patrick.net

DS

The fact that you, of all people, are suggesting that physical stress is equivalent or parallel to psychological stress, I take as either (a) you're just being sarcastic at a level too clever or (b) you're applying some kind of post-modernism to something you know better than to.

The very fact you are citing psychological and emotional stresses -- which no one denies by the way -- yet failing to acknowledge the fact that these are subordinate to physical stresses which have largely been removed for more now than ever before in human history is just dishonest. And you know it. Even those beloved, isolated indigenous tribes you love to refer to were under orders of magnitude more physical stressors than a Western industrialized welfare-recipient is today.

For example, most of their children died either during the process of being born or within 5 years thereafter.

Seriously, if you cannot at least acknowledge the advances of modernity then why bother arguing neo luddism on the Internet at all?

Who's arguing for neo-Luddism? I already typed 2 clever replies to this, but there were 2 power failures that wiped them out each time due to instabilities here after rain... and my UPS overloaded from trying to support a PC and a Mac at the same time... I'm reflecting on typing a 3rd brilliant exposition, this time with the Mac disconnected...

Jimbo,

Most of the poor I have known . . . have nothing but free time.

I'm with you on this one.

I have also had contact with poor people in a rich society, once through disabled sport and once through a nephew's ex-partner who basically used him as a sperm donor so she could get her own flat/pension.

Since the child of this pairing was at the time my mother's only great-grandchild, I was prevailed upon to visit from time to time even after they split up. During these visits I got to know several of the residents of the adjoining flats, all of whom were in similar circumstances.

I once worked out that these single parents could have lived quite comfortably on their benefits, given that they had free healthcare and that they were renting a 2/1 flat for a fixed 25% of their official income. (Plain, I grant you, and not particularly well maintained, but structurally sound and perfectly adequate for a parent and child. Perfectly adequate for a couple and child, in fact.)

However the unfortunate reality is that most of them actually lived in absolute squalor. A lot of this had to do with their lack of life skills, but some was caused by group dynamics and some by excessive tobacco/alcohol/illegal drug consumption which I suspect was partly due to sheer boredom.

Oh, and these people were continuously getting credit card offers.

Infant mortality may well have been higher in societies other than H-G for most of the history of 'civilisation', due to overcrowding and association, and the movement of diseases from domesticated animals to humans (such as 'flu, smallpox and measles. You could even argue bubonic plague needed large populations, trade routes and urbanised settlements where rats could breed and spread disease) especially as domesticated animals used to co-habitate within the same structures as their owners for safe-keeping and convenience. HIV is believed to have spread from baboons due to certain ritual practices. Then there are the human practices that led to the spread of BSE (from feeding animals to animals, not from soil prions) and bird flu.

The other 'diseases of civilisation' include obesity, diabetes and heart disease from eating a surplus of refined carbohydrates, sugars and fats.

People in HG societies tend to be fairly lean and rangy throughought the lifespan, on the other hand, but their physical stresses are no more than an active, healthy person who plays some sport would do in our society. What's the difference between a fit young man throwing a spear or playing squash? Modernity has created a sedentary population who need to artificially construct exercise opportunities and create substitute hunting and gathering activities to avoid disease and overweight. You could read ethnographies of any simple society such as in Africa, Australia, Papua New Guinea or North or South America to see how people live/d in these societies.

There is no doubt that post-HG societies were all about controlling the environment and planning for the future, which allowed for burgeoning populations to be free from the vagaries of the natural environment to a greater extent than previously -- better shelter, warmth, and better control over an animal and plant food supply. A surplus and stability allowed for creativity and further invention.

However, it was only with the hygiene movement of the early 20th century and the development of 'germ theory' that infant mortality really started to come down. My own area of Chippendale here and other areas in inner Sydney were hotbeds of typhoid fever right up until the 20th century. Malnutrition was common right up until after the 2nd world war in the UK. Improved hygiene and nutrition are responsible for more lives being saved than most medical breakthroughs, in potentially fit and healthy populations. Medical science itself has really only come into its own in the last century. Antibiotics are only about 70 years old.

