was 19 years old, supporting my mother, my great aunt, and my sister. A few decades on, retired millionaire. It put me in such dire straits that I was forced to work several jobs and then start businesses in my spare time until one stuck. Best thing that ever happened to me.
Ain’t nothing wrong with helping others.
Societies which have the Clan, the family as the biggest institution building unit, are crippling societies they are part of wherever they go.
Family units can not build nations. Only societies that can build meta-families can. You will never be part of the institution of Saud if you are not born into it.
His article has a link to an article about Uganda called How the deceased are robbing the living. [1]
I know approximately nothing about Uganda, and I have no way of evaluating the article. Especially since I haven’t read it yet. But it does contradict Madradavid’s statement that these kind of burials are unheard of there.
[1] https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/magazines/life/how-the-dece...
I did read that article; it is just a generic article about how funerals are expensive, you could replace Kampala with New York, and it would still hold.
My point is that the Author has picked a practice by a couple of tribes on a Continent so diverse and large you could fit the states, the UK, and still have space for 30 or so more countries, and passed it off as the norm.
Funerals can be expensive, anywhere. I don't want you going away with the impression that all these poor Africans are using up all their hard-earned savings to throw these outlandish burial ceremonies.
That counter argument is valueless. Yes, it might be unequally spread but unless you can proof the locality of the phenomena the cliche still communicates. Not everything in the west is California but thanks to hollywood it is.
That sounds like a reversal of the burden of the proof to me. David Oks is claiming in his blog that "funerals keep Africa poor". The job of showing whether it is widespread and generally true in Africa belongs to David Oks, not to Madradavid.
Articles about two countries cannot be more true than the lived experience of actual residents of Africa. I am Kenyan as well, that article describes something very specific to individual communities in some countries in West Africa, it is foreign to me. The largest expense of funerals that I've experienced in my life is usually paying the medical expenses of the deceased (if the person had been ill for a long time) and feeding the funeral attendees (we do usually get a huge crowd and they generally get lunch).
Another data point: maybe 35-40% of people in Africa identify as Muslim. They usually bury people the same day they die or at worst the next day, and there is no elaborate coffin, usually just a cloth sheet.
My wife is Sotho from South Africa. While there were certainly a bunch of, to me, very strange practices when my FiL died, it was nothing like what was mentioned in the article.
That said, funeral insurance is extremely common in SA, as even normal burials can be pretty expensive.
> That said, funeral insurance is extremely common in SA, as even normal burials can be pretty expensive.
This is off-topic, but how does funeral insurance even work? You're guaranteed to die at some point, right? To me, insurance is there to hedge against something not very likely, but expensive. The odds are you're going to pay money in, and never see it back (if you don't get sick / crash your car / whatever).
Is funeral insurance just some form of forced savings?
You're more likely to die each year that passes.
If you subscribe to an insurance in your 20s it'll cost you less per month than if you start it in your 60s.
Indeed it is forced savings but with the benefit of covering your funeral expenditure if it is required suddenly and unexpectedly.
For context, it might cost you $5 per month, and give you funeral cover of $500.
As OP mentioned it is very common in South Africa, likely owed to the unpredictable life expectancy. All the large insurers offer it, it’s a massive market.
Funerals are a big thing in South Africa. It can be often to the same level as a wedding, where families will take out loans to host the event. Hence the funeral insurance being common. You go to an ATM and get advertised Funeral Cover, offered by your bank.
Might depend on the tribe, and on personal circumstances. The biggest/weirdest thing for me was the whole night vigil and brewing (Umqombothi) and cooking/roasting of the lamb to honor the elders, which had several guests, but not on a wedding level.
Funerals are huge in india too. It runs for 13 days in some communities. To be clear, the actual cremation happens immediately, but the funeral ceremonies continue for 13 days after that.
Most of the expenses are days of one-meal-a-day for guests, and the general extra expenses of having a lot of relatives over at your house. The ceremonies themselves are fairly cheap - it's mostly prayers.
However there is no insurance and so on, since the aforementioned expenses scale with usual QoL.
The writer is using the elaborate funerals as a life story to draw people into the article, because starting with an abstract discussion of African culture isn't going to draw many readers. This is a standard journalistic technique, which is why you see writers interview Gemma the soccer mom who's affected by whatever the story is rather than an academic who produces fifteen paragraphs on the societal implications of the event. This is completely normal. They're not claiming that the personal-interest bit is representative of all of Africa any more than Gemma's complaint about getting her kids to school is representative of whatever country she's in.
