An interesting puzzle: how can evolution produce an organism like an ant where the vast majority of its exemplars are sterile? And the answer is: ants are not organisms, ant colonies are organisms. They just happen to be made of parts that are not physically connected to each other.
The same thing turns out to be true of humans. A single human in isolation cannot reproduce. Even a single breeding pair in the wild will (almost certainly) not be able to reproduce. The minimal reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a village or a tribe. So you too are not really an orgnism but an organ, a component of a larger reproducing system that, just like an ant colony, is made of parts that are not physically connected to each other.
You don't have to look as far as ants to make the analogy you are making. Almost no animal, and even some plants cannot reproduce without some minimal number of "tribe" members. This is true for anything from chimps to probiotics.
This all depends on how you define "life" and "individuality": slippery concepts. And it's hard to not confuse those with emergent behavior once you do get millions/billions of individuals together. Sure you could treat NYC as its own autonomous living organism. Or you could treat it as millions of individuals. It certainly doesn't make sense to treat it as gazillions of cells.
The idea of having free will has been debated for centuries, but intuitively I think it's obvious that a human has more free will than an ant.
> To envisage how an ant’s task of the moment arises from a pulsing network of brief, meaningless interactions might compel us instead to ponder what really accounts for why each of us has a particular job.
It brought to my mind the economic calculation problem [1]. Markets distribute decision making, commanding resources through the transmission of meaningless price-discovery and transactional interactions. This has, so far, outperformed systems which centralize economic planning.
There are actually good counter examples where central planning wins. They are often contentious like Medicine, but the advantage markets bring is robustness not effecency. In a famine market economies have some people starve more and others starve less.
You can't just assume a famine starts and then look what happens. The whole point of pricing signals is that it changes what gets produced, making shortages less likely to occur in the first place.
I was recapitulating the quote. The ants' interactions are not meaningless; their meaning is just difficult to observe from a single interaction. Analogously, one finds intelligent people struggling with the concepts of money and prices.
The author is mischarachterizing how Adam Smith viewed the division of labour. While he viewed it as a gain in economic efficency, he also viewed it as regrettable, limiting, and damaging to people, especially when taken to an extreme.
"The man whose whole life is spent in performing a
few simple operations, of which the effects are
perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same,
has no occasion to exert his understanding or to
exercise his invention in finding out expedients
for removing difficulties which never occur. He
naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such
exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and
ignorant as it is possible for a human creature
to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not
only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in
any rational conversation, but of conceiving any
generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and
consequently of forming any just judgement
concerning many even of the ordinary duties of
private life... But in every improved and civilized
society this is the state into which the labouring
poor, that is, the great body of the people, must
necessarily fall, unless government takes some
pains to prevent it."
The moral side of Adam Smith's arguements is often entirely ignored in analysis of his philosophy. He strongly condems many aspects of a free market/capatialist economy. Why this is never focused on isnt very clear to me.
I wouldn't say this specific problem has anything to do with the free market / capitalism. When my country was socialist, this kind of division of labor was way more extreme, people would literally spend their entire "careers" doing the same job from youth to retirement.
The problem with capitalism these days tends to be the opposite. The world is changing fast and the economy doesn't really have a need for people who will only do 1 specific simple task for 40 years, to prosper in the long term it is important to be flexible and adapt and learn new things easily.
And a lot of workers dislike this, they would actually prefer the situation described in your quote because it provides economic security even if it's dehumanizing.
> Why this is never focused on isnt very clear to me.
Not in the interest of those who rule. Whatever you know is significantly affected by what people with money and power want you to know. Despite all the rhetoric about freedom of thought, etc. Knowledge is socially engineered all the time.
How much is this emphasized when his philosophy is being taught? That is, who is doing the ignoring: those who teach, or those who were taught and now forsake it?
It was taught plenty well at my college, Davidson College http://www.davidson.edu/academics/humanities, but I can imagine they did quite a bit better job than most of doing so.
Still reading Adam Smith it is very obvious what he believed. Even if your economics professor were to ignore much of what Smith said (hopefully they wouldn't fail to but in that event...) it would be a pretty poor student that didn't pick up on it.
His 2nd most well know book after Wealth of Nations is called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
I'm not going to find it now, but I was blown away when he says that interest rates on loans should be capped to prevent lenders destroying wealth by making loans to those most likely to default (which would justify high rates of interest).
Adam Smith and the founding group of the United States were all philosophically opposed to inheritance, and very in favor of estate taxes, estate taxes being very very compatible with capitalism:
If there was one thing the Revolutionary generation agreed on — and those guys who dress up like them at Tea Party conventions most definitely do not — it was the incompatibility of democracy and inherited wealth.
With Thomas Jefferson taking the lead in the Virginia legislature in 1777, every Revolutionary state government abolished the laws of primogeniture and entail that had served to perpetuate the concentration of inherited property. Jefferson cited Adam Smith, the hero of free market capitalists everywhere, as the source of his conviction that (as Smith wrote, and Jefferson closely echoed in his own words), "A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural." Smith said: "There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death."
