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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   13439 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Apparently one main reason for white affluence in Rhodesia was that even when blacks and whites were paid the same, social obligations to family members caused problems for blacks. If people who make money have to give it to their relatives, wealth becomes useless and it's impossible to save or invest for the future.

Same with indigenous Australians. Demand sharing from family and friends is speculated to have roots in hunter gatherer societies.

I'm of Anglo descent, my father was born in a pretty grim part of Northern UK just after WW2 and managed to get out of 'the poverty trap' via joining the army, getting a skilled trade and then heading overseas. But in his description the culture of poor Northern English households was pretty similar to the African and Indigenous mindset. He's one of 7 siblings, and whilst he was still domiciled anywhere near his mother he was expected to send about half of his post-tax wages back home to support the broader family.

Maybe less 'random cousin Igwe jumps out of a bush' than some of the African examples but a lot of this stuff is just downstream of being poor and having large families. It's always going to be difficult to be the first one trying to better yourself if the clan assumes that wins are socialized.

The missing part of all of these stories, IMO, is: where does the shared money go? If all the men in the family work and all the women are married and raising children, then communalizing wealth to handle the elderly, a widow and orphans, and hard-to-finance large one-off expenses seems like a fairly unobjectionable practice. In larger society we leave that to the government, or at least a local church, at significantly higher graft than my hypothetical, and someone trying to “make it on his own” is an obvious tax evader.

But I expect this isn’t the whole story, and the reality is an excess of men who don’t work or women who aren’t married or an unusual quantity of drink for the amount of money earned. That’s what’s really wrong: the family exerts authority to tax, but not authority to force good behavior. That is, this isn’t a criticism of the “demand sharing” family, it’s a criticism of an undemanding welfare state that lets he who does not work to eat.

But I’d be interested in the specifics. The above is largely prejudice.

If all the men in the family work and all the women are married and raising children, then communalizing wealth to handle the elderly, a widow and orphans, and hard-to-finance large one-off expenses seems like a fairly unobjectionable practice.

It also depends on how much is communalized. Even if it just goes to the needy, any poor community is going to have enough needy that you could easily take away every penny that someone earns, give it to the needy, and still have needy. And the community isn't going to say "well, the needy already got 30% of his income, we'll let him keep the rest".

That is, this isn’t a criticism of the “demand sharing” family, it’s a criticism of an undemanding welfare state that lets he who does not work to eat.

It's the same phenomenon.

Based on my dad's telling, it was a combination of drink, gambling, covering for injured/elderly men and women, covering pawn shop debts since frequently the money would run low just before the husbands returned from the sea. There was also an expectation of low-grade neighborhood socialism and enough men died or were injured on the boats that there was a pretty constant flow of widows, orphans and the like. Also my dad was there for essentially a very particular social moment between the Second World War (half the town was still ruins from the Blitz for his childhood) and the obsolescence of the Northern fishing communities for a plethora of reasons a few decades later. Which also increased the pressure on neighborhood charity networks since there were less boats and therefore less men going out on them and making great money for the time and place.

I haven't made a deep sociological inquiry of it, and my dad first left the fishing town at 14 to go to military school and then completely left the country at about 30 without spending all that much time actually living there.

Demand sharing is a terrible crab bucket that stops people from reaching escape velocity from an underprivileged life. I really sympathise for people that start out on hard mode. Many never had a chance.

It doesn't feel right to me that demand sharing is only a black/brown person thing. I've seen it growing up in white communities too.

Yeah I find my father's example interesting since paradoxically the fishermen were actually paid pretty well by general English working class standards.

But generally their lives would be spent half at sea in the middle of the Atlantic for weeks at a time, and then shore leave where they'd give over 85% of their pay packet to the wife/extended family and then drink the remainder. Made even worse by failing to do either usually marking you as a social outcast and meaning you weren't going to be invited back out on the ships for the next fishing run.

Yes, when young Africans talk about this they often call it the "Black Tax". It makes the kind of low-level capital accumulation necessary for growing a black middle class almost impossible, outside of people willing to move to the city or to a different country and cut ties with their family - a very difficult and painful thing to do in any culture, but particularly in African cultures. On the other hand, it's good for Malthusian survival.

It used to be the norm in Europe as well, back when subsistence farming was the default occupation.

Yeah my dad was born into a poor family in a fishing-dominated area of Northern England and prettymuch had to bail to Australia to get his family's hands out of his pockets.

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