The link is here, here is the abstract:
Gypsies believe the lower half of the human body is invisibly polluted, that supernatural defilement is physically contagious, and that non-Gypsies are spiritually toxic. I argue that Gypsies use these beliefs, which on the surface regulate their invisible world, to regulate their visible one. They use superstition to create and enforce law and order. Gypsies do this in three ways. First, they make worldly crimes supernatural ones, leveraging fear of the latter to prevent the former. Second, they marshal the belief that spiritual pollution is contagious to incentivize collective punishment of antisocial behavior. Third, they recruit the belief that non-Gypsies are supernatural cesspools to augment such punishment. Gypsies use superstition to substitute for traditional institutions of law and order. Their bizarre belief system is an efficient institutional response to the constraints they face on their choice of mechanisms of social control.
Steve Levitt blogged the paper here. Relative to Peter, I am much more likely to find social institutions inefficient. I think individual decisions are often inefficient for behavioral reasons and furthermore individual norms often produce bad or dysfunctional outcomes when multiplied at the social level. Historically, most of human history has been lived under conditions of extreme poverty and misery, a warning sign of potential inefficiency.
I don't have any personal opinion about gypsies (about whom I know little), but just from reading Peter's paper (or abstract) I thought he should have called it "Why gypsies are inefficient." I received the impression that a more efficient set of gypsy norms would do more to encourage integration and education, especially when gypsies live in wealthier, freer countries. I don't doubt that some of the norms are partially functional, relative to the poverty, but some of the norms also seem to support the poverty.
I was unable to find data on gypsy per capita income or rates of assimilation, but I was searching only in English. Do any of you know?
http://roma.undp.sk/
I’d name the paper, “Why Gypsies are Gypsies.” They do not assimilate or even attempt to appear to assimilate.
I was sationed at Ramstein AB, West Germany (Cold War) in 1975 (I was four years old). Gypsies would “camp” their caravans on the outskirts of Ramstein village; and in the forest along the “strasse” between Landstuhl (US Army hospital) and Kaiserslautern (big US Army compound). You can imagine what went on (for money) in the woods. That was the only place I know of that was “off limits” to US servicemen.
These are old concepts, that religious beliefs invoke supernatural punishment to supplement social punishment, and make contact with outsiders negative to strengthen internal bonds.
Having read the paper, it does sound like the Roma system is inefficient, except for the purposes of keeping the group together. Leaving aside the psychic benefits of group identity, it sounds like the Roma would be better off if they abandoned their culture and integrated.
And the paper doesn’t make any attempt that I could see to argue that these cultural practices offer benefits that outweigh the costs in an objective way (eg what are Roma’s average life expectancy compared with a similar group without these cultural rules?) This might be because it’s too difficult to collect this sort of data on marginal groups, which is fair enough, but does mean that the hypothesis that cultural ruies are efficient is unproven (and I don’t think Peter Leeson explicitly argues that anyway).
Isn’t “inefficient” a bit of a relative term here? The social norms, superstitions, and punishments may be inefficient in the “Western” sense, in that the culture may exclude outsiders such that it thwarts their own educational attainment, wealth, etc, but if we consider the Roma as being “efficient”, then they are in that their culture and spirituality preserves their unique way of life. So they are actually incredibly efficient in preserving their culture, nomadic lifestyle, religion, language, and not having their cultural identity “tainted” by outsiders.
I think I’d be more interested to hear the Roma’s opinions on quality of life, wealth, and education for people outside of their culture, than to hear “us” talking about “them”.
“I argue that Gypsies use these beliefs, which on the surface regulate their invisible world, to regulate their visible one.”
you mean humans use their odd beliefs to navigate their moral and natural world? (overwrought eye roll goes here).
What? Just a few days ago, you referred “sacrifice and stigma.” Go back and read it.
Making extreme demands is a way of keeping cohesion. Creating artificial barriers is a why of preserving identity. Orthodox Jews using food laws for that; it prevents them from dining with the Other.
Why don’t Gypsies assimiliate? They do! And once they assimiliate, they disappear into the larger population and cease to be Gypsies; they culturally disappear. All we see left over are Gypsies who don’t assimiliate.
Same with the tribes of Israel. Their kingdom was crushed, and those Jews were absorbed by surrrounding populations. Their descendents are still out there somewhere in the Middle East, but they are no longer Jews.
