3 ms·

People need to eat, and now all the land is 'owned', they can't just forage, so they'll work for whatever rather than starve. Is that a 'free market'?

gus_massa 4y ago
Hunter-gatherer can support only like ~10 millions persons globally [1]. Take that number with a grain of salt, but it's only 0.13% of the current population. To get a full hunter-gatherer world again you must get rid of 99.9% of the current population. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721726115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721726115 One of the first results searching in Google. I'm not sure it's the most accurate number.
- deleted 4y ago
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- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  I think the key part of the previous comment was about land ownership rather than agriculture being bad. Of course land ownnership is just another version of inequality. And massive wealth inequality leads to massive power imbalances when negotiating fair wages.
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    Nobody is going to plow the land unless they are confident they will harvest the result a few months later. You can go with a bunch of friends and family and plow some random piece of land and camp there with a few pikes. You don't own the land, but if someone else shows up you ask them nicely to go to another place. Is that place nice? Do you want to use it next year? Are you camping all the year and squattering it? What if your group split? How are you dividing the spot? What about the group that is nearby? Does that steam separate the part you don't own and the part they don't own? Who can use the water from the stream?
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
      These are all good questions. And yes society is complicated. But I don't think the current solution of: let's just have a couple people own everything everywhere while others starve and suffer, is the necessarily the best one. In fact, history has shown the 'few people own everything while everyone else can suck it' approach to resource distribution inevitably leads to collapse.
candiodari 4y ago
Is this a comment on how "unfair" it is that keeping a human alive is not free? That "God"/Darwin/the universe/gaia/... did not make it so. This is merely a direct consequence of the laws of physics and does not really have anything to do with the organisation of society (which is what economics, and "free market" describe). Every society, however organised, must on average get a positive net output from every human alive.

gus_massa 4y ago

Hunter-gatherer can support only like ~10 millions persons globally [1]. Take that number with a grain of salt, but it's only 0.13% of the current population. To get a full hunter-gatherer world again you must get rid of 99.9% of the current population. [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721726115 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1721726115 One of the first results searching in Google. I'm not sure it's the most accurate number.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
I think the key part of the previous comment was about land ownership rather than agriculture being bad. Of course land ownnership is just another version of inequality. And massive wealth inequality leads to massive power imbalances when negotiating fair wages.
- gus_massa 4y ago
  Nobody is going to plow the land unless they are confident they will harvest the result a few months later. You can go with a bunch of friends and family and plow some random piece of land and camp there with a few pikes. You don't own the land, but if someone else shows up you ask them nicely to go to another place. Is that place nice? Do you want to use it next year? Are you camping all the year and squattering it? What if your group split? How are you dividing the spot? What about the group that is nearby? Does that steam separate the part you don't own and the part they don't own? Who can use the water from the stream?
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
    These are all good questions. And yes society is complicated. But I don't think the current solution of: let's just have a couple people own everything everywhere while others starve and suffer, is the necessarily the best one. In fact, history has shown the 'few people own everything while everyone else can suck it' approach to resource distribution inevitably leads to collapse.

candiodari 4y ago

Is this a comment on how "unfair" it is that keeping a human alive is not free? That "God"/Darwin/the universe/gaia/... did not make it so. This is merely a direct consequence of the laws of physics and does not really have anything to do with the organisation of society (which is what economics, and "free market" describe). Every society, however organised, must on average get a positive net output from every human alive.