Niccolo Leo Caldararo

Human ecological intervention and the role of forest fires in human ecology

The present text is a summary of research on the relationship between forest fires and human activities. Numerous theories have been created to explain changes in forests during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, and a general understanding has developed in the past 50 years regarding natural fire regimes. The present summary is directed to assess the validity of these theories. A re-analysis of the literature argues that the intense forest fires we experience today are an artifact of human intervention in forest ecology, especially by the reduction of herbivores and are relatively recent, approximately 100,000-250,000 BP. The history of fire, especially in the context of the increased dominance of humans, has produced a progressively fire-adapted ecology, which argues for human-free wildlife areas and against prescribed burns under many circumstances.

Primitive and Modern Economics: Derivatives, Liquidity, Value, Panic and Crises, A Uniformitarian View

This paper investigates aspects of economics in the context of complex society and the nature of investment devices in cross-cultural comparison, placing special attention on the new global issues of money, hedge fund contracts, derivatives and other risk-spreading concepts and practices. The function of these are compared to the behavior of the inventors and practitioners in other cultures. Similarities are noted with religious formulators and the process of conversion and the operation of the market and credit paralleled with the concept of Mana. This work provides a context for understanding contemporary human economic behavior. Novel structures of symbolic worth are associated with individual presentation and performance. Clearly concepts of value and credit have been changing in modern financial culture. Indeed, they have been expressing forms that have traditionally been associated with primitive economics. An understanding of the current financial and social losses resulting from the subprime collapse is presented along with a means to counter it.

Caching, Money, Magic, Derivatives, Mana and Modern Finance

This paper investigates the nature of investment devices in cross-cultural comparison, placing special attention on the new global issues of hedge fund contracts and side letters, derivatives and other risk spreading concepts and practices. The function of these are compared to the behavior of the inventors and practitioners in other cultures. Similarities are noted with religious formulators and the process of conversion and the operation of the market and credit paralleled with the concept of Mana. This work will provide readers with a context to understand contemporary human economic behavior. Novel structures of symbolic worth are associated with individual presentation and performance. It is obvious that concepts of value and credit have been changing in modern financial culture. What is interesting is that they have been expressing forms that have traditionally been associated with primitive economics. As recruitment activities such behavior takes on similar functions to a number of eusocial animals. Financial behavior then functions in the performance of various strategies in a similar fashion as the good sense model of sexual selection of Darwin (1871).Behavioral ecological theory and many economic models derived from this theory are based on optimization and rational decisions, recent research and that contained in this paper undermine such assumptions. A view toward understanding the current loss of social credit resulting from the subprime collapse is presented along with a means to counter it.

On the Use of Contemporary “Hunters and Gatherers” as Models for Prehistoric Patterns of Wealth Distribution

Your February 2010 editorial on wealth transfers and inequality (Aldenderfer 2010) notes an important area of research that we should find of great interest, especially with the growing inequality in modern industrial societies. In the recent study published in Science by Borgerhoff Mulder et al. (2009), the authors make some assertions about wealth inequalities associated with adaptive strategies and inheritance patterns that they assume are related. The study uses a number of contemporary social groups—the Ache are one—that it describes as hunter-gatherer. This characterization is not generally accepted by most anthropologists, as the Ache derive only a third of their livelihood from foraging, grow crops, have domesticated animals, and live in or near mission posts, where they receive food from missionaries. This is documented by Hawkes, Hill, and O’Connell (1982) and Hill et al. (1987). The disparity of this one group from the definition given it by the authors is not unique and limits severely the reliability of their work. The study is, nonetheless, still a useful attempt at providing some comparative data on inheritance within contemporary societies. Rather than demonstrating the specific inheritance patterns and their results in producing inequality of wealth, the authors have produced a relative chart of the effects of contact and trade with certain dominant economic and political societies in the past 400 years. The groups they are using have not lived in isolation and are not idealized types but the product of assimilation and hegemony. It is unfortunate that the authors did not include some archaeological assessments of the use of resources or a more thorough critique of the literature on hunter and gatherers, like that produced by Sahlins (1972); see, for example, McCarthy (1957), Bose (1964), and Lee (1965). The authors’ main mistake is to assume that today’s surviving peoples who practice various adaptive strategies associated with traditional societies are representatives of the social organization and cultures described as particular to those strategies in the past. Such an idea of the “frozen-intime” primitive was more characteristic of nineteenth-century historians and missionaries and is not accepted by most of today’s anthropologists. Implicit in the study is the idea that institutions, represented by inheritance patterns, define today’s wealth inequality among the people of their sample. The authors appear to believe that there have been no outside influences in marriage and kinship and that ideas of property are indigenous, functional, and intact. What this study does tell us is how dominant and powerful have been the effects of borrowing in producing fairly uniform patterns of inequality over the past 400 years. It would have been interesting if the authors had tried to use a variety of time-referenced data, especially reports on wealth distribution from antique sources—Greco-Roman and Chinese as well as other ethnohistorical data from the past 400 years on the same people—to determine whether wealth inequality had changed and, if it had, to measure the degree of this penetration of distribution variance.

