Do Markets Make Us Moral? (ft.com) 34
A new study [PDF] examining the United States between 1850 and 1920 found that expanded market access -- driven largely by railroad expansion -- made Americans more trusting of strangers and more outward-looking, but weakened family-based care for the vulnerable.
Researchers Max Posch of the University of Exeter and Itzchak Tzachi Raz of Hebrew University compared places and people gaining different levels of commercial connectivity. In better-connected regions, Americans became more likely to marry outside their local communities, and parents more likely to pick nationally common names for children. Trust toward others rose, as measured through language in local newspapers.
The researchers used multiple tests to rule out the possibility that these shifts simply reflected places getting richer. The cultural changes were concentrated among migrants in trade-exposed industries; workers in construction and entertainment showed no effect. But market access also meant orphans, the disabled, and the elderly became less likely to be cared for by relatives at home.
Researchers Max Posch of the University of Exeter and Itzchak Tzachi Raz of Hebrew University compared places and people gaining different levels of commercial connectivity. In better-connected regions, Americans became more likely to marry outside their local communities, and parents more likely to pick nationally common names for children. Trust toward others rose, as measured through language in local newspapers.
The researchers used multiple tests to rule out the possibility that these shifts simply reflected places getting richer. The cultural changes were concentrated among migrants in trade-exposed industries; workers in construction and entertainment showed no effect. But market access also meant orphans, the disabled, and the elderly became less likely to be cared for by relatives at home.
No, they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it completely unsurprising that people of the time wanted more access to the outside world. Even if things were good for them, the grass always seems a little greener on the other side. There are billions of people on the planet. The likelihood that your best possible partner lives within a few miles of where you were born is statistically unlikely even given most people's in-group preferences.
Better transportation networks merely enabled people to do what they already wanted to do but previously couldn't afford to due to prohibitive costs. People becoming more accepting of outsiders as they are exposed to them at a higher rate is hardly surprising either.
Actually, I think they do (Score:5, Informative)
And it seems you agree. As you said, exposure to more people at greater distances encourages them to be more accepting of others.
Morality is a set of societal goals. The best and broadest goals I have heard in that regard are increasing flourishing and reducing harm. Our need to extend our moral range beyond a small "tribe" of a hundred-ish peole required us to extend our beliefs about the behaviors others beyond those we see every day.
The book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is worth reading for more insights on this topic.
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We live in a time and age where our markets based economy, or at least the one that is declared as such, is failing more and more people. Since it is now more and more difficult to argue that said economy brings prosperity, it must therefore be defended with a moral argument. If it doesn't make things better for people, at least it makes the people themselves better.
Because if the markets and economy should go undefended, it might happen that the people might get the idea to replace it with something differ
Re: No, they don't (Score:2)
> They are merely an efficient means for delivering what people actually want.
Eh, people want ads, service fees, multiple subscriptions, poor quality and craftsmanship, reduced wages, and extortion?
I guess when you say "people" you mean a certain class of people, not the general public
Re: No, they don't (Score:4, Insightful)
> They are merely an efficient means for delivering what people actually want.
Eh, people want ads, service fees, multiple subscriptions, poor quality and craftsmanship, reduced wages, and extortion?
I guess when you say "people" you mean a certain class of people, not the general public
Seems a little odd that you believe the general public buys things they do not want.
At this point, I believe there are a few failtroll users who comment on every topic on Slashdot with generalized doom and hatred. I hope you don't actually feel this way - if so, you need the anti-depressant/anti psychotic cocktail they give some people now to numb their ennui,
Perhaps your goal is to return to pre-industrial times when everything was better? Or just anarchy in general.
Re: No, they don't (Score:2)
The public chooses from what they are offered. They have to be aware of products and services before they can purchase them. If they only encounter bad offers, they will wind up accepting only bad offers. They will accept things they don't want which are bundled with things they want or need if they are not aware of alternatives.
