[levocardia]

>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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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

[haritha-j]

Thank you, TIL about the parable of the broken window. I was thinking the same thing when reading the comments, surely that money would still benefit the economy if say it was invested in the education of a child, but it would also act as a economic multiplier as the child can now contribute more to the economy. But I never knew there was a term for it.

Especially this line really highlights it: > by the 2000s, many Ghanaian hospitals were earning more from storing dead bodies than from treating living patients.

Surely those resources are better spent healing the living.

[kingofmen]

> 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]

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.

[kingofmen]

> If people are getting what they want

"If".

It appears (from this article, I haven't done any exhaustive research) that when the Ghanaians have the option of hiding money from their families and from the funeral expenses, they exercise that option with flair and alacrity. That suggests that they are not getting what they want out of this whole digging activity. And while we cannot read off what is best in life from the stars or the mountains, we can have a look at what people do when they are free to choose without social pressure. It does rather appear that most humans who are free to choose would rather have washing machines and cars than elaborate funerals. Were it not so, then presumably the funerals of the West, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, would drastically outshine what the poverty-stricken Ghanaians can manage. Where are our burials IN SPACE? Our cremation rockets fired into the Sun, "from stardust you came, to stardust your return"? Why do we not hold weeks of elaborate mourning, with professional poets (or rappers if you prefer) hired to extol the virtues of the deceased and laws about "funeral leave" allowing us to sit idle?

[card_zero]

It would be mean of me to link to the Wikipedia article "Space burial" at this point. I think you make some valid points, mainly in the first few sentences.

[decimalenough]

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]

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.

[nightsd01]

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