Child labour under terrible conditions was only banned in England in 1867.

So the current affluence and comfort we possess has really been about the last 50 years out of an experiment that has lasted 10,000 years.

You could look at the light-hearted series The Worst Jobs in History to see just how bad things were for people right up through and including Victorian history. Before the invention of the internal combustion engine and hydraulic equipment, train line routes were dug and laid by hand by teams of navvies doing back-breaking work, and one person died for every mile of track laid.

All these observations are fairly incidental, though, as I have perfectly well acknowledged the advances of modernity but you also have to look at the price that has been paid in new disease types, pollution, psychological stress, and so on, and the price that has been paid over generations in getting to where we are. There is also the question of a viable global population size and the sustainability of our current practices with regard to world energy resources, over-foresting and harvesting of resources, and even the creation of greenhouse gases like methane, CFCs and CO2.

The overarching and very simple point I was trying to make though is that there are good features of other societal types that have been somewhat lost under modernity. Marx pointed to Australian Aboriginal societies as a form of 'primitive communism' in his writings, for instance. Marx himself was writing in reaction to the early conditions of the early Industrial Revolution -- the satanic mills and sweatshops, etc, which we've conveniently forgotten all about in late modernity.

Don't Dismiss Our Dismal Savings Rate
By BOB MCTEER

The main fallacy in monetary theory and policy is the confusion of money and wealth. Money is wealth from the individual perspective since individuals can usually exchange it for goods and services. Money -- and financial assets easily converted to money -- may not be wealth for society as a whole if the production of goods and services has not kept pace with claims on it. Early spenders may have some success, but inflation will dilute the buying power of others. The bottom line is that real wealth has to be produced; it can't be printed.
...
A parallel is the farmer who hopes for a good crop year. But, if all or most farmers have a good crop year, the decline in prices may more than offset higher yields. What our farmer really needs is a good crop in a bad crop year. Then he could look for a popular restaurant that isn't crowded.

I realize this is not very sophisticated stuff, but it's on my mind because of the many talking heads I hear dismissing the adverse consequences of our low personal saving rate by saying it ignores capital gains as a source of spending. "Properly measured," they say, saving is not a problem.

Again, that may be true for the few, but not for the many. A penny saved may be a penny earned, but it matters whether it was earned by producing more or by a rise in the price of existing financial assets. A stock or housing market boom creates apparent wealth in the form of capital gains, but trying to convert it to real wealth en masse can make it disappear.
...
The problem goes beyond government entitlement programs. Consider the baby boomers whose IRAs, 401(k)s and personal investments helped drive the stock market to record highs. What happens when cash-in time comes? There will be a mountain of paper claims on output, but will there be an equally tall mountain of output?

The great French economist, Frederic Bastiat, said that "The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else." It's time to get real about producing real wealth, not just financial claims on wealth.

DS asks: where is the age of leisure and the 2-day working week we were promised?

Who promised us a 2-day working week?

People in HG societies tend to be fairly lean and rangy throughought the lifespan, on the other hand, but their physical stresses are no more than an active, healthy person who plays some sport would do in our society. What’s the difference between a fit young man throwing a spear or playing squash?

Lean and rangy is a sign of health in a sedentary society. What about nutrition and periods of starvation in H-G societies? You ask what's the difference between a spear-thrower and a squash player. Well, for starters, the squash player isn't going to die if he can't find a ball for two weeks.

You could read ethnographies of any simple society such as in Africa, Australia, Papua New Guinea or North or South America to see how people live/d in these societies.

I'm dreadfully curious. If agrarian societies didn't provide access to modern healthcare, shelter, nutrition, safety and stability to modern H-G cultures, what would their life expectancy be? You can debate quality of life, but Randy is right about physical exertion vs. psychological stress. The simple life sounds great until your lifespan is 50 at the outside.

