Sharon

Sharon - The point about the dividing line between child as burden and child as economically productive being blurry is right, and the same point is true of adults and the blurriness varies from society to society, and has cultural and economic roots too. There is a lot of stuff here. But this misses the point that land ownership is usually the limiting factor, it is only recently that money or oil is. You see even in Nigeria a 6 year old is only economically productive rather than a burden if they have access to land to farm that can productively use one more set of hands. If the family owns a little land and can use the extra help, great! If their little parcel of land is already being farmed as productively as it can be and another 6 year old comes a long, well … Maybe they can be loaned to another nearby family which isn’t full, or maybe they can work on the big planation down the road for money. But this can slip quickly into slavery, or near slavery conditions. Your own analysis on modern slavery which you re-cited in this article, agreed with UNICEF that child laborers are “almost always forced laborers.” Quickly an area will reach the population density that can be usefully farmed by traditional techniques and then need either more land, or different farm laboring set ups, or usually to export expendable people elsewhere to cities or warfare or overseas or something, or start killing people off or letting them starve. This was one of the major dynamics of the Hutu-Tutsi problems, all the land was farmed and there were still too many people. Perhaps Nigeria is still recovering from its civil wars in the 70s, certainly ethnic and religious strife are not yet gone from Nigeria. The same is true of India, a woman who wants not to beg at 60 needs 5 children, and enough land or access to jobs to support them between child-birth and 60, which is why Indian culture has encouraged old men and women to become renunciate beggers for so long! Sooner or later there isn’t enough land, for every woman to have access to enough land for her family to farm to support themselves and 5 kids until old age. Better to try to re-value begging, than prevent beggers. I’m not really saying colonialism is a red herring, more that it is a story as old a Sumer. What oil changes is that you can use non-traditional farming techniques (if you have access to equipment and capital and transport to market) to keep comparatively few people on the farm, send lots to the cities for other tasks, and still have plenty left over for expending. Oh nice one on hording too, can’t think of anything productive to add over there yet.

Rebecca - Can you imagine a culture that “really” valued human life? Can you point to examples? What would it look like for a culture to really value human life? Jared Diamond discusses the example of Tikopia a small isolated pacific island which maintained a stable population for centuries, by careful reproductive limitations and other management choices. Without an incentive to treat people as expendable, they developed a kind of real valuing of human life. They have been described as communal, idyllic, and even utopian. Of course they also routinely practiced infanticide to keep the population stable and prevent people from becoming expendable and shaking up their society, and they remained a small population. Unlike their Melanesian neighbors they have also deeply resisted the changes of the 20th century, and refused to grow beyond what they can support themselves. Is that valuing human life? Or does a society that spreads and spreads value human life, because they want more of it even if each life becomes less idyllic? Do the slums of Mexico City represent the ultimate valuing of human life, because the people choose that even a life like this is valuable and worth living and bring more people into being while refraining from suicide? Or is that where life is cheap and thus not valued highly? I’m not really disagreeing with you about culture here, it is just that the more I think about what a culture that deeply valued human life would look like the less certain I am what that would look like.

-Brian M

The boss may choose not to dicker with you over what’s a fair wage. But if you band together with every other worker like you, then they have to. It’s more work than just busting your ass for minimum wage, and more risk, but it’s more rewards, too.

Though, truthfully, the nursing home workers are undercut by free family care *and* religious orders that run nursing homes, so it’s a different kind of “market”.

never went to college

he working class would be better off if fewer people entered the labor force and employers had to compete for them

amen..exactly my point

Now, the fact is that a lot of people are going to be doing those jobs. Even if every person in the world were born with special talent and driving ambition, not everyone could obtain one of the highfalutin’ jobs that you seem to think make life worth living. You can’t have a society where everyone is a professor, engineer, doctor, or businessman; by necessity, many will not make it and will get shoved downhill towards the janitor and nurse’s aide slots. You sneer at low-paid workers for “messing up” others by contributing to the problem of low wages, but if hordes of people are striving to get any job perceived as elite, all that does is drive down wages and working conditions for those jobs too (ask any adjunct professor if you doubt this). Rather than having more and more workers begging to be employed at lower and lower wages to crank out more and more salad spinners, the working class would be better off if fewer people entered the labor force and employers had to compete for them.

Too bad we don’t live in a free state. And I think we’d better leave it at that.

Besides, maybe you won’t take those jobs, but I promise you that most nursing homes pay very badly, so even if you won’t have to work for that, there’s an excellent chance that unless we change the system, the person who is supposed to kindly and humanely take you to the bathroom will be making $7 hour or the rough equivalent.

Sharon

Interesting comments. I think on a more local scale I’m afraid. To my mind one of the most underestimated factors is the existence of the good old grape vine. That is what will keep a community together and alive. I doubt even an army could really overcome a strong community. For a good example take a look at the Vietnam war. On paper that war should have been over in about a week. The reality was somewhat different. Not only that but one community influenced the other to the point that the war became unpopular on both sides and eventually just fizzled. Same thing with the cold war. It couldn’t be sustained at any cost after just a matter of years. Communities won’t live at extremes and will always return to some sort of middle ground and they look after their own at almost any cost.

The value of an individual life might be low but the value of a community will always be high. That’s what heroes are about.

viv in nz

I feel all people in a free state have a choice.

The only ones that don’t are in slavery or forced work or an unbalanced mental or physical state.

Free states care for their unbalanced.

If someone settles for less then that is what they get. It also contributes to lower wages so they are not only messing self up, but others to boot.

Fear of the unknown is the big factor but that is a personal problem and not due to any outside oil.

I have worked waitress jobs for under 7.00, but I knew I could supplement it with tips and that it was not where I would stay.

Some people are always victims.