Some Effects of the Use of Ultrasonic Devices in Conservation and the Question of Standards for Cleaning Objects

This article discusses the implications of sonochemical research for the treatment of antiquities composed of organic or inorganic materials. It provides a review of some of the present uses of ultrasonic devices and contrasts these empirical applications with the scientific data on how the observed effects are interpreted as cleaning versus damage.

Empty Housing in America, Housing Needs, Shadow Banks and the Sharing Economy

The credit crisis has revealed economic inequalities across the world, yet it has emphasized transitions in the way middle class and working class people have handled wealth and consumption. This has mostly been focused in the press on changes in home ownership but has had dramatic effects in how and where people live as well as in their use of automobiles and their living spaces. This paper examines some of these changes in a general context of the degradation of the quality of life of Americans.

The Maori, behavior, modern diets and colorectal cancers.

Variation in diet and the rates of colorectal cancers have confounded researchers in recent years. Comparisons of populations in different geographic locations and of different ethnic origins have shown considerable differences in disease frequency, location and relation to diet. This paper revisits an earlier comparison of Maori rates of disease and diet based on data from 20 years ago with surprising changes in disease rates today.

Bitcoin: Rube Goldberg Machine, Gigantic Distraction, Entertainment, Ripoff or Money?

A means of exchange and preservation of value is likely as old as our species. Global economic trade is often argued to be as old as trade. The question of the nature of the exchange, of who creates the value and how it is regulated is the issue. While tin from England may have reached Sumeria 4,000 years ago, or Phoenicians’ ships entered the Africa area of Cape Palmas at about the same time, the problem of exchange is a central issue. Ideas of money are as diverse as the cultures that produce them, yet today global trade is experiencing modifications of the satisfaction of exchange with new platforms of electronic money. Blockchain technology is touted as foolproof, such claims have appeared in the past with various financial innovations. Such abstractions of value may not be new, but as a product of technology and complexity they create psychological novelty and a form of mesmerizing fetishism. Manias of value are also not new, from stock (South Seas Corporation) to tulips. The form of the mania is defined and expressed culturally but is often associated with technological change and distance of exchange of partners and clients. Inequality is also a feature, embedded in economic and technological disruption of trade and exchange. The role of redistribution and taxation are essential in maintaining social credit and equality.

Preliminary Observations on the Behavior of Feral Chickens on the Island of Kauai; Reflections on Domestication as Complexity

Two study sessions of fieldwork on the Hawaiian island of Kauai were undertaken in 2012 and 2014 on the behavior of the feral chickens on the island. The inquiry was directed to understand the nature of social organization given the animals had no natural predators and were largely ignored by the present population. Comparisons with other vertebrate populations with out natural predators was considered.

Recovery, Retirement, Central Bank Intervention and the Bentzel Effect or Productivity

While the unemployment rate has continued to drop across the developed world and the participation rate edged up slightly, wage stagnation continues to plague recovery. This is exacerbated by the lack of investment and a dropping productivity. As bonds and the cost of borrowing have stagnated due to central bank intervention, lending has also slowed yet equities have risen substantially. Pension funds have been forced, along with most savers, to invest in increasingly risky financial vehicles. Modigliani (1986) argued that the basis for productivity growth is the Bentzel Effect that implies that younger cohorts have larger lifetime resources than older ones, and their savings are larger than the dissaving of the poorer retired cohorts. This Effect cannot work in the context of poor job growth, low paying jobs and stagnated investment in research and development.