8 ms·

This line of reasoning is the same as the line of reasoning behind the idea that hunter-gatherers had it better than we do. It works until: - Your kid breaks t

by api 5y ago

This line of reasoning is the same as the line of reasoning behind the idea that hunter-gatherers had it better than we do. It works until: - Your kid breaks their leg. - A natural disaster destroys your home. - You get cancer. - Psychopathic marauders sack your town and rape and kill everyone. - A draught causes a famine. - Your baby is born with a birth defect. ... and so on. I strongly suspect that humanity set off on its endless hedonic treadmill ride to the stars not because we were dissatisfied with the median of the status quo but because we were dissatisfied with the edge cases. Today's technophilia is framed as a run toward a glittering future, but I think we started this journey by running away from random misfortune and cruel circumstances. The whole idea of running toward anything is fairly recent vintage, probably enlightenment era onward, though it has some antecedent in Christian eschatology with the idea of salvation being a novelty or in the future vs being in the past.

pydry 5y ago
Hunter gatherers were, if anything, healthier and almost certainly happier than their agricultural counterparts but the latter outcompeted them due to their greater ability to wage war.
whatshisface 5y ago
There is a lot to learn from the history of technology, but I think the real explanations are: - People working across thousands of years for independent and poorly understood reasons, that set up combinations of circumstances that suddenly clicked in to place. (Initial breeding of animals and plants for agriculture, mathematicians unknowingly laying the groundwork for mathematical sciences.) - People working to further their own immediate interests. (Every industrial development.)
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Haha, joke is on us, masters of the world: Those listed "edge cases" are just as dangerous to even Americans in the land of for-profit health care and psychotic housing values. So back to the Samoans, you are now working near-slave-labor to be exposed to the same effective dangers, abstracted via financialized debt.
bmitc 5y ago
Hunter gatherers did have it better than the early agricultural societies. They worked much less during any given day, lived longer, and were healthier. Hunter gatherer societies can live as long as people in modern, developed societies. You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. With those, it makes a human life almost a tragedy, stretched out due to modern medicine and protocols keeping people alive.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  I think you mean better than early North American settlers. Agriculture is quite old, and integral to the birth of Civilization. Not really clear what the disparity might have been at the onset, though it might have been a hybrid system. It seems that even some indigenous societies in the Americas experimented with agriculture. > You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. That might say something about developments in technology, or wealth inequality - not so much society revolving around agriculture.
  - bmitc 5y ago
    No, I meant all the way back to the birth of agriculture. See Against the Grain by James C. Scott.
    - slothtrop 5y ago
      A bit skeptical since he wrote Seeing Like A State but I'll put it on my list.
      - bmitc 5y ago
        What were your issues with Seeing Like a State? I haven't read it myself yet, so I'm curious.
    - UglyToad 5y ago
      To give a +1 here, I think Against the Grain makes a nice companion to Debt from what I assume are separate ends of the left-right spectrum within libertarianism, or at least I guess so from Against the Grain having a positive review from the Cato Institute on the cover. They both construct convincing narratives from looking at the history that deconstruct the "just so" stories of economists. From AtG you see how most of 'civilization' throughout history has been experienced by most people as slavery and warfare and living standards actually improved, or at least didn't become much worse, for many with things like the fall of Rome. Debt is fascinating because it shows just how new and novel the current inescapable logic of capitalism actually is. Adam Smith's fanciful notion of a fully formed civilization of shopkeepers who adopt coinage to streamline barter is shown to be complete nonsense and with it the foundations of much of "assumed" thought about how people and markets organise themselves.
