. . . taxation, that is.
If hope and fear don’t guarantee compliance, there’s always embarrassment. Vampire bats are famous for their willingness to regurgitate a blood meal to feed fellow bats that are down on their luck. In fact, hiding one’s wealth is a problem. A fully fed vampire bat is as bloated as a fraternity water balloon, and the bats appear to rub bellies to see who is in a position to share. “It’s hard to cheat when your stomach is obviously distended,” Dr. Santos said.
It’s also hard to cheat when you live in a small band of big-brained, sharp-eyed individuals, as humans did for vast stretches of our past, which may help explain why we are so easily taxed. “There’s not a human society in the world that doesn’t redistribute food to nonrelatives,” said Samuel Bowles, director of the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute. “Whether it’s through the state, or the chief, or a rural collective, or some other mechanism, food sharing of large nutritional packages is quite extensive and has been going on for at least 100,000 years of human history.” In hunting and foraging cultures, the proportional tax rate is so high, said Dr. Bowles, that “even the Swedes would be impressed.”
Take the case of the Ache tribe of Paraguay. Hunters bring their bounty back to a common pot. “The majority of calories are redistributed,” he said. “It ends up being something like a 60 percent income tax.”
Pastoral and herding societies tend to be less egalitarian than foraging cultures, and yet, here, too, taxing is often used to help rectify extreme inequities. When a rich cattle farmer dies among the Tandroy of southern Madagascar, Dr. Bowles said, “The rich person’s stock is killed and eaten by everyone,” often down to the last head of cattle. “That’s a 100 percent inheritance tax.”
Now there's an idea.
6 comments:
Back when I was studying anthropology, I learnt that the reason the vampire bats example is so famous is because there are so few examples of genuine altruism between non-relatives in nature. So perhaps your post should have been called, "Birds don't do it, bees don't do it, but humans do!"
Cheers
Hah! That's what you get when you learn biology from anthropologists. ;-)
I suppose, from your reading of Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, you have loads of examples up your sleeve of care homes for sparrows and squirrels rescuing hedgehogs from burning hedgerows... I fold!
Ha ha. Very good. Funny too, because I was only reading last week in Contemporary Anarchist Studies (I kid you not) that a lot of Kropotkin's stuff in Mutual Aid about human societies is now out of date.
On the animal thing, I was only thinking of Fran de Waal's example at the start of Our Inner Ape about the gorilla that nurtures a bird back to health. Not "true altruism," obviously, in the strict sense that it's used, but interesting for what it suggests about empathy in animals.
I have no idea, btw, how rare or otherwise "true altruism" is in animals. I was just tickled by your comment.
Why, thank you!
I'm not that confident myself, that's why I folded. I just remember being fascinated that, according to some article I read, there was only one or two examples ever found in nature of 'reciprocal altruism' -- one of the key concepts in theoretical evolutionary biology!
Short egg-head article here that's quite interesting on reciprocal altruism (has a diagram and everything).
recihttp://www.anthro.ucsd.edu/~jmoore/publications/Recip.html
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