Interdependence makes societies MORE resilient, not less. Trust is difficult, even painful—but it helps those around you and those to come. Poor subsistence farmers have a shitty situation cause their evolutionary lineage decided not to go and dependent on one another.
″peasants generally live so close to the subsistence line that it takes little to destroy their livelihoods. From this, he infers a set of economic principles that it would be rational for them to live by. It is important to emphasize that this book was not based on fieldwork, and itself proposed a cross-cultural universalistic model of peasant economic behaviour based upon a set of fixed theoretical principles, not a reading of peasant culture. Firstly, he argued that peasants were “risk averse”, or, put differently, followed a “safety first” principle. They would not adopt risky new seeds or technologies, no matter how promising, because tried and true traditional methods had demonstrated, not promised, effectiveness. This gives peasants an unfair reputation as “traditionalist” when in fact they are just risk averse. Secondly, Scott argues that peasant society provides “subsistence insurance” for its members to tide them over those occasions when natural or man-made disaster strikes.
″
Interdependence makes societies MORE resilient, not less. Trust is difficult, even painful—but it helps those around you and those to come. Poor subsistence farmers have a shitty situation cause their evolutionary lineage decided not to go and dependent on one another.
″peasants generally live so close to the subsistence line that it takes little to destroy their livelihoods. From this, he infers a set of economic principles that it would be rational for them to live by. It is important to emphasize that this book was not based on fieldwork, and itself proposed a cross-cultural universalistic model of peasant economic behaviour based upon a set of fixed theoretical principles, not a reading of peasant culture. Firstly, he argued that peasants were “risk averse”, or, put differently, followed a “safety first” principle. They would not adopt risky new seeds or technologies, no matter how promising, because tried and true traditional methods had demonstrated, not promised, effectiveness. This gives peasants an unfair reputation as “traditionalist” when in fact they are just risk averse. Secondly, Scott argues that peasant society provides “subsistence insurance” for its members to tide them over those occasions when natural or man-made disaster strikes. ″