>Kinship societies are actively hostile to economic growth, because economic growth undermines the basis of kinship: that is why kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead. The funeral is a window into a system of wealth destruction that serves, above all else, to keep people poor

This reasoning is flawed. Consumer spending is not "wealth destruction" -- who makes the fantasy coffins? Who prints the banners? Local businesses!

Ghana is sitting at a 5.6% GDP growth rate; for reference developmental success India is at 6.5%. Ghana's GDP in 2000 was $5B, today it's $82.B. Its per-capita GDP has more than doubled in the same time period.

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JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Consumer spending is not "wealth destruction" -- who makes the fantasy coffins? Who prints the banners? Local businesses!

This is the parable of the broken window [1].

> Ghana is sitting at a 5.6% GDP growth rate

Ghana is a success story in large part due to having made a clear-eyed recovery after its 2015 IMF bailout.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

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nightsd01 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's doubled because it practically couldn't get any worse. Let's see what happens (sadly) now that USAID has been dismantled

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kingofmen 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Consumer spending is not "wealth destruction" -- who makes the fantasy coffins? Who prints the banners? Local businesses!

If the local businesses were instead being hired to dig holes and fill them up again... oh wait, they literally are, except they're also instructed to make very elaborate artworks and put them in the holes before shoveling in the dirt. Anyway: Can you please examine the movement of real resources rather than pieces of paper? No society gets rich by making art which is immediately destroyed.

	▲	card_zero an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There's no good way to measure wealth creation. If people are getting what they want - if there's no extra government tax them to pay for the digging and re-filling of holes, but it's all done freely, out of desire to have it done - then it might be of some value, because they think it is. We can say "but it plainly isn't purposeful", but the same applies to pets, vacations, every kind of art and craft, fancy cuisine, pure mathematics, dance music festivals, religion and all associated economic activity, all sports ... I'll stop there, but the two main points are: firstly, the value in life is about a lot more than moving real resources, or paper, or food and shelter; secondly, nobody knows what it is all about, man. It's hugely a matter of opinion, what's good and worthwhile. Economic activity is perhaps the ongoing process of making guesses about the answers.

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decimalenough 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ghana's GDP per capita is around $2000. It's only a success story because the baseline is so low, and because most of its neighbors are doing even worse.

	▲	kingofmen 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Additionally, this is pretty much the paradigmatic case of that criticism frequently heard on the left in any other context, that GDP is not the same as quality of life. Indeed in this case it's apparently measuring the quality of death.