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The public chooses from what they are offered. They have to be aware of products and services before they can purchase them. If they only encounter bad offers, they will wind up accepting only bad offers. They will accept things they don't want which are bundled with things they want or need if they are not aware of alternatives.
Is that societies problem? Is there a restriction on what the public sees?Is it not possible to encounter quality?
The closest I can come to agreeing with you is that one facet of consumerism has convinced many that the only metric is price.
I dunno if I hang with a different group, but I look at what I want to buy, then research the price. Then I buy it if it is acceptable.
If not, I don't. Wife and I even do this with groceries. If something is soaring, we don't buy it. And our grocery bill is signif
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Take phones for example. The average person does not know about alternatives, and their bank app wouldn't run there anyway, so they have no choice but to plug in to one or another platform that wants to milk them in some way. I chose to have my bank app work myself.
I don't just buy everything that's thrown at me, either. But many people don't enjoy the choice I've got.
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Yes they do. When markets and Capitalism satisfy lower needs in the famous 'maslow's hierarchy of needs'. Peopl can turn to each other with less suspicion of them being a threat to these needs. It also helps when a society is more homogeneous culturally and racially because it gets past the primal 'us vs. them' tribalism our stone age brain runs on.
Care more than just "morals" (Score:5, Interesting)
The article states that "market access also meant orphans, the disabled, and the elderly became less likely to be cared for by relatives at home." as if that were an indication that people are now shirking duties of care or are more callous to the needs of the disabled and elderly. But there are more factors at play here:
1) Medical advances made it much more likely that people needed care for an extended period of time. It's one thing to care for a relative for a few months, it's quite another to do it for years with a relative that needs 24/7 care. It used to be that you either died before you got Altheimer's, or it would kill you pretty quickly. Someone with dementia wandering off today will probably be found and returned to their relatives. Someone wandering off in a rural area in 1850 (most Americans lived in rural areas then) probably died somewhere in the woods. Any infection in the elderly would likely kill them immediately, so families did not go years of off and on hospitalizations for elderly relatives who kept getting sick- they just died. Finally, modern medicine means an institution may be far more likely to keep the elderly/disabled relative alive than the family could at home because the institution will medical professionals/equipment on-hand and will be set up for resident safety far more than a house.
2) Other options exist now. I'm sure there were plenty of family members who were unhappy about caregiving obligations in 1850, but they either did it or their relatives died. There were no nursing homes to send them to.
3) Institutions like orphanages are far less of a thing (they basically no longer exist except for very temporary situations). It used to be there were children with living parents or other close relatives, but the parents or other relatives were separated from them and could not be found. Today, that's extremely rare because it's relatively easy to locate someone in the information age. Smaller family sizes and lower chance of parent mortality also contribute to far fewer orphans to begin with. Grandparents are far more likely to be living and able to take children in if both parents die.
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With more options far from home it's also possible that the generation of working age sought greener pastures while their parents stayed where they were, tending eg. a farm until their bodies gave out. It wasn't possible for the kids then to take care of their parents and maintain their job far away, if they even knew about the parents' troubles before it was too late to do anything.
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The article states that "market access also meant orphans, the disabled, and the elderly became less likely to be cared for by relatives at home." as if that were an indication that people are now shirking duties of care or are more callous to the needs of the disabled and elderly. But there are more factors at play here:
1) Medical advances made it much more likely that people needed care for an extended period of time. It's one thing to care for a relative for a few months, it's quite another to do it for years with a relative that needs 24/7 care. It used to be that you either died before you got Altheimer's, or it would kill you pretty quickly.
A whole lot this. Now that we can keep dementia sufferers alive for a dozen or more years, it means that if they are going to get 24/7 care at home, someone will have to stay at home 24/7. It doesn't mean the family is callous. It means that someone will have to give up a significant portion of their lives, when at one time it was just a much smaller part.
And yes, all of the things that killed the demented, since their entire physical and immune systems are failing, are being circumvented. There is a say
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Yep.
It's not just that it's a significant proportion of your life, people can't physically do it, especially not to the standards of care we expect today.
