The Healthy Upperclass

Is being healthy a conscious decision? Does it result primarily from individual irrationality and insufficient incentives to be healthy? If you answer a definite "yes" to both questions, then you might think there is some logic in Esther Dyson's hail of the business enterprise of connecting health to social status.

And why not indeed, social status might motivate people to stay healthy. If I can flash my fancy card around, avoid queues, have free WiFi in waiting rooms, enjoy special treatments, luxurious air-port lounges and personal phone lines to my medical service, why wouldn't I want to be healthy. It is a double benefit - one's both healthy and socially "rewarded"... Assumed social inequality is acceptable and non-problematic and I would be the person to enjoy such benefits.

1997 "Gattaca" with Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman represent a pretty good idea of what a social status fixation on health would look like. A novel technology and complete regulatory control enable a precise identification of genetic information. So by just scanning somebody's DNA, it could be determined if that person would be a healthy and strong one or would be liable to all kinds of diseases. The genetic scan is used for a total segregation of society into "valids" and "in-valids", where the second group is a social underclass, living in ghettos and acquiring only cleaners' jobs. Even if the example seems a bit exaggerated for the business entrepreneurship of connecting health and social class, it bears fictional relevance. Some people are not consciously unhealthy.

For one, I would like to agree that incentives and encouragement are a good thing: a free yoga class or gym membership as well as some discounts on organic food are excellent initiatives. Creating a "healthy" high class blows the matter out of proportion. What I mainly wondered about is: healthy people usually don't take pills, most would not train excessively (at least five times a week?!) and are not to be frequently found in doctors' waiting rooms. Or is it about the less-healthy of the healthy that Esther Dyson refers to?

By the way: no space travel for "in-valids".

End of Nomadism?

(Complementary to the Land Reform post)

The Cambridge-based "Environmental and Cultural Conservation in Inner Asia" (ECCIA) project aimed to evaluate the different institutions and their influence on the pastoral economy in Russia, China and Mongolia. The summary of results was given by Sneath in the Science Journal and the book of Humphrey and Sneath with all details was published soon after that.

The grassland environment of Inner Asia, which is an area "seven times the size of Germany" is shared between the three countries. The utilization patterns based on different institutions are dissimilar. While the Mongolians were mobile pastoralists (nomads) mostly living in tents and moving around to different pastures, the Russians had agricultural collectives, which operated with heavy machinery and the Chinese created People's Communes in the 1950s, collectivizing the pastoralists.

Satellite images were used to evaluate pasture degradation in different administrations regimes and show that there is much more degradation on the Russian side of the grassland than on the Mongolian side. Reports also compare 75% pasture degradation in China to only 9% in Mongolia. The conclusions of these findings point to the benefits of mobile systems of pastoral land use. Mobile pastoralism, which has its roots in nomadism, is actually the most sustainable, efficient and well-coordinated pastoral method and is compatible with many different social and economic systems.

In "Revisiting the Commons", Ostrom uses Sneath's article as an illustration of how "both government ownership and privatization are themselves subject to failure in some instances". The Mongolian case is the positive example of traditional small group resource management and the Chinese administration has recognized its merits, implementing institutional changes which would allow more sustainable pastoral land use.