That's a result of the replacement of local tribal communities with a widely extended market. But when the world was all local tribal communities, the chances of your being able to experience a wide variety of cuisines were pretty minimal; few people could travel to different tribal communities, or learn to hunt and gather in new environments. Look at how many millennia it took Homo sapiens to colonize the entire habitable world to get a sense of how much travel people did.
The ability to hunt and gather as a lifestyle rests on unclaimed land that can easily be accessed; the ability to be treated as a welcome guest of a community rests on small tribes that can easily be visited. But both are purely transitional phenomena that exist because there's a disequilibrium between the Promethean West and the rest of the world. The long-run equilibrium is for everyone to be incorporated into a global market economy . . . or if the Soviet Union hadn't run into the economic calculation problem, it might have been into a global bureaucracy. I prefer the market economy; it's more hospitable to diverse communities of interest. Indeed, the market monocultures of the twentieth century were massively helped along by government promotion of monopoly and cartelization; they would not have been nearly as sustainable without rent-seeking.
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zvi and
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Date: 2010-04-03 04:41 pm (UTC)The ability to hunt and gather as a lifestyle rests on unclaimed land that can easily be accessed; the ability to be treated as a welcome guest of a community rests on small tribes that can easily be visited. But both are purely transitional phenomena that exist because there's a disequilibrium between the Promethean West and the rest of the world. The long-run equilibrium is for everyone to be incorporated into a global market economy . . . or if the Soviet Union hadn't run into the economic calculation problem, it might have been into a global bureaucracy. I prefer the market economy; it's more hospitable to diverse communities of interest. Indeed, the market monocultures of the twentieth century were massively helped along by government promotion of monopoly and cartelization; they would not have been nearly as sustainable without rent-seeking.