They don't comprehend how large Africa (or for that matter India) is nor do they comprehend diversity, in the real sense.
HN is marginally better than Reddit, where you will see bots push the usual ignorant and racist tropes, but it happens here as well, but is concealed skilfully.
> The Author is labeling this an “African” thing which is just the usual daft nonsense
> This is like taking something a small town in Louisiana does and declaring it an “American” tradition.
I've mentioned this issue on HN a ton but it gets downvoted to oblivion. It truly is a hivemind.
It's a hivemind of a certain culture who are only taught there exist only 9 countries in the whole world: USA, Canada, South America, UK, Europe, Japan, China, Asia, Australia.
What do you mean that Africa is a continent of great diversity in cultures, languages and history? They all look poor and black to me.
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.
In Mexico you have quincenaras with like 500 people and a dress that's worn for 1 day that costs like $2,000.
So it was just the head of the family?
What if there were several of these birthday parties in succession due to siblings dying?
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.
Your pack falls behind, and has nothing to eat during food supply shocks like the one that's almost certainly coming.
Fewer homeless, I bet.
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
Why are you acting like a vast majority of the population are capitalists? You're describing the actions of less than 1% of the worlds population, acting like it's the norm of human history and not the extreme aberration that it is. Not too mention we're living in the corporatist neoliberal dream that is a massive hellscape for workers where income inequality is at the highest levels, worse than the gilded age, where your single life is determined by factors the majority of workers can never control since the system is designed to benefit capitalists at the expense of everyone else.
Why are you assuming capital formation is even beneficial for people? Poor workers in Arkansas do not benefit when Ford sells their crappy wares around the world. Children in Utah aren't getting a better education when Zuckerberg sells more ads.
>Why are you acting like a vast majority of the population are capitalists?
Anyone who has saved money to buy something that makes them more productive is a capitalist. At least for any meaningful definition of the word. It's not 1%, it's some very large minority or even majority.
>Why are you assuming capital formation is even beneficial for people? Poor workers in Arkansas do not benefit when Ford sells their crappy wares around the world.
The guy that squirrels away $20,000 so he can buy a food truck, or hell, $300 for a hot dog cart is a capitalist. Every programmer here that ever bought a new laptop or phone acquired the "means of production" for the jobs they work.
The thing about marxists is, unfortunately, they're still stuck in the 1850s with him, trying to solve the problems of the 1850s, and refusing to engage in reality with any of us who don't want to live in the 1850s with them.
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.
> It's viewing the situation through the lens of Anglo capitalist opinions.
Came here to say this. It's a very narrow perspective that shows in sub headlines like "Kinship societies are wealth-destroying societies".
One could also take the lens of "Kinship societies are making people's wealth more equal to reduce competition and jealousy, increase harmony and happiness" – although I have no data whether these people are genuinely more happy. It quotes some business-oriented Ghanians who seem quite unhappy about sharing their wealth. And yet, the perspective of indivual wealth over group wealth is assumed and never critically reflected upon.
I'm not saying that their way is better or something like that. I just think that reading the article is a good exercise in reflecting on one's own views on life and wealth.
It also assumes a myopic version of wealth. Rich people haaate when poor people do work for each other for free, because there is no opportunity to add a middleman.
>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
Thank you, TIL about the parable of the broken window. I was thinking the same thing when reading the comments, surely that money would still benefit the economy if say it was invested in the education of a child, but it would also act as a economic multiplier as the child can now contribute more to the economy. But I never knew there was a term for it.
Especially this line really highlights it: > by the 2000s, many Ghanaian hospitals were earning more from storing dead bodies than from treating living patients.
Surely those resources are better spent healing the living.
> 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.
There's no good way to measure wealth creation. If people are getting what they want - if there's no extra government tax them to pay for the digging and re-filling of holes, but it's all done freely, out of desire to have it done - then it might be of some value, because they think it is.
We can say "but it plainly isn't purposeful", but the same applies to pets, vacations, every kind of art and craft, fancy cuisine, pure mathematics, dance music festivals, religion and all associated economic activity, all sports ... I'll stop there, but the two main points are: firstly, the value in life is about a lot more than moving real resources, or paper, or food and shelter; secondly, nobody knows what it is all about, man. It's hugely a matter of opinion, what's good and worthwhile. Economic activity is perhaps the ongoing process of making guesses about the answers.
