Keeping it within the family. (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Wile E. Coyote]

Keeping it within the family.

It's an idiom that signals preference for handling people, information, resources or decisions within a close, trusted circle (family), rather than involving outsiders.

Surely a good thing.

You start a small business, who do you trust as an employee, surely your brother, father, sister..........they are going to work hard and not take from the till. If you need someone and know someone already within your close family, it would be madness to do otherwise. Why employ someone from outside, a stranger that you do not know?

You grow the business, you become fairly wealthy, but old and unwell, who will take over? Why, your son of course. Your daughter will help care for you. What could be more natural.

You have kept it all within the family.

[Mick Harper]

This is the big weakness of family firms. You have shown talent by building up and then running a business but what is the likelihood your son will have the same talent? Or any talent at all. True, he won't have to do the building-up part (the difficult bit) but then he hasn't acquired the experience of building up a business (the important bit).

He might recognise this and sell out immediately in which case your operation will survive -- maybe even thrive -- but for some reason we regard this as a dereliction of duty on his part.

The Mafia (and the Ottoman Empire) do it slightly more efficiently by employing a system where any close relative can... um... emerge to do the job.

But perhaps you are speaking in a more personal capacity?

[Wile E. Coyote]

True, what is natural to one person, one culture, can be very unnatural to another. What constitutes family is another conundrum.

As is now well known (Wily missed out on a further education, so only picked up this a few days ago) in 1965, John Hajnal discovered that Europe was divided into distinct areas. West of the so called Hajnal line, the average age of women at first marriage is 24 or more, whilst men married 26 or higher, spouses are relatively close in age (no child brides) and 10% or more of adults never marry at all..........

East of the Hajnal line, the mean age of both sexes at marriage was earlier, spousal age disparity was greater, and marriage is more nearly universal.

The West bit is the unique bit. Marriages typically happen older, the consent of the bride is emphasized, there are taboos around marrying cousins, and men tend to leave and start their own households rather than opt for so called multi-generational living.

In short, in the west "keeping it in the family" in many situations now often feels wrong, unnatural, or strange. We instinctively are much more wary about always "keeping it in the family" where other cultures would view this as normal, natural etc......

We have started acting very unnaturally.

[Mick Harper]

This Hajnal Line is exceptionally interesting (and quite new to me) but it will take me off on a minor detour, I'm afraid. Ask yourself why you're having to dredge up sixty-year old findings.

It's because academics are essentially family firms. This John Hajnal presumably spent his life doing all the donkey work but... there it ended. He had no-one to pass the work on to. There is no mechanism in academia to do this save Hajnal himself becoming senior enough to be given grad students who he can direct to do more Hajnal Line donkey work. But even that will stop when they get their PhD's, and then finally when he retires.

We know why. It would take vast statistical efforts to nail down how (or indeed whether) the Effect works. And there's no obvious pay-off for doing it (especially as sociologists find any kind of statistical work extremely irksome) irrespective of its usefulness as 'knowledge'.

That wouldn't stop people quoting it though whenever it was useful to assume it to be valid. I'm not criticising you here but it is only too likely that policy think tanks would say, "There's no point in doing that.... we're west of the Hajnal Line" and so forth.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

[Mick Harper]

To return to the main theme of this thread, all human societies have been faced with another problem qua 'family firms'. They are too small (and too temporary) to undertake large scale and long-term projects. And there didn't seem anybody else around to do them.

Exceptionally, very successful families--like the Bruggers or the Medici--could provide finance for such things but not the graft at the sharp end. That left the state to do the needful but, as we know, they are better at government than they are at, say, maintaining road networks or guaranteeing grain supplies for the urban millions.

The answer, at first, turned out to be family firms that were not families! The Church, monasteries, knightly orders, city guilds, lordly monopolies--anything that had the essential skeleton of the family firm: the ability to enjoin collective enterprise among individuals through time. None of them worked in the exponential way that was required.

Until the limited liability joint stock company was invented.

[Wile E. Coyote]

The Hajnal line tries to explain why Western culture allows for greater trust in non-family members than other cultures. Why we are more trusting of those outside family.

A western taboo on marrying close relatives (cousins) inhibits the formation and consolidation of tight-knit extended-family networks which are found elsewhere, and so leads to greater co-operation with non-kin.

This greater trusting leads to a morality that applies to all, rather than one morailty towards extended family, and a separate morality that applies to others.

We are therefore more trusting, and much less likely predisposed to keep it all within the family.

[Mick Harper]

[Boreades]

[Mick Harper]

We must not, however, forget that this is just as likely

[Mick Harper]

This is an old AE trick:

[Grant]

My X feed was full of idiots attacking cousin marriages amongst brown people, but unaware that it's never been illegal in Britain.

Darwin married his first cousin, thus keeping a big chunk of the Wedgwood fortune within the family, and producing a line of scientists which continues to the present day.

[Mick Harper]

However, there is a difference between it not being illegal (good) and it being a cultural practice (presumably bad).