In Western society, its fun to romanticize rebels like James Dean and villainize bureaucrats and salary men as inside-the-box rule followers. But, what would happen if there were no people who followed all of our mundane mind-numbing rules? What are boring and the middle class' true value? This piece may shed light ...
To drive home th
e importance of good rules to economic growth, Romer sometimes shows a photograph of Guinean teenagers doing their homework under streetlights. The line of hunched, concentrating figures presents a mystery, Romer says; from the photo it is clear that the teens are not dirt poor, and youths like these generally own cell phones. Yet they evidently have no electric light at home, or they would not be studying by the curbside. “So here is the puzzle,” Romer declares: Why do these kids have access to a cutting-edge technology like the cell phone, but not to a 100-year-old technology for generating electric light in the home? The answer, in a word, is rules. Because of misguided price controls in the teenagers’ country, the local electricity utility has no incentive to connect their houses to the power grid. Their society lacks the rules that make technological advance meaningful.
e importance of good rules to economic growth, Romer sometimes shows a photograph of Guinean teenagers doing their homework under streetlights. The line of hunched, concentrating figures presents a mystery, Romer says; from the photo it is clear that the teens are not dirt poor, and youths like these generally own cell phones. Yet they evidently have no electric light at home, or they would not be studying by the curbside. “So here is the puzzle,” Romer declares: Why do these kids have access to a cutting-edge technology like the cell phone, but not to a 100-year-old technology for generating electric light in the home? The answer, in a word, is rules. Because of misguided price controls in the teenagers’ country, the local electricity utility has no incentive to connect their houses to the power grid. Their society lacks the rules that make technological advance meaningful. Rule-of-law: unglamourous, not pretty, unriveting, uncelebrated in verse, print or cinema. But, necesarry. 
An interesting question:
- If culture really has a evolved to choose and promote the fittest courses of action,
- and rule of law is the fittest course of action,
then why is rule of law not a celebrated part of our low, mid or high culture?
It may be difficult for Cultural Memetics, a branch of evolutionary psychology, to give a non-throwaway answer to such anti-fit behavior. After all, it is a fact that by-the-book behavior is the most evolutionarily capable strategy in everyday and long-term circumstance. Culture, according to memetics, needs its hosts, humans, to live long and prosper in order to have hosts to feed off of. Then, why doesn't pop, mid, or high culture reflect this fact at all?
Not that anyone would be intersted in cultural artifacts that celebrated such things. And, I can't blame them.
No comments:
Post a Comment