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.
It's doubled because it practically couldn't get any worse. Let's see what happens (sadly) now that USAID has been dismantled
> 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...
Personal anecdote, having lived in a few very poor countries and a few relatively very wealthy ones:
1) In the poor countries, I find people are generally quite happy living their day to day lives but rate their happiness low - because they think people in wealthy countries have it so much better. I.e. they underrate their happiness because they think wealthy people must be so much happier.
2) Vice versa in the wealthier countries - so many miserable people, but, they feel that they can't complain because they see how bad things are in the poor countries.
I think these "happiness ratings" are a bunch of bullshit. Some of the happiest families and communities I've seen are in the poor countries while so many people are miserable and lonely in the wealthy countries.
I believe it is very very hard for a person to subjectively rate their own happiness. (Edit to add, especially when they are comparing their own happiness against cultures and people they have mostly only seen on TV).
So basically, you dont believe people when they talk about how they feel and what they think, because you think you know them better.
That is not how it works. If you ever had someone else project feelings they think you have on you while ignoring what you say, you would know how absurdly missing the mark they are.
Please don't twist my words.
I've lived in these families and communities on both sides. I clearly said it was anecdotal.
I think you missed the whole point of my comment.
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.
I can't see how all the mental overhead of modern multicultural living can make you happier either.
Really? Having other cultures around you makes one unhappy now?
You are confusing "happy" with "outgoing extrovert".
And the alcoholism? The antidepressants?
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.
or just an extrovert, but nuance doesn't make for pithy quotes
Ok, so better to be poor and backward, eh ?
Hard to say. There are so many options that aren't just those two.
perhaps.
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.
maybe. personally i would definitely not trade places
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.
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.
Thank you! That’s so kind of you.
I’m pleased to report that the advice I got directly helped me feel optimistic about life again. The community is here, and I continue to be amazed by it. I’m grateful for you and everybody else who helped dig me out.
Feel free to shoot me an email. I was buried in dozens of emails last time (apologies if I missed anyone) but things are much slower now. Happy to hear from you or anyone else who wants to chat.
Why limit yourself to two options?
Someone else mentioned a fourth category - "self" - which I also agree should be in the list.
Why not pick all four?
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.
> 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.
> That should be always supremely easy and never contain work
But bills?
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.
This is the most insightful comment in this thread. Unfortunately Oks decided to use a clickbait title that made people jump to conclusions.
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.
> China and its steep ascent, blowing past all European countries, and soon - the USA.
China's GDP (PPP) is somewhere around $30k, depending on whose numbers you like, which does beat such lighthouses of Western capitalism as Albania ($25k) and Ukraina ($20k but they also have a good excuse), but isn't in any obvious danger of "blowing past" the likes of Serbia ($35k) and Bulgaria ($45k), much less the USA ($90k).
Oh, my bad - I didn't realize there were so many super-powers in Europe that the US considers peer adversaries. I suppose this century will belong to the Serbians then! The Big Mac index is what truly determines a country's trajectory.
> 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 seems like the issue rather is is that wealth accumulation in sub-saharan africa is limited to a small subset of population
At one time I lived in a predominantly black community in mosside Manchester UK. I witnessed these kinship based rules often in daily life and even overheard conversations by and about those members of the community who succeeded, left and didn't 'pay back their obligations'.
This was deeply striking at the time and until I read this article I've never seen anyone highlight it. But it's something I think about often.
So I don't agree that this doesn't happen in the rest of the world. It's a cultural thing not a capitalism thing.
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?
This is stretching a metaphor way beyond anything plausible. Fusion in a sun is a positive feedback loop therefore... Compound interest is natural?
It's not even a good metaphor since a star is mostly a stable system. The better metaphor for human economic systems is life itself, and in life, positive feedback loops lead to things like ecosystem killing algae blooms or cancer.
Infinite growth through positive feedback loop is natural, exponential decay is natural (radioactive decay), but the thing that supports life best is homeostasis. In which case this culture's tendency to prevent wealth hoarding is actually long term the better solution than capitalist endless wealth accumulation.
