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The purpose of this site is to try and get the world to start dealing with the interaction between culture and success in a mature and intelligent manner. Poll: Do you believe culture influences success? Yes 68.36% No 19.8% Uncertain 11.7% - Newest Articles - Per capita income figures for the countries and regions of the world. While rarely read this is Gandhi's most important written work. The traditional explanation for the noticeable differences in income across cultures was to say that they differed in their level of civilization. - Categories - - All Articles - Per capita income figures for the countries and regions of the world. While rarely read this is Gandhi's most important written work. The traditional explanation for the noticeable differences in income across cultures was to say that they differed in their level of civilization. This 1920 work by Roger Babson is a classic with in its genre. It promotes the traditional, pre-1960s explanation for the connection between success and culture. Current events in Zimbabwe are giving us an unprecedented opportunity to measure and judge the effect of white settlement and colonization in Africa. Average US Incomes by Race, Ethnicity and Religion. Max Weber's claim that Protestantism is more conducive to success than Catholicism and that Calvinism is in particular more successful is widely repeated and rarely examined. We need to recognize that culture is the personality of a group or race and we must see culture and having seen it, make it a work of art. The moral justification for welfare is supposed to be that we are temporarily helping out our fellow man through a rough stretch of road or helping the disabled permanently. If it is to become a system for continually transferring wealth from one group to another the people behind this change owe us an explanation. The great taboo of our age is not speaking about race, but speaking about culture. Bourgeoisie is more than just a term of abuse used by the Left, it refers to a real people who led real lives. Selections from the Federal Outlook Selections from a 1960's Rhodesian newspaper. How Africa Underdeveloped Africa Africa is the poorest place in the world. Why? Will Famine Come to Zimbabwe? The end of commercial farming in Zimbabwe could plunge the country into famine. The Tragedy of the Zimbabwe Commons Communally owned property always has and always will suffer from the 'tragedy of the commons' problem. Band Aid Africa recieves $15 billion a year in aid. Is it helping? Africa is where the data is. It's the one part of the world where everything worthy of being dcalled "historical forces" are more at work, and more naked, than anywhere else. All religious, racial, and philosophical disputes that are at play around the world are at war in Africa. If you have a strong interest in history, politics and philosophies you will be interested in today's Africa as it is here everything is happening in such extreme and obvious terms. Every issue involved with whether or not voluntarily chosen beliefs can influence belief is a daily headline in Africa. The two countries which seem most obvious examples of this are Zimbabwe and South Africa, but the entire continent is also involved. The articles in this section try to make use of all the history that is occurring in Africa and try to draw something useful from it.Selections from the Federal Outlook Selections from a 1960's Rhodesian newspaper. How Africa Underdeveloped Africa Africa is the poorest place in the world. Why? Will Famine Come to Zimbabwe? The end of commercial farming in Zimbabwe could plunge the country into famine. Africa recieves $15 billion a year in aid. Is it helping? |
The above photo has been cropped and recompressed
to bring it down
from 376K to 32K. The redder the area the more plant life it has.
(4/8/01) We keep reminding each other not to reinvent the wheel and it must be working because no one ever does it. Yet we forget to remind each other to stop trying to make the commune work. Communally owned property always has and always will suffer from the 'tragedy of the commons' problem. The fundamental example of this is to imagine a pasture which is communally owned by 100 people who own 1 cow each. If one more cow is added the pasture will degrade and the milk output from each cow will be reduced. However, the reduction in milk per cow is less to each individual than what would be gained from adding one more cow. Therefore each individual is best off adding as many cows as he can, despite the fact that the overcrowded pasture and the herd as a whole will suffer. If that same pasture was owned by one person he would never put more cows on it than it could hold. This is the 'tragedy of the commons' and illustrates why communally owned resources will always be abused. Despite the inevitable failure of these arrangements we keep on trying to make it work.
The most clear example of this is in what is likely the largest system of communally owned land in the world, the 16 million hectares(40 million acres) of communal land in Zimbabwe. This land is severely degraded, as can be seen from satellite photo above and from the other photos linked to. The red areas indicate vegetation and the white areas are bare patches. If you look at a map showing the communal land borders you will see that they are contiguous with the bare patches. The degradation of these lands is well known and studied. The average rate of soil formation in Zim is .4 tons per hectare per year. The communal lands lose 50 tons a year on farmland and 75 tons a year on grazing lands. In comparison, the commercial farms only lose 5 tons per year in farming and 3 tons per year in grazing land. It's important to note that the privately held commercial farms lose more soil in farming while the communally owned land loses more in grazing.
