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For the American Natives, when the landscape was lush and the population was low, almost all time was spent in leisure. Then settlers came and made farms which
by jl2718 8y ago
For the American Natives, when the landscape was lush and the population was low, almost all time was spent in leisure. Then settlers came and made farms which were massively more productive, but they had to work a lot more because they were feeding a city of people doing other things. In the city, people can’t farm, so they have to buy food and shelter by inventing goods and services to trade for it which previously had no value. Then in these markets too, productivity increases so that a small number of people are working very hard to provide a low-value product to a large number of people. As productivity increases, so must scale, and workers are displaced, who must then find a way to sustain themselves by creating a new product that is even less necessary to survival and well-being.
This basic economic cycle is immutable regardless of the political system or label you place on it, and I believe that Keynes was a charlatan to deny it. A time traveler from the past might assume that we are all in some kind of penal colony being forced to do absolutely nothing and stressed out about random punishments for meaningless transgressions.
There is one thing that breaks the cycle: population decline. It was the plague that broke the pointless misery of the feudal system. In our world, even voluntary population decline is considered such a crisis that leaders are eager to sacrifice all forms of sustainability for any kind of growth. Unwise.
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoWow. It's almost like humans are governed by the same rules as algae blooms and predator-prey systems, where unsustainable growth causes total collapse on a timescale somewhat longer than any individual's life.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoWe are and we aren’t. Both the society and the social creature are co-evolving so the carrying capacity land has for a human can change dramatically due to culture. Of course there is a minimum caloric basis but the world can produce much more than subsistence calories for 10 billion people and has for a long time. Just in terms of murder and calories we are actually no longer constrained by predator/prey. For now.
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoThe long timescales of anthropogenic climate change and ecosystem collapse suggest that this claim is a hypothesis which will take, at minimum, thousands of years to validate.
- browsersetting 8y agoFor the American Natives, when the landscape was lush and the population was low, almost all time was spent in leisure. I would heartily recommend reading anything about the native american peoples written in this millennium, the world you’re imagining never existed.
- jl2718 8y ago“Sapiens” or “Tribes”. It’s very clear.
- jl2718 8y agoDespite the utter uselessness of this comment, there is some merit in the sense that there are differing opinions from reputable sources. Thus I will present my second-person account of the Amish. They work very hard and what they do is very physically demanding. But most of their work is of their own choosing, with some small fraction required for sustenance. The women knit more quilts than they know what to do with them (unfortunately exploited by charity scams). They cut down trees to make new furniture just because. Kids make a game out of collecting rocks from the fields. I get the sense that it’s pleasurable and community-oriented. All Amish young adults must spend at least two years living in the ‘english’ world and decide whether to return. The vast majority do. Tech workers might happily pay for such an experience. Is that leisure? Well, sort of. The point is that it’s optional and uncoerced. Make your own conclusion. I’m sure you can find a differing opinion, but I don’t care to. This is direct from someone I know very well.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoI don’t really think of Amish as American Natives. The Amish are actually an example of hypercivilization, not indigenous culture. They took all of the learnings from civilization and edited, edited, edited. They use even the most modern technologies if they are deemed useful to their civilization. It’s more like Western Society, gameified, than a pre-colonial society.
- jl2718 8y agoNote: I am not suggesting population decline as a solution. I'm not even disputing population increase a policy. I am lightly suggesting that unsustainable policies are generally unwise, but mostly just trying to frame this problem in terms of basic economic history. In this context, it seems that the vision of egalitarian leisure utopia fueled by industrial over-efficiency is unprecedented, although something more like that is observed in short duration with basic resource over-abundance.