This is mostly just capitalist normativism. In reality capitalism is young. Describing it as a natural order of things is like a kid born in 2002 calling TSA in airports a fundamental reality, after all, you can't have airports without TSA!
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.
This "tradition" isn't possible without refrigeration technology to delay the burial. It is a modern aberration.
> 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.
A herd of goats and an apple orchard both exhibit exponential growth in production, to the limits of the supporting land (which admittedly may be reached rather quickly). Indeed this is the origin of interest: I lend you my goats for a season and expect to get back a larger herd. The argument that non-capitalist economies can't have exponential growth from investment is a non-starter.
> to the limits of the supporting land
Exactly, under capitalism, "limit to growth" means "maladapted." Only things that grow forever are considered successful under capitalism, even if that growth is to the detriment of humans, society, the environment, laborers...
Whereas outside of capitalism, things may grow, to an extent, and then achieve homeostasis.
Good thing nobody made that argument! My argument was that you can't hide goats.
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.
Social pressure to do stuff like this is enormous in some families. It's not necessarily about the subjects (deceased person or the newly wedded couple) but about re-affirming the status of their relatives. Arguably the dead don't really care. But their nearest relatives definitely do care how they are perceived to be dealing with the death of the deceased. It underlines their importance and status. People come to "pay their respects". There's a whole etiquette around that.
In many cultures it used to be (or still is) quite common to treat brides as property. It's more like a financial transaction than a romantic thing. The groom's family "buys" the wife for the husband. Money changes hands sometimes. An elaborate party seals the deal. A lot of royal houses actually have a rich and colorful history with arranged marriages. And inbreeding because they jealously guarded their power by marrying cousins and managing how wealth and power is distributed via inheritance.
Of course grief and empathy with the mourning relatives is also very real and genuine and is mixed through this. Same with happiness for a newly wed couple.
And some of that empathy translates into people making sure they are there for the mourning family. So, they travel from far. And if everybody is coming, you need to make sure you don't forget to invite everybody else. People will want to be there. And that creates a need for a social gathering. And that in turn results in it becoming a big event. Which then that creates an obligation to make sure that all these people are welcomed properly. They need to be fed, entertained, etc. Or it would look bad on the family.
In short, it's all very explainable. But also a bit irrational to put yourself in debt because you are getting married or because somebody you care about passed away. Some people flip this with not wanting to impose on others with either their marriage or deaths. I'm not married and I don't believe in an after life. I've told my relatives to do what pleases them and works for them with my remains when the time comes but that I otherwise don't really care.
> In many cultures it used to be (or still is) quite common to treat brides as property.
Property is not the right word for this. Responsibility is the right word.
When a bride price is paid, you give money (or goods) to the family. In return the responsibility of the care of the woman is passed down.
This is not a traditional monetary style transaction in the way it appears.
In practice, a lot of families that accept a bride price end up returning the value in different ways. But the responsibility is passed down from parents to partner and that's why divorce is so frowned upon.
You can replace bride with dog and nothing changes.
We can sugarcoat it all the way we want, but in biblical times, when parents are under economic stress, female newborns are laid in the sun for post-natal abortion. Female offspring is a financial liability, they do not provide the same 'value' as males do. So when a father raises a women, the father gets compensated.
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?
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
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.
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?
Well, there are many worse systemic issues in the region.
It's been 15 years since I saw that movie, but I recall the remains presented to be just the skull and some larger bones - all dried out completely.
What happened to the rest of the body I don't recall.
Doesn't stop the Torajans in Indonesia for storing the corpses inside their own houses, sometimes for years.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2017/oct/13/cleani... (warning: graphic)
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 $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !
> have you been to an indian wedding in India? Now that’s big big money
Are Indian families spending multiples of annual incomes on weddings? They're lavishly done. But the cost of labour, land and e.g. fresh flowers is also ridiculously cheaper in India than in the West.
Per Wikipedia, the average cost of an Indian wedding is six times annual income.
> Per Wikipedia, the average cost of an Indian wedding is six times annual income
Income disributions can produce that effect even if every couple spends less than a year's income on a wedding. This article says "out of 325 families that declined into poverty in western Kenya over a period of 25 years, 63 percent cited “heavy expenses related to funerals” as a major cause." I'm curious if we have similar statisitcs of financial burdens caused by wedding expenses.
big question is who pays
> Far better to spend those $$ 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.
