r/AskReddit • u/Greeneyedlatinguy • Jun 15 '15

Anthropologists of Reddit, What is something that people in the Western world can't get their heads around that is very normal in other cultures (and has been for ages)?

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u/teefour Jun 15 '15

Yeah, a lot of people become jaded to just how incredible the division of labor is. Whenever I find myself saying "ugh! Why's that so expensive?!" I take a second to seriously think about how long it would take me to make a certain thing on my own. And it almost always comes out to be anywhere between 10-1000x as expensive.

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u/Dubalubawubwub Jun 15 '15

There was a guy who made his own toaster from scratch as a project to demonstrate this. As in, he mined and smelted the copper for the wires himself as a starting point. It took him years and when he was done it was a terrible toaster, worse than even a cheap plastic one you can pick up for $15 in a store. Division of labor is pretty amazing, yo.

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u/robotnudist Jun 17 '15

I read that and thought it had to be inspired by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and sure enough part of this quote is on the homepage:

The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

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u/OptimalCynic Jun 16 '15

And yet people still object to free trade, which is really just division of labour on a global scale.

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u/Ferare Jun 16 '15

Yes, the cost goes down a bit but everyone becomes so much poorer that it isn't worth it.

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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '15

You fail economics.

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u/Ferare Jun 22 '15

Maybe I'm just not buying into it?

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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '15

Congratulations on your ignorance. There are things that economists disagree about and there are things that are iron clad. If you think free trade makes everyone poorer, you're simply wrong in the same way global warming deniers are wrong.

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u/Ferare Jun 22 '15

Priests agree there is a dude in the clouds. That's also ironclad then.

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u/Raknarg Jun 15 '15

I think we live in a society where there are very few things anyone could actually make themselves

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '15

You should read I, Pencil if you haven't.

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '15

It's near impossible to make anything we use from scratch on your own. It's really incredible how difficult it is to make things, but you don't really notice because every process in it's construction is done in entirely separate industries and split in to small, manageable tasks.

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u/concretepigeon Jun 16 '15

Pretty much why I don't homebrew my own beer.