The states left no doubt that in taking this step they were giving expression to a basic and widely shared philosophical belief that equality of citizenship was impossible in a nation where inequality of wealth remained the rule. North Carolina's 1784 statute explained that by keeping large estates together for succeeding generations, the old system had served "only to raise the wealth and importance of particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue influence in a republic" and promoting "contention and injustice." Abolishing aristocratic forms of inheritance would by contrast "tend to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine republic."
Others wanted to go much further; Thomas Paine, like Smith and Jefferson, made much of the idea that landed property itself was an affront to the natural right of each generation to the usufruct of the earth, and proposed a "ground rent" — in fact an inheritance tax — on property at the time it is conveyed at death, with the money so collected to be distributed to all citizens at age 21, "as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property."
Even stalwart members of the latter-day Republican Party, the representatives of business and inherited wealth, often emphatically embraced these tenets of economic equality in a democracy. I've mentioned Herbert Hoover's disdain for the "idle rich" and his strong support for breaking up large fortunes. Theodore Roosevelt, who was the first president to propose a steeply graduated tax on inheritances, was another: he declared that the transmission of large wealth to young men "does not do them any real service and is of great and genuine detriment to the community at large.''
In her debate in Delaware yesterday, the Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell asserted that the estate tax is a "tenet of Marxism." I'm not sure how much Marx she has read, but she might want to read the works of his fellow travelers Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Herbert Hoover, and Theodore Roosevelt before her next debate.
All wealth is inherited. Are you proposing each person is cast out and begins again in cave man form with nothing but the unowned land to start with? Everything you have, knowledge, money, inventions, cultivated land, food, your body etc, were created and passed down (inherited) from a prior generation.
Also this idea penalizes someone who's parents died when they were born, who would have paid for every opportunity until they were of age, now they have nothing. Meanwhile those who have parents or some other caretaker to pay for and facilitate all kinds of experiences thrive.
If you really think that's the case, then please stop using all the things you've inherited from prior generations (i.e. turn off your computer, electricity, plumbing, clothing you wear, food grown by others, streets built before you).
> If you really think that's the case, then please stop using all the things
Please don't use escalating rhetoric like that on Hacker News. We're trying for civil, substantive discussion here. Playing this sort of card is mildly uncivil in its own right and tends to lead to worse.
I think you are misunderstanding the point that is being made. The point is that inheritance belongs to everyone NOT just a single family. Its not about forcing everyone to begin anew by banging two rocks together, its about allowing the common whole to inherit, not just a select few.
That is nonsensical. Were it true we'd have only the things our ancestors started with. Clearly somebody somewhere created the buildings we live in, invented the devices we use. Or was that merely infinitely inherited too?
Rather I'd argue the vast majority of each generation's wealth is created not inherited. Otherwise we'd all be living exponentially worse off than previous generations as the wealth is diluted by population growth.
The moneied interests started that bread and circus brigade because they want to build dynastic wealth. They've succeeded splendidly -- hence the sudden boom of The Dakotas as a banking center for the well to do.
The author has an overly narrow view of what constitutes division of labor. Division labor doesn't mean that can't switch tasks or that you can only do a task you were specifically born with the special ability for. Indeed, any system of division of labor has to operate with the sort of adaptability she describes in ants.
I think what the author is trying to get at here is that there is no control system. There is no central brain coordinating things. Each individual ant brain evolved to do different things based on the signals it receives from others. Useful behaviours that lead to a higher fitness tend to survive and progress to future generations of ants.
When you look at the human analogy, the queen doesn't have all the resources and food she could ever need. In human society, we prise those people at the top who convince others to give them resources. Human societies are not equal. They never have been. In fact, equality is a completely human social construct that we must actively and consciously pursue:
Even our concept that the brain "controls" things is just our own projection of things. Think about it, you get hit hard in the leg, so the leg releases chemicals that trigger a bunch of repsonses, perhaps using the brain as the intermediary point of communication, but to say the brain "controls it", is just one way to look at it. The brain was really told what to do by the leg, or maybe the nerves, or the blood. There is no system in nature that has centralized control, all systems with "central authority" are really just a projection of human conditioning.
For example, even in government, how exactly is centralized control maintained? Its a bunch of distributed interactions that cause people to go out and take actions that result in overall changes, but there isn't a "government" per se that is like a giant telepathic mind controlling anyone's actions, its just millions of interactions of people choosing what to do (some soldiers, some merchants, some politicians), flowing in all directions.
At the beginning he describes a historical view of human division of labor (which is in fact pretty specialized -- think of Adam Smith or, as he mentions, Henry Ford) and the longstanding belief that hive insects are programmed as pupae to do only one task.
The rest of the article shows, including his millet experiment, that our longstanding belief is wrong at least in regards to ants. In fact the only such ant is the queen.
The Toytoa Production System has division of labour (As Taichi says : "if the plant can operate without you, why are you there?") but also fungible workers - they train to do each other's jobs too.
The same thing turns out to be true of humans. A single human in isolation cannot reproduce. Even a single breeding pair in the wild will (almost certainly) not be able to reproduce. The minimal reproductive unit for homo sapiens is a village or a tribe. So you too are not really an orgnism but an organ, a component of a larger reproducing system that, just like an ant colony, is made of parts that are not physically connected to each other.