Anyway, if the H-G lifestyle is so great, why aren't you living it, Sean? Give up the computer, car, healthcare and house. Then your carbon footprint would be zero. There's still enough fish and game in the world that you could live like a hunter-gatherer.

ozajh and Jimbo:

Wasn't talking about the sloths who squandered their opportunity entitlements in favor of government assistance entitlements. I have relatives like that too.

There's a whole world of working poor, too. I think Jimbo at least acknowledged the possibility of it.

If you don't take the time to get to know the person who cleans the toilets in the office building you work in, or the tired 50-ish matriarch who asks you if you'd like fries with that, then you can read "Nickel and Dimed in America".

Nostalgia for the fabled "golden eras" of history has long been a staple of straw men arguments. In truth, there is a reason societies inevitably progress along the same developmental lines over and over; and a reason that we call anomalous periods regressive. The reason is simple. People living under stress of survival and peril endeavor to remove those factors for themselves and their children. I seriously wonder about the sanity of neo-Luddites who wish to reintroduce their children to such perils. I'm not saying DS falls in that category, but come spend a weekend in lovely Marin, where at any of our $40 lunch coffee shops you can listen to a deadly serious conversation about why they have chosen to not immunize their children.

Yes we manipulate our environment. Yes we endeavor to exert control over our environment. Yes we inevitably screw things up in the process and then have to try to fix it. Why is it so bloody hard for some people to accept that is what we are, we humans. We aren't even unique. Given the right accidents of evolution the bees or ants would be doing the same, as they already to at their scale. In fact, they'd be more efficient than we are, I suspect, at dominating the planet's resources. What's wrong with just embracing our humanity and trying to make that work rather than pretending we'd all be better off if we were lice-eating, red-butted monkeys?

Randy, you're a venture capitalist! Don't tell me that you're a chickens--- about saber-toothed tigers. :)

I've always found it morbidly amusing when people invoke the golden days of ancient times, considering that we have very little record of those societies. But it's easy to paint some happy revisionist picture on a blank canvas. "See? The ancient Neolithic farmers were happier because they only ate organic food! They lived in harmony with their environment. Look what pesticides did to 19th century Britain... violence, social unrest, rebellion!"

Personally, I wish we could all live in an ancient utopia like the dinosaurs. They didn't need technology or possessions. They roamed peacefully in herds, at one with their environment, eating only organic plants. Well, except for the carnivores. But at least they were eating free range dinosaurs. Less disease that way. Plus they were leaner.

:o

JJ Rousseau RULZ!!!!!!

JJ Rousseau 4EVER!!!!!!

Randy,

With any luck, the neo-Luddites will take themselves out of the gene pool. I'm a bit more concerned about unwed welfare moms. They may be quite stupid individually, but as far as I'm concerned, they've hit upon an admirably cunning evolution strategy.*

* See also: White tail deer, Canadian Geese, Kudzu.

astrid: We need welfare moms in our society. Then we can tax the middle class and give the money to them, and in turn they can buy products from our companies. This arrangement benefits everyone.

Well, not everyone. But certainly everyone who counts. :o

"you are wrongly assuming that ‘the monarch’ suddenly appeared on the scene in societal evolution and that the monarch owned everything, both of which are not really true, especially when you look at the Magna Carta, the beheading of Charles I, the French Revolution and so on."

The Magna Carta was great, it started the early framework that lessened the monarch's absolute ownwership of all property and people. This lessening of control was what allowed the Industrial Revolution to take place where it did, when it did. After all, people who are allowed to keep some of the fruits of thier labor, without all of it going to the monarch, have more incentive to be inventive and more productive. A scary thought to those who espouse the "from each, to each" philosophy.

