Hard Work by Tuomas Tammisto, 2024

Producing places, relations and value on a Papua New Guinea resource frontier

For the Mengen people of Papua New Guinea, ‘hard work’ does not refer to drudgery or physically exhausting labour. Instead, it involves creating and recreating social relations through acts of care, marriages, ceremonial events, sharing, and working the land together.

#OpenAccess

https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/149858

#books
#anthropology
#PNG
#SocialRelations

The last generations have no idea how much more fun the 80s were without cell phones, when anyone could ring a friend's doorbell and simply be told if he or she had time for a visit; and there was no drama if declined. Today, many folks lose their temper if some idiot blocks them online.

#SocialRelations #HumanRelations #isolation #technology #smartphones #cellphones #doorbells #visit #friends #AsocialNetworks #Relational #DumbingDown

Nobel prize for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity
500 years of European colonialism, extractivism and the resource curse

"Among countries colonized by European powers during the past 500 years, those that were relatively rich in 1500 are now relatively poor. We document this reversal using data on urbanization patterns and population density, which, we argue, proxy for economic prosperity. This reversal weighs against a view that links economic development to geographic factors. Instead, we argue that the reversal reflects changes in the institutions resulting from European colonialism. The European intervention appears to have created an “institutional reversal” among these societies, meaning that Europeans were more likely to introduce institutions encouraging investment in regions that were previously poor. This institutional reversal accounts for the reversal in relative incomes. We provide further support for this view by documenting that the reversal in relative incomes took place during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and resulted from societies with good institutions taking advantage of the opportunity to industrialize."
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Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 117, Issue 4, November 2002, Pages 1231–1294 (PDF>)
https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/reversal-of-fortune.pdf
#colonialism #extractivism #SettlerSociety #IndigenousPeoples #SocialRelations #PE #economics #democracy #RuleOfLaw #AuthoritarianRegime #populism #corruption #goverance #reforms #distrust #UnevenDevelopment #democracy #institutions #ResourceCurse #nobel

This report just published by the Post Carbon Institute not only frames the challenges of our times, but correctly identifies many of the tensions and difficult trade offs that navigating our predicament necessitates.

https://www.postcarbon.org/publications/welcome-to-the-great-unraveling/

#Greatunraveling #climatechange #ploycrisis #planetaryboundaries #civilisation #humanity #socialrelations #emergancygovernance

GENERATIONS + FILM. Zadie Smith discusses the film Tár. As usual, Smith injects some much needed wisdom into noisy debates about the social world.

Link: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/01/19/the-instrumentalist-tar-todd-field-zadie-smith/

#FilmCriticism #film #SocialRelations #generations #criticism #IntergenerationalPolitics