I think this is quite a rosy view of being a hunter gatherer or a subsistence farmer. From what I've read, there's like, a LOT of murder in existing hunter gath

I think this is quite a rosy view of being a hunter gatherer or a subsistence farmer. From what I've read, there's like, a LOT of murder in existing hunter gatherer societies. And back when everyone was either a hunter gatherer or a farmer, lots of people starved to death all the time. It may be true that a farmer of 500 hundred years ago got to keep all of the rewards of their labor (though many... most(?) of them had to give up some portion to the local strongman), but those rewards generally amounted to barely enough to make it through the winter, and certainly not enough to survive, say, two bad harvests. As crappy as capitalism is sometimes, most people in the developed world are very, very far away from worrying about starving to death on a yearly basis. The biggest problem is that what we consider subsistence is way more expensive that what an existing hunter gatherer considers subsistence. If we were willing to live on nothing more than barely enough food and have almost no clothes, or housing, or possessions, we'd be able to work a lot less too.