noodles_nomore 5y ago
So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. -- Hobbes
- UglyToad 5y ago
  There's more discussion of Hobbes in the book than can reasonably be quoted since it links in to themes developed across chapters, but for a taste: "I want to draw particular attention to the underlying notion of "self-interest". It is in a real sense the key to the new philosophy. The term first appears in English right around Hobbes' time, and it is, indeed, directly borrowed from interesse, the Roman law term for interest payments. When it was first introduced, most English authors seemed to view the idea that all human life can be explained as the pursuit of self-interest as a cynical, foreign, Machiavellian idea, one that sat uncomfortably with traditional English mores . By the eighteenth century, most in educated society accepted it as simple common sense."[0] Hobbes statement of some fundamental truth of human nature is both newer and less open-and-shut than we assume. [0]: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/special/statesofdamage/syllabus201516/graeber-debt_the_first_5000_years.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/under... p 331
ramblenode 5y ago
"The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered." - Jared Diamond [0] "Throughout his studies of isolated populations on native diets, Price was continually struck by the contrast of native sturdiness and good health with the degeneration found in the local white populace, living off the “displacing foods of modern commerce” such as sugar, white flour, canned foods and condensed milk. Nowhere was the contrast more evident than in Africa. In addition to their susceptibility to chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, intestinal problems, appendicitis, gall and kidney stones and endocrinological dysfunction, the Whites also showed little resistance to infectious diseases carried by mosquitoes, lice and flies. “In all the districts, it was recognized and expected that the foreigners must plan to spend a portion of every few years or every year outside that environment if they would keep well. Children born in that country to Europeans were generally expected to spend several of their growing years in Europe or America if they would build even relatively normal bodies.”1 By contrast, the native Africans exhibited a very high tolerance to infectious disease including malaria carried by mosquitos, typhus and fevers transmitted by lice and sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly." [1] "The remarkable metabolic and cardiovascular health of hunter-gatherers and other small-scale populations has long made them attractive models in public health. Given the similarity in health profiles across ethnic groups, it is clearly their environments, rather than genetics, that keep people within small-scale societies so healthy. Indeed, from Australia to the Americas, these populations develop the same metabolic and cardiovascular ‘diseases of civilization’ when they move away from traditional lifestyles and adopt Western diets and activity levels 46." [2] "Indeed, the modal age at death for hunter-gatherer populations examined by Gurven and Kaplan is ~72 years (range: 68–78 years), near the value for the US population (85 years) in 2002." [2] "Here, we analyse famine frequency and severity in a large cross-cultural database, in order to explore relationships between subsistence and famine risk. This is the first study to report that, if we control for habitat quality, hunter–gatherers actually had significantly less—not more—famine than other subsistence modes." [3] "Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9″ for men, 5’ 5″ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3″ for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors." [0] [0] http://www.meissinger.com/uploads/3/4/9/1/34919185/diamond_worst_mistake.pdf http://www.meissinger.com/uploads/3/4/9/1/34919185/diamond_w... [1] https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/traditional-diets/out-of-africa-what-dr-price-dr-burkitt-discovered-in-their-studies-of-sub-saharan-tribes/ https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/traditional-diets... [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obr.12785 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obr.12785 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/

