@sebastianG @LeeBailey How about this: “Every population must have a reasonably

http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/02/mitt_romney_is_living_every_social_scientists_nightmare @sebastianG @LeeBailey How about this: “Every population must have a reasonably uniform set of rights and correlative obligations, necessary to perpetuate the individual, familial, tribal, informal and formal institutional orders, which in turn makes planning, cooperation, a division of knowledge and labor, and conflict resolution possible. This portfolio of rights and obligations is largely unstated, and exists as manners, ethics. morals, rituals and traditions – all transmitted through imitation and training. This portfolio is generally called culture: the soft institutions that are habituated by a population. And as a rich and complex web of rights and obligations, many of which make assumptions about the natural world, and our relationship to it, changing these webs has infinite consequences, some of which are beneficial, and some of which are not. But the similarities that unite these rights and obligations generally impeded whatever changes we seek to impose upon that system of unstated rights and obligations.The written law generally codifies these unstated rights and obligations. Regulatory law then seeks to clarify them. Political or legislative law then seeks to alter them in order to grant privileges, rents and transfers. Some portfolios of rights and obligations accelerate cooperation, competition, a division of knowledge and labor, and provide a barrier against rent seeking and corruption. Some portfolios of rights and obligations inhibit cooperation, competition, a division of knowledge and labor, and provide a breeding ground for rent seeking and corruption. Every time an individual forgoes the opportunity for personal, familial, and tribal consumption by respecting someone else’s rights, whether individual or communal, it is a cost to him or her. To respect individual property rights, to avoid corruption and rent seeking, is an extremely challenging and culturally difficult thing to accomplish.These unstated, unwritten portfolios of rights and obligations are the most expensive infrastructure we can build. And they are resistant to change, and particularly to change that is not obviously useful to individual participants. The very idea that we must break family inbreeding and grant women property rights in order to reduce corruption at all levels of society, is not only foreign, but antithetical to some of our largest civilizations – which have retained familial or tribal priority. When by contrast, we understand, that human beings do like to consume. But the majority of people feel alienated by consumption and the dissolution of the family, tribe and nation. It is this conflict between what is necessary to create the productive and prosperous society, and the human desire to be part of a pack or tribe, that is impossible to solve with our current institutions. And it appears we cannot have it both ways.