And can't you do better than Charles I or the French Revolution? Charles the first was knocked off by Oliver Cromwell, with Cromwell becoming an absolute dictator. The French Revolution brought Napoleon, who actually had emperor and king among his titles. These examples help prove my point that historically most human societies were ruled by monarchs.

"We need welfare moms in our society"

Yes, the slumlords need someone to "force" into the slumlord's dirt floor, vermin infested huts.

LOL. That's why the slumlords killed off the buffalo herds. No other option than renting now! Muahahahaha!

Well I don't know about other countries, but this one is starting to look like "House of Lancaster, House of York".

We have royal families that swap roles. Clinton, Bush, now maybe another Clinton. Are we grooming more of their kids for leadership? Maybe we need another Kennedy in the job again. Some choice there.....

In fact, talking about 'progressive' or 'regressive' societies or similar conceptions of 'forward evolution' and 'continuous improvement' in peoples is now very politically incorrect in social science and development circles. You can only say that soem societies have a more advanced technology than others. For instance, the Romans were arguably more barbaric and uncivilised than the HG Kung of Africa due to their aggressive colonising behaviours and harsh punishments. So you cannot create a 'hierarchical' taxonomiy of societies and proclaim that things are always just getting better and better, except in terms of material wealth or wellbeing. For instance, the US has more visible homelessness, more ghettos and more healthcare problems than Australia, and yet has a higher per capita GDP. Which is more 'progressed' in nature?

Brand Says:
Who promised us a 2-day working week?

I dunno, some journalists and futurists, maybe the odd hopeful politician...

Lean and rangy is a sign of health in a sedentary society. What about nutrition and periods of starvation in H-G societies? You ask what’s the difference between a spear-thrower and a squash player. Well, for starters, the squash player isn’t going to die if he can’t find a ball for two weeks.

Poeple die regularly in the US because they can't afford healthcare. Further, HG societies are inherently small and can live within the means of the environment they inhabit.

The simple life sounds great until your lifespan is 50 at the outside.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about people's lifespans. Some of the calculated averages include infant mortality rates, so this myth that people in medieval Europe had an average lifespan of 35 for instance is a nonsense -- if you survived childhood, it was quite likely that you would live to the ripe old age of 60 or 70 -- hence the Biblical mention of 'three score and ten' years for a lifespan. (Note that the Aramaic societies were also simple agrarian and partially nomadic societies when that was written.)

Anyway, if the H-G lifestyle is so great, why aren’t you living it, Sean? Give up the computer, car, healthcare and house. Then your carbon footprint would be zero. There’s still enough fish and game in the world that you could live like a hunter-gatherer.

Some people choose to. I'm not the least bit interested in living a HG lifestyle, unless society collapses in the next 50 years due to running out of resources, which is not a remote possibility. But, once again, I am not arguing that we should live a HG lifestyle. I have not argued that anywhere on this thread or any other thread, so it's a straw man argument again. My argument all along has been that there are praiseworthy aspects to these simple societies which we have lost. In fact, we have lost them so much that many of the posters here are demonstrating that they can't even grasp the concepts, such is the level of their own enculturation.

Social donations are also made in our society in the form of international aid, welfare benefits and programs, donations to charity and foundations, and so forth. However, some countries have instituted more reliable and guaranteed forms of redistribution than others, possibly having a lot to do with their own histories. The criticism is constantly that not enough international aid is given, or aid is only given to resource-rich countries in a quid pro quo, or that in fact countries are deliberately being entrapped in toxic loans which the instigators know can never be repaid.

J.K. Rowling was a welfare mum. She is now richer than the Queen of England. You may have even bought one of her books.

HeadSet Says:
“We need welfare moms in our society”
Yes, the slumlords need someone to “force” into the slumlord’s dirt floor, vermin infested huts.

Once again, my own inner city suburb here was a slum of timber cottages only 150 years ago, with massive overcrowding in each house, and floor levels set below street level so that they flooded regularly. Didn't stop the landlords coming around to collect the rent each week. Typhoid was endemic from inadequate sewerage. Huge piles of animal bones were burnt each morning to make charcoal to process sugar cane at the original CSR sugar refinery on the hill, and the smell drifted over the suburb.