As you say in the past people with dementia would have died of all sorts of preventable things like being lost in the woods. You'd find out in the morning, maybe people would go look, maybe you find a body. That wandering off isn't supposed to happen now, if it does the authorities get involved etc etc. Not in a bad way, the police will go looking to bring
Re: (Score:2)
Yep.
It's not just that it's a significant proportion of your life, people can't physically do it, especially not to the standards of care we expect today.
As you say in the past people with dementia would have died of all sorts of preventable things like being lost in the woods. You'd find out in the morning, maybe people would go look, maybe you find a body. That wandering off isn't supposed to happen now, if it does the authorities get involved etc etc. Not in a bad way, the police will go looking to bring them back, an ambulance will come to check up on them and the council may send someone to discuss options.
Yup, it is a humanitarian thing, and trying to keep people safe. Something like that happened with my MIL. She was far into end stage dementia, the part where the brain is so far gone that bodily processes are shutting down. She was in an end care nursing facility. Her heart stopped early one morning. The damn EMTs arrived, and after 10 or maybe 15 minutes, they got it started again. So we ended up with her at the hospital. Doctor came in and told us she was basically brain dead. So there she was on a venti
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Well, I'm glad to hear her suffering is over. My MIL's suffering is not. What little is left of her is not happy.
She was far into end stage dementia,
It's horiffic to see someone unmade. My MIL is in the beginning of the end stage. A few words left. She doesn't know anyone except her husband, really, though still has some recognition that I'm someone she is familiar with.
I had to convince the wife that needed to happen. She was exhausted from all that stuff that creeped up, so it really wasn't too hard to co
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3) Institutions like orphanages are far less of a thing (they basically no longer exist except for very temporary situations).
Orphanages exist today; you don't see them because they're called the foster system. And it's still a hard knock life.
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Eh, we are talking semantics here. Obviously there is the foster system, but it's not like the old days when there was a physical building where large groups of children were raised by the state.
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How would they? (Score:2)
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Markets are not about morality in any way. So how would they?
I doubt they are any more of less moral, it probably just reflects a better quality of life for most people.
Nostalgia has a lot of people believing that we live in some sort of latter day hell, while pre - 1900 times were halcyon days.
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The funny thing, we used to do that with taxes, be it tax deductible donations, or other items. Having this be a way of modifying behavior was an overall good thing, because without it, the most banal instincts rise to the surface.
Markets or Transportation? (Score:2)
What I have read of the article here, seems to juxtapose the two.
Trains made some people less close to their families, not markets.
if markets made us moral (Score:1)
Prosperity makes you moral. Markets enable wealth. (Score:2)
Hard to be altruistic when the calculation is not to give away your pocket change but to give away your livelihood.
Other way around - lack of markets creates problem (Score:2)
When you do not have a free market, you have scum bags ripping people off left and right.
This makes people wary and untrustworthy.
It is not that markets make us moral, instead they put scumbags out of business.
Morality allows organized markets (Score:2)
Morality is a meme which enables lower economic friction (lower waste of energy in petty squabbles, etc), overall having the effect of banishing social friction to the boundaries of larger and larger in-groups and enabling co-operation (whether market based or not) within the co-operating in-group. It also allows the size of the in-group to be increased by
Get thee behind me, Savings! (Score:2, Interesting)
Markets, desire, temptation, tomayto, tomatoh. They're both about people wanting things.
I think that maybe part of the problem is that practically nobody is left out there in society who's willing to tell people that fulfilling a desire, whatever the other consequences, could ever be immoral, or that resisting desire could ever, under any circumstances, be a worthy undertaking.
Other than, like, Buddha. But when's the last time you heard from Buddha? Okay. When's the last time you heard from Amazon?
That tracks. (Score:2)
Betteridge's Law of Headlines says 'No' (Score:2)
Betteridge has spoken.
Shame they didn't look a bit further ... (Score:2)
... like the other side of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Trust might have gone down a bit, methinks.
Necessity is the mother of invention. (Score:1)