In my experience (60 yrs, almost equally in India and the US) are that weddings are typically more suited as social occasions with fun, cheer, enjoyable music, food & drinks. Funerals also bring folks & families together, but its a sombre and more disciplined/rigid vibe. I know which one I prefer ..
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.
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)
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 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.
> to have a big wedding like how the article describes funerals in Zimbabwe.
I clicked through to the linked about Zimbabwe, and the article misrepresented the research (at best). The paper notes that when families have unexpected funeral expenses, they hold onto assets if they only have one in that asset class at the expense of temporary food insecurity, which would be like not selling your only car in the face of a shock medical bill and opting for cheaper groceries/ramen.
The paper notes that when Zimbabwean more than one item in an asset class, they are likely to sell one (or more). This reads a lot like generic loss-aversion and not specific to attitudes about death, which would require to be controlled against expense type (e.g. weddings, environmental disaster or unexpected loss of income).
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.
This was an eye-opener for me when I read C.A. Gregory's Savage Money.
Our values, i.e. the things we do to gain the approval of each other, has a huge effect on how we live. Much larger than I had expected.
Some people (not limited to Africa -- common also in e.g. rural India) value lifecycle rituals, like coming-of-age parties, marriages, and funerals. Those are the reasons they make money. They don't make money for something else and then blow it on a funeral. They made money specifically for the funeral.
I make money to be able to eventually unchain myself from the daily grind and spend my later years doing armchair research. Some people near me make money to buy a fancy home and pay eyewatering amounts of mortgage interest to their bank. And some people further from me make money to spend on lavish funerals.
It's easy to feel superior about any of these, but I struggle to see how one is better than the other. They're all restricting the way we live and imposed on us from society, they're just different from each other.
You struggle to see how a society which has a system where you put requests from other people ahead of your own healthcare is not equal to one where you take care of yourself?
Did you see the examples that those women started actually getting healthcare as soon as they had their own bank account?
The picture you paint is about respecting what people do with their surplus money. The picture the article paints is that in those societies you don't even take care of your basic needs and you never get to have surplus money. So debating which use of surplus money is better is besides the point.
Moral relativists can't be reasoned with, no matter how plainly the logic in front of them.
I'm fairly certain the bank would put mortgage interest payments above the healthcare of the individual even in my society.
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.
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.
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.
In South Africa, health insurance is prohibitively expensive, but you can get funeral insurance as a value added service from your data plan provider, bank, or even your favourite football team. It is extremely common, so there’s just more money going around. That said all the other points made around the kinship society are still valid. Its also very like that they contribute to the proliferation of funeral insurance themselves.
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.
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...
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.
when I'm dead just throw me in the trash
seriously, i've never understood spending so much money on rituals like burial or marriage, might as well set it on fire. i'd just do aquamation or mushroom burial, whichever's the best mix of green/cheap.
It's a way of dealing with the fear of death. "When I die, an event will be organized for me and then I'll go to heaven". The living need to do that to maintain the illusion.
Interesting - I knew about the fancy coffins (I'd seen pictures of them years ago) but had no idea about the rest of it.
Colonialism blocked endogenous capitalist classes from developing freely in Africa. Internal dynamics should be understood in the context of the actual history of Africa.
Meanwhile I want to be tossed into a hole bare naked with a tree planted on top of me.
I would like to be embalmed and placed at the end of a dark corridor in a run-down guesthouse, in a crouched position. Seems less wasteful.
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.
I lifted or paraphrased the terms from the benefits that the author ascribes to kinship society; not sure how that’s buzzword-y unless you are referring to “individualist, capitalist” which seems like a pretty fair description of broadly held American societal values related to wealth.
Regardless the question still stands and I’ll put it more plainly: Do the lifetime costs and contributions(including the accrued funeral costs) to a kinship society outweigh the shared benefits? That would be my criteria for an overall “bad deal”.
And this is no shot at the author because I appreciate the exposure to another culture, but if the framing is the highest earners in a kinship society subsidize the lowest, there is also a question of the extent to which the high earners were successful in spite of or due to their kinship society membership.
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.
The USA system is hardly the only alternative.
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.
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.
the western mind cannot comprehend kinship...
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
Only someone who's never had to deal with it could pine for it. No thank you. There are some lessons to learn but it's a shit sandwich.
As westerners we must look at this as a weapon that's being imported into our countries.