This issue of communal land degradation is one of the most popular sub-topics on Zimbabwe and any internet search will turn up dozens of studies on it and they all point to the same cause: overcrowding. All of these studies claim that the racially based land distribution practiced by whites in the past is the real cause of the ecological disaster on the communal lands. The possibility that communal ownership is to blame is never accepted as anything other than a racist justification for past misdeeds. I don't believe this view is supported by the facts.
The communal lands are the most crowed rural areas of Zim as can be seen from this map. However, Zimbabwe itself is not a crowded country and simply being more crowded than the rest of the country does not make the communal lands crowded by African standards.
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The above table shows that Zim has more arable land per person than many of its neighbors. Given that the communal lands had 20,000 sq. km planted in 1998 I think it's fair to assume that they contain 20,000 of the 27,370 sq. km of arable land. The commercial farms had 5,000 sq. km planted in 1998. There are 6 million people in the communal lands. This means they have .0033 sq. km of arable land per person. These communal lands also sell enough corn to feed another 3 million. That means they have .0022 sq. km. of arable land per person fed. This is not overcrowded when compared to the other countries of Africa.
While the other countries of Africa have ratios of people to arable land similar to Zim they do have the land degradation problems the communal lands are notorious for. If you look at the satellite photo of Africa found in the links at the top you will see that no other country seems to have this patchwork of bare places among the green. No other country in this continent, and probably no other country in the world has the land degradation problems that the 16 million hectares of communally owned land in Zimbabwe has.
It needs to be remembered that only 1/8 of the communal land area is under the plow, yet all 8/8ths of these lands look like hell from outer space. The explanation for this land degradation is not to be found in farming or overcrowding. The real problem is cows.
The communal areas have 45% more land, but 80% more cattle and more goats than are worth calculating. What we have here folks is a real tragedy of the commons.
The roots of the problem go back to the first white settlement in the 1890's. It was decided that the native population would be given some smaller portion of the land to live in a traditional manner under tribal customs while the majority was to be privately held by whites. The belief was that each generation most of the children would grow to prefer modern life and leave these tribal reserves. It was believed that eventually so few people would prefer the old way of living that after several generations the reserves could be done away with. Regardless of one's opinion of the comparative value of modern and tribal lifestyles, there was one large flaw in this plan. If you left the reserve you lost land, if you stayed you kept your little plot.
Under tribal law every married man is given a share of the tribes land. When he dies the land goes back the tribe. His sons do not inherit his plot, but have to apply for land when they marry. This leaves the individual with no motivation to care for the long term interests of the land and a motivation to maintain residency even if it's not needed. When married men in these communal lands find work in the city they leave their wives and children behind to work their plot and maintain rights to the plot. These tribal rules worked when the country was sparsely populated, but since the white arrival the population of Zim has gone from 750,000 to 12,000,000. These old rules are killing the land.
The strongest evidence in favor of the view that overgrazing is the cause of communal land degradation is that this degradation first became an issue while the population was very small. In 1931 the total population was estimated at 1,000,000. Despite this small human population it was at this time that alarm was first raised on the issue of land degradation. During the 1930's Rhodesian officials were saying and writing things such as: "Things are very, very, bad in the reserves(communal lands). If we go on at this rate we are going to leave this country infinitely worse than we found it", "rehabilitation appears almost impossible", "heading for ruin".
The cause of this concern was overcrowding but overgrazing. From 1902 to 1932 the cattle population on the communal lands had increased at 12% a year to 1.75 million. It was during a time of very low population numbers and very high cattle numbers that the land began to fail. The response of the Rhodesian government was to force the communal lands to cull their herds and herd size remained almost constant until the late 1960's. This enforced culling was revoked in the '60's to try and make white rule more popular among the population and by 1980 the herd was up to 3 million. It reached 4 million before the devastating drought of 1991. The fact that land degradation first became an issue when the cattle herds expanded and not when the population expanded points to the real cause.
What makes the Zim communal lands important to the rest of us is that this is most likely the oldest and largest ongoing experiment on the usefulness of communal land ownership. This experiment is a failure. There are other countries witch are as or more crowded and the land there is not devastated the way it is in Zim. This land quality problem became an issue long before the population grew to any size, but only after the explosion in cattle. The cause of this land degradation is clear. The 'tragedy of the commons' was invented as a hypothetical example to teach the world about the danger of systems which lack built in accountability. This lesson has not been learned well enough. It is ironic that this hypothetical example is actually being demonstrated on 16 million hectares occupied by 6 million people. It is tragic that those 6 million will have to pay the price.
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