Gellner would have fun tearing apart the relativist subtext of this article. He and others will roll around in their graves cursing a naive economist who is only now rediscovering that magic is the rational choice in premodern micro-society. The tiny populations of Romani who resist modernity will need to intensify their innovation of good luck charms. But if their activities are illegal it’s blindingly obvious that state legal institutions cannot give support to their social cooperation. More like tautology than analysis.
The gypsy phenomena of cultural inefficiency is no different than the effect of the Catholic church on science and economic progress during the middle ages.
You do not have to look at the Roma for the effect of culture or religion on scientific development or economic progress.
To add to ad hominem, I think it’s hilarious who Leeson would always choose to thank for the supposed helpful suggestions “and conversation” — you know, Levitt, Shleifer, Becker, Posner…
The problem is that simply acknowledging this kind of research perpetuates it. Getting into MR and Levitt’s blog helps his career. He writes about pirates and gypsies and the economic rationale for deciding whether or not to give up belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, and people latch on to it as brilliant because it’s humorous and just cute enough to hold their attention.
Anastasia, Chris, but if you just say “well they might have another definition of efficient”, then it’s boring, it’s a theory that explains every possible change in social rules, and thus none of them.
If the goal of Roma culture is maintaining a distinct cultural identity then we can compare more objective outcomes of Roma, like life expectancy and income, with those of other groups that have maintained a distinct cultural identity (Orthodox Jews, Jehovah Witnesses, spring to mind) to estimate how efficient the Roma practices are. But if the hypothesis is that it’s about maintaining Roma culture specifically, then what is there interesting to say?
As for prefering to hear the Roma’s opinions on quality of life, wealth, and education for people outside of their culture, Anastasia, don’t you find it interesting to try to imagine what a different culture is like? Don’t you think that these conversations tell you a lot about “us”, as well as “them”? I do like hearing other people comment on my culture, but I also like discussing other cultures with people who share similar (but never identical!) outlooks to me. It’s great to live in a world where I can do both.
From the Guardian in 2004:
“In the Czech Republic, 75% of Roma children are educated in schools for people with learning difficulties, and 70% are unemployed (compared with a national rate of 9%). In Hungary, 44% of Roma children are in special schools, while 74% of men and 83% of women are unemployed. In Slovakia, Roma children are 28 times as likely to be sent to a special school than non-Roma; Roma unemployment stands at 80%.”
The Roma apparently tend to suffer from dyslexia to a high degree, although that seems to be balanced by their musical skill. The late classical pianist Balint Vazsonyi told me that in the top Budapest conservatory where he studied, there were Gypsies who never learned to read music, but somehow made their way through this rigorous course of classical training on sheer musical ability.
Gypsies are often compared to Jews because of their victim status. Yet, in many ways, they are the anti-Jews. The part-Jewish, part-Gypsy American author Isabella Fonseca reported:
“The Gypsies have no heroes. There are no myths of origin, of a great liberation, of the founding of a ‘nation,’ of a promised land. . . . They have no monuments, no anthem, no ruins, and no Book. Instead of a sense of a great historical past, they have a collective unease, and an instinctive cleaving to the tribe.”
In their defense, Gypsy criminals are less violent than most criminals, preferring swindles to brute force. Still, the National Geographic reporter Peter Godwin, sent to write a major story about the persecution of the Roma (NG, April 2001), was, in a scene reminiscent of anti-American correspondent Robert Fisk’s famous encounter with a Muslim mob, beaten up and mugged by a gang of gypsies he was trying to help.
Further, Gypsies don’t seem to kidnap children anymore. Historically, their most famous victim was the unworldly economist Adam Smith:
“At the age of 4 he was kidnapped by a band of Gypsies, though prompt action by his uncle soon effected his rescue. ‘He would have made, I fear, a poor Gypsy,’ commented John Rae, his main biographer.”
Gypsy culture trains its children from a very early age to be economic parasites. The Gypsies possess a classic “in-group morality.” While extremely loyal to their clan, their culture inculcates in them an almost sociopathic disregard for the property rights of outsiders.
That’s why there’s never been a Zionist or separatist movement among Gypsies. Jews could successfully start their own national homeland, away from their persecutors, but the Gypsies can’t imagine living in their own country with no productive non-Gypsies to leech off.
By the way, in the movie “Borat,” the scenes in Borat’s home village were actually filmed in a Gypsy village. From USA Today:
The name of this remote Romanian village means “mud,” and that’s exactly what angry locals are throwing at comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.
Cohen used Glod’s Gypsies as stand-ins for Kazakhs in his runaway hit movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Now offended villagers are threatening to sue the film’s producers for paying them a pittance to put farm animals in their homes and perform other crude antics.
