Spezielle Buchempfehlung (nicht nur) für @Taktiker … Dein Paradies ist gefunden…

verfasst von Popeye, 22.11.2003, 16:16

-->Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 348 S., New York, 1972.
(Erhältlich hier und anderswo.)


Auszüge aus dem ersten Kapitel: The original Affluent Society

In this relation of hunters to worldly goods there is a neat and important point. From the internal perspective of the economy, it seems wrong to say that wants are"restricted", desires"restrained", or even that the notion of wealth is"limited". Such phrasings imply in advance an Economic Man and a struggle of the hunter against his own worse nature, which is finally then subdued by a cultural vow of poverty. The words imply the renunciation of an acquisitiveness that in reality was never developed, a suppression of desires that were never broached. Economic Man is a bourgeois construction- as Marcel Mauss said,"not behind us, but before, like the moral man". It is not that hunters and gatherers have curbed their materialistic"impulses"; they simply never made an institution of them."Moreover, if it is a great blessing to be free from a great evil, our (Montagnais) Savages are happy; for the two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans, do not reign in their great forests, I mean ambition and avarice... as they are contented with a mere living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth."(12)….

The hunter, one is tempted to say, is"uneconomic man". At least as concerns non subsistence goods, he is the reverse of that standard caricature immortalised in any General Principles of Economics, page one. His wants are scarce and his means (in relation) plentiful. Consequently he is"comparatively free of material pressures", has"no sense of possession", shows"an undeveloped sense of property", is"completely indifferent to any material pressures", manifests a"lack of interest" in developing his technological equipment….

Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present-specifically on those in marginal environments suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production….


Despite a low annual rainfall (6 to 10 inches), Lee found in the Dobe area a"surprising abundance of vegetation". Food resources were"both varied and abundant", particularly the energy rich mangetti nut-"so abundant that millions of the nuts rotted on the ground each year for want of picking".15 The Bushman figures imply that one man's labour in hunting and gathering will support four or five people. Taken at face value, Bushman food collecting is more efficient than French farming in the period up to World War II, when more than 20 per cent of the population were engaged in feeding the rest.

Quelle

Sahlins beendet sein Buch mit folgender Bemerkung (S. 230):
„But there is a curiosity worth remarking. Here has been given a discourse on economics in which “economizing” appears mainly as an exogenous factor! The organzing principles of economy have been sought elsewhere.

Grübel, grübel… vielleicht, na,ja,… ich will die Diskusion um @dottores Thesen nicht neu entfachen.
Popeye

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gesamter Thread:

• Friedman, nein, nicht der.. auch nicht der, sondern David D., also der Sohn… - Popeye, 22.11.2003, 12:03
  • Sehr interessant. Hab mir das Buch schon bestellt. - Taktiker, 22.11.2003, 14:15
    • Re: Sehr interessant. Hab mir das Buch schon bestellt. - Euklid, 22.11.2003, 14:38
    • Re: entfesselte Marktwirtschaft - silvereagle, 22.11.2003, 14:59
    • Spezielle Buchempfehlung (nicht nur) für @Taktiker … Dein Paradies ist gefunden… - Popeye, 22.11.2003, 16:16
    • lieber das Buch erst mal lesen, bevor man über dessen fantasierten Inhalt - kingsolomon, 22.11.2003, 17:49