by api 5y ago

pydry 5y ago

Hunter gatherers were, if anything, healthier and almost certainly happier than their agricultural counterparts but the latter outcompeted them due to their greater ability to wage war.

whatshisface 5y ago

There is a lot to learn from the history of technology, but I think the real explanations are: - People working across thousands of years for independent and poorly understood reasons, that set up combinations of circumstances that suddenly clicked in to place. (Initial breeding of animals and plants for agriculture, mathematicians unknowingly laying the groundwork for mathematical sciences.) - People working to further their own immediate interests. (Every industrial development.)

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Haha, joke is on us, masters of the world: Those listed "edge cases" are just as dangerous to even Americans in the land of for-profit health care and psychotic housing values. So back to the Samoans, you are now working near-slave-labor to be exposed to the same effective dangers, abstracted via financialized debt.

bmitc 5y ago

Hunter gatherers did have it better than the early agricultural societies. They worked much less during any given day, lived longer, and were healthier. Hunter gatherer societies can live as long as people in modern, developed societies. You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. With those, it makes a human life almost a tragedy, stretched out due to modern medicine and protocols keeping people alive.

slothtrop 5y ago
I think you mean better than early North American settlers. Agriculture is quite old, and integral to the birth of Civilization. Not really clear what the disparity might have been at the onset, though it might have been a hybrid system. It seems that even some indigenous societies in the Americas experimented with agriculture. > You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. That might say something about developments in technology, or wealth inequality - not so much society revolving around agriculture.
- bmitc 5y ago
  No, I meant all the way back to the birth of agriculture. See Against the Grain by James C. Scott.
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    A bit skeptical since he wrote Seeing Like A State but I'll put it on my list.
    - bmitc 5y ago
      What were your issues with Seeing Like a State? I haven't read it myself yet, so I'm curious.
  - UglyToad 5y ago
    To give a +1 here, I think Against the Grain makes a nice companion to Debt from what I assume are separate ends of the left-right spectrum within libertarianism, or at least I guess so from Against the Grain having a positive review from the Cato Institute on the cover. They both construct convincing narratives from looking at the history that deconstruct the "just so" stories of economists. From AtG you see how most of 'civilization' throughout history has been experienced by most people as slavery and warfare and living standards actually improved, or at least didn't become much worse, for many with things like the fall of Rome. Debt is fascinating because it shows just how new and novel the current inescapable logic of capitalism actually is. Adam Smith's fanciful notion of a fully formed civilization of shopkeepers who adopt coinage to streamline barter is shown to be complete nonsense and with it the foundations of much of "assumed" thought about how people and markets organise themselves.

noodles_nomore 5y ago

So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. -- Hobbes

UglyToad 5y ago
There's more discussion of Hobbes in the book than can reasonably be quoted since it links in to themes developed across chapters, but for a taste: "I want to draw particular attention to the underlying notion of "self-interest". It is in a real sense the key to the new philosophy. The term first appears in English right around Hobbes' time, and it is, indeed, directly borrowed from interesse, the Roman law term for interest payments. When it was first introduced, most English authors seemed to view the idea that all human life can be explained as the pursuit of self-interest as a cynical, foreign, Machiavellian idea, one that sat uncomfortably with traditional English mores . By the eighteenth century, most in educated society accepted it as simple common sense."[0] Hobbes statement of some fundamental truth of human nature is both newer and less open-and-shut than we assume. [0]: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/special/statesofdamage/syllabus201516/graeber-debt_the_first_5000_years.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/under... p 331

ramblenode 5y ago

"The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered." - Jared Diamond [0] "Throughout his studies of isolated populations on native diets, Price was continually struck by the contrast of native sturdiness and good health with the degeneration found in the local white populace, living off the “displacing foods of modern commerce” such as sugar, white flour, canned foods and condensed milk. Nowhere was the contrast more evident than in Africa. In addition to their susceptibility to chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, intestinal problems, appendicitis, gall and kidney stones and endocrinological dysfunction, the Whites also showed little resistance to infectious diseases carried by mosquitoes, lice and flies. “In all the districts, it was recognized and expected that the foreigners must plan to spend a portion of every few years or every year outside that environment if they would keep well. Children born in that country to Europeans were generally expected to spend several of their growing years in Europe or America if they would build even relatively normal bodies.”1 By contrast, the native Africans exhibited a very high tolerance to infectious disease including malaria carried by mosquitos, typhus and fevers transmitted by lice and sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly." [1] "The remarkable metabolic and cardiovascular health of hunter-gatherers and other small-scale populations has long made them attractive models in public health. Given the similarity in health profiles across ethnic groups, it is clearly their environments, rather than genetics, that keep people within small-scale societies so healthy. Indeed, from Australia to the Americas, these populations develop the same metabolic and cardiovascular ‘diseases of civilization’ when they move away from traditional lifestyles and adopt Western diets and activity levels 46." [2] "Indeed, the modal age at death for hunter-gatherer populations examined by Gurven and Kaplan is ~72 years (range: 68–78 years), near the value for the US population (85 years) in 2002." [2] "Here, we analyse famine frequency and severity in a large cross-cultural database, in order to explore relationships between subsistence and famine risk. This is the first study to report that, if we control for habitat quality, hunter–gatherers actually had significantly less—not more—famine than other subsistence modes." [3] "Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9″ for men, 5’ 5″ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3″ for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors." [0] [0] http://www.meissinger.com/uploads/3/4/9/1/34919185/diamond_worst_mistake.pdf http://www.meissinger.com/uploads/3/4/9/1/34919185/diamond_w... [1] https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/traditional-diets/out-of-africa-what-dr-price-dr-burkitt-discovered-in-their-studies-of-sub-saharan-tribes/ https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/traditional-diets... [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obr.12785 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/obr.12785 [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3917328/