Residents and local officials in the hardscrabble hamlet 85 miles northwest of Bucharest said Tuesday they were horrified and humiliated to learn their abject poverty and simple ways were ridiculed for a movie now raking in millions at box offices worldwide.
“We thought they came here to help us — not mock us,” said Dana Luca, 40, sweeping a manure-stained street lined with shabby homes of crumbling brick and corrugated iron sheeting.
“We haven’t got anything here. We haven’t got running water. We can’t even bathe,” she said. “We are poor people, but we are still people.”
Nicolae Staicu, leader of the 1,670 Gypsies, or Roma, who eke out a living in one of the most impoverished corners of Romania, said he and other officials would meet with a public ombudsman on Wednesday to map out a legal strategy against Cohen and Borat distributor 20th Century Fox.
Staicu accused the producers of paying locals just $3.30-$5.50, misleading the village into thinking the movie would be a documentary, refusing to sign proper filming contracts and enticing easily exploited peasants into performing crass acts.
Only five villagers have jobs at a nearby sanatorium and a stone quarry, Staicu said. The rest weave baskets, grow apples, pears and plums, gather mushrooms in the dense Carpathian Mountain forests rising above the town, or raise a few scrawny chickens.
With no gas heating or indoor plumbing, most keep warm with wood stoves and drink from wells. Horse-drawn carts far outnumber automobiles on unpaved, badly potholed roads, and mangy stray dogs growl and snap at strangers. Acrid fires smolder in trash piles on the outskirts of the village, and children — their clothing worn and torn — play in yards littered with stumps, scrap metal and other bric-a-brac.
“These people are poor and they were tricked by people more intelligent than us,” he said….
The mood in Glod, meanwhile, was tense and volatile, with crowds of angry, shouting villagers repeatedly gathering around reporters.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2006-11-14-romanians-borat_x.htm
Agnostic,
I think what economists could, theoretically, contribute to cultural anthropology is a higher degree of hard-headedness and political incorrectness.
An economist could write a good paper about the economics of grifting using Gypsies. For example, why do Gypsies in Europe so often run their scams at train stations? Probably because that’s where you can find lots of naive American, Japanese, and Australian tourists to prey upon who view Gypsies through romantic lenses supplied by Victor Hugo and Cher.
Or, what’s the maximum density of Gypsies in a district before locals wise up to their home repair scams?
What has been the impact of admitting Eastern European countries, with their large numbers of Gypsies, to the common labor market of the EU? Have many Gypsies moved west in search of richer pockets to pick, or have they been content to live off the dole in their traditional domains?
Leeson, however, mostly avoids the specifics of Roma criminality, euphemizing it as merely being on the fuzzy edges of the host society’s laws. So, what good are economists if they act as soft-headed and fearful of offending political correctness as cultural anthropologists?
John Updike wrote:
Though her six years of living in Roussillon may have left her with “the same attraction to their intractable difference,† readers of her account, if this reviewer is an example, will be cured of any faint desire they may ever have entertained to live like a Gypsy.
Evidently it’s a miserable life, for the shiftless, jobless, largely illiterate men, and twice as bad for the homebound women, generally married in their teens to other teens, who will bully, betray, tyrannize, and most likely beat them. As for their children, they stay up so late watching television and hanging out on the street that they are usually too sleepy to go to school; Gypsies must be the only significant ethnic group in France that actively discourages literacy and encourages truancy. Compared with them, the embattled immigrants from the Muslim world are models of aspiration to bourgeois order and enlightenment.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/10/060410crbo_books1#ixzz0v6kxP9wg
Just for balance, there are some economists doing good case study work and writing ethnographies of the business world:
The Ostroms obviously
Liebowitz’s work on Microsoft (with Margolis) and on the internet economy
Art De Vany’s work on Hollywood
Hard to think of more off the top of my head. If it’s there, it clearly doesn’t get promoted — and that must only be because there isn’t much of an audience to promote it to. We live in such a dorky decadent culture today that Levitt would rather blog on a rehash of decades-old work rather than learn about what the Ostroms have discovered.
Yuri Slezkine held up Gypsies (and the similar but unrelated Irish Travellers) as examples of “Mercurian” cultures, though of the illiterate variety. I would have liked if he had spent more time on them.
Very interesting but not true.
The idea of obsession with cleanliness is laughable. I have seen what it really is like inside Gypsy huts, caravans, tents, etc. Nothing is clean. Nothing.
