Re: [Pen-l] Excellent article on Jared Diamond and the New Yorker

[Michael Perelman <michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Wouldn't it be fair to say that these societies have a different kind of 
complexity, rather than less complexity? I wrote this in Steal This Idea:

Edgar Anderson, who was associated with Missouri Botanical Garden of St. 
Louis, during the last 5,000 years, modern society has not domesticated a 
single plant that primitive cultures had not already used.  He pointed out 
that traditional cultures had already managed to discover all five natural 
sources of caffeine: coffee, tea, the cola plant, cacao, yerba mate and its 
relatives (Anderson 1952, pp. 132-33).



On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 02:41:01PM -0700, raghu wrote:
> 
> 
> While acknowledging the truth of this statement, is it nevertheless
> not true that industrial societies are orders of magnitude bigger,
> more interconnected and more complex than tribal cultures? In the same
> way that a large factory is more complex than a garage workshop.
> 
> It seems to me that the danger lies in translating "more complex" into
> "superior" or "better".
> -raghu.
> 

-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
michaelperelman.wordpress.com
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