The most ‘intelligent’ species on the planet….

Big Weddings Bring Afghans Joy, and Debt:

In Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, bridegrooms are expected to pay not only for their weddings, but also all the related expenses, including several huge prewedding parties and money for the bride’s family, a kind of reverse dowry.

Bill Cosby may be right about African-Americans spending a lot on expensive sneakers–but he’s wrong about why:

Economists Kerwin Charles, Erik Hurst, and Nikolai Roussanov have taken up this rather sensitive question in a recent unpublished study, “Conspicuous Consumption and Race.” Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for 1986-2002, they find that blacks and Hispanics indeed spend more than whites with comparable incomes on what the authors classify as “visible goods” (clothes, cars, and jewelry). A lot more, in fact–up to an additional 30 percent. The authors provide evidence, however, that this is not because of some inherent weakness on the part of blacks and Hispanics. The disparity, they suggest, is related to the way that all people–black, Hispanic, and white–strive for social status within their respective communities.
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To test their theory, the authors look at how much a white family spends on conspicuous consumption when it is surrounded by white families making a similar amount of money. They find that this white family spends the same portion of its income on visible goods as a black family surrounded by other black families with similar incomes. They also find that the further a family of either race slips behind the average income of nearby households of the same race (becoming too poor to compete in the signaling game), the less it spends on these visible goods.

Once these effects are accounted for, racial disparities in visible consumption disappear. It’s not that black Americans are more inclined to signal wealth; rather, poor blacks are more likely than poor whites to be a part of communities where they are relatively rich enough to participate in the signaling game.

These are the sorts of data which has resulted in my turn away from principled libertarianism; in my opinion political ideology should be grounded in the art of the possible not the yearning for what should be. The more we delve into ‘human nature’ the more complex and bewildering it becomes, and the less our naive reliance on the powers of human agency seems to be a wise course.
Note: I have read ethnographic literature from Southeast Asian which suggests that some communities have converted to world religions (in this case Islam and Christianity) to escape the onerous expectations of the community in regards to ritual feasts and other various customary outlays. Since these expenses are justified on religious grounds a rejection of the tribal religion is a principled “opt-out,” and an integration into a universalist religion results in compensation for the social ostracism which might be incurred by the removal of oneself from the communal activities which have sacral import. That being said, I suspect this sort of behavior has only an epiphenomenal significance, because over time whole communities tend to convert to world religions. At that point the old dynamics no doubt reassert themselves as communal outlays are now justified as part of the customary tithe or zakat for the new dispensation.