The idea of sexual morality/cleanliness is a joke. Sex of all kinds, including oral, is for sale by Gypsy girls and women all over Europe, and it is cheap.
The whole story may apply to a fictional and isolated tribe somewhere. Not in real life.
In the former Czechoslovakia, it can be said that welfare system has seriously hindered integration of Gypsy population. For a long time, welfare payments would be paid for every child in family, which was an incentive for the Roma women to have many children; for 6 and more children, the income from welfare would be higher than the average salary. The Roma culture does not value education or social mobility, and so the price paid for such population growth (no education and no good jobs for the overwhelmed mothers) was seen to be quite low and acceptable.
Nevertheless, many EU states move in the direction from “pay welfare for every child” to “pay welfare only for the first two, maximally three children, and upon condition that these children go to school regularly, and limit the welfare period by time”. This is mostly motivated by the fact that the class of permanent welfare recipients (not just Gypsy) outgrew the abilities of the sclerotic economies to sustain such generous systems. We will see what kind of effect will that have on the total fertility rate.
Albert: indeed the Gypsies consider “us” spiritually unclean, in the same way that a pious Bedouin from the desert considers infidels ritually unclean (najis), even though it is him who wipes his … behind … with his hand, and not the unclean infidels.
It has nothing to do with tidiness of living space. It is rather a stance that the “others” are cursed and you’re not supposed to touch them, otherwise you risk a curse too. In case of Gypsy, the belief is explicitly racist against non-Gypsies (of any color). In fact, intermarriage of a Gypsy and a white may result in shunning of the entire family.
“Justaguy: How could you do a comparison like that outside of the specific historical situations that the group in question is?
Good point, you’d probably need to take measures of income and life expectancy relative to the average people in that specific historical situation”
No, that’s not my point at all. You cant treat a group of people as a discrete entity and analyze its well being apart from the large scale political structures that it is within. A study of life expectancy of Hasidic Jews in Germany during the 1930s that located the cause of the drastic drop in life expectancy in Hasidic culture rather than the Holocaust wouldn’t really work, would it?
Romani are not on an island in the middle of the pacific, they interact with larger social systems. While I wouldn’t suggest that those larger systems are absolutely determinant, any analysis that doesn’t include their influence is absurd. That makes comparative analysis of different minority populations difficult – if there are differences in life expectancies between Romani and Uighurs is that due to their social organization or due to the different political situations that they face? You can’t really control for such a thing in a comparison.
Justaguy, I am well aware that things like the Hololcaust would influence life expectancy in a way unrelated to culture. That’s why I said you’d want to control for political climate. In the case of mass genocide, it would be probably easiest to skip those cases entirely. In other words I agree with you entirely that a culture cannot be abstracted from it’s surroundings. But a good attempt to do so can produce interesting results, much more interesting than just stopping with the concepts that we can get by just talking about incomparability.
I don’t suppose anyone in European nations with both gypsy issues and Islamic supremacist issues has given any thought to the idea of trying to pit the two groups against each other?
Converse_shoes – of course you can’t really ever properly control, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying to answer the question. It would be interesting if there were no differences in life expectancy, or incomes, between groups that , and it would be interesting if there was a consistent relationship during time (for those groups not facing genocide of course).
Honestly everything written here is bullshit and whoever wrote the paper has no real knowledge of Rroma culture. If you live almost anywhere in the world you have felt the impact of Rroma culture on music and dance. But Roma are not solely musicians traditional trades included blacksmithing wagon making and repair and in modern times auto parts car repair as well as many hundreds of other occupations including farming, most Rroma today are not nomadic and even in the previous centuries many Rroma were non nomadic. Many Rroma who travel today are not even necessarily practicing a nomadic lifestyle they are seeking for work like so many poor people around the world. It is not true that the Rroma people collectively choose to be anti social or are inferior these old racist myths have been thrown around for many groups of people. There are various tribes of Rroma with different languages though many Rroma don’t speak them any more and exclusively speak the language of their native country, this makes it very hard to make generalizations about Rroma be they positive or negative, they will probably not be true. The statement that the entire Rroma people from hard working adults young college students babies and elders who survived and often fought in WW2 have some how brought upon themselves this snobbery racist violence disrimination and segregation is as ridiculous and deplorable as saying that the other victims of the holocaust, like the Jews somehow had it comingIt is amazing to see how strong the backlash would be against an anti Jewish comment in public. Anti Rroma comments are apparently just fine.
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