I really recommend you follow the link above to the 'Worst Jobs in History' site and have a look at a few of them to see how some people lived. Look up Victorian chimney sweeps and mudlarks, for instance. This was a society that failed to redistribute effectively, hence the writings of Dickens, etc. Now you are complaining that 'welfare moms' are something akin to cockroaches. The mom that stays at home while hubby does all the money-making is fine on the other hand, as is Paris Hilton.

you survived childhood, it was quite likely that you would live to the ripe old age of 60 or 70

Do curiosities of averages also explain all the archaeological evidence?

C'mon DS. Cut the equivalency crap. Of course evolution and social "progress" are undirected by your definition. That's mere semantics. They are directed -- both of them -- by iterative survival dynamics. You can bitch and moan all you want about how those dynamics are interpreted, but they simply *are*. All the forces of postmodernism cannot change that anymore than you can halt the march of the arrow of time.

You could have made a perfectly good argument about how lifespans are markedly longer in our (post)modern society, but that the cumulative quality of life experience is worse or no greater. I would have still proven you were wrong about that, but at least it would have been an honest argument. But denying even such fundamentals as life expectancies of history and injecting some fairy-tale fictions instead only makes you and your allies in this argument sound just plain silly.

HeadSet Says:
“you are wrongly assuming that ‘the monarch’ suddenly appeared on the scene in societal evolution and that the monarch owned everything, both of which are not really true, especially when you look at the Magna Carta, the beheading of Charles I, the French Revolution and so on.”

The Magna Carta was great, it started the early framework that lessened the monarch’s absolute ownwership of all property and people. This lessening of control was what allowed the Industrial Revolution to take place where it did, when it did. After all, people who are allowed to keep some of the fruits of thier labor, without all of it going to the monarch, have more incentive to be inventive and more productive. A scary thought to those who espouse the “from each, to each” philosophy.

And can’t you do better than Charles I or the French Revolution? Charles the first was knocked off by Oliver Cromwell, with Cromwell becoming an absolute dictator. The French Revolution brought Napoleon, who actually had emperor and king among his titles. These examples help prove my point that historically most human societies were ruled by monarchs.

Your point was that the 'monarch owned everything, and all wealth was returned to the monarch'. What everyone else lived off then is a mystery. Your point was not that most human societies were ruled by monarchs, which is also numerically suspicious. (However, I will have to accept that you have added up the sum total of all known human societies in history and the number which were identifiable 'kingdoms', and concluded that at least 51% were monarchies. I look forward to seeing the analysis.)

So you have just changed your point dramatically, and I would suggest that most societies historically have not been monarchies on a count. The rest of the teleological tripe about how it all lead to capitalism and isn't it great is just so much nonsense, given the already advanced technology of Europe at the time it was all occurring. You could check your facts even with wikipedia on all this. Is this one of those occasions when one realises one is actually debating a 12 year old on the Internet? Perhaps you should study some social history when you're old enough to go to college...

Randy H Says:

Do curiosities of averages also explain all the archaeological evidence?

You should present it then.

They are directed — both of them — by iterative survival dynamics.

Well, it goes beyond mere survival. But look at some of the jobs on the website indicated and tell me whether you would prefer to have been a mudlark 150 years ago or lived in a HG society where you were an equal. Don't bother writing back until you've done that and ruminated on it.

Growing populations following the agricultural revolution lead to higher birthrates which lead to more social problems and crime due to lack of jobs and lack of a welfare system to cope with the population pressure. This lead to the creation of a stigmatised convict class, where convicts were first sent to the US, then to Australia, often for trivial crimes against property for survival. After each 'excising of the convict stain' to purify the society, more impoverished people turning to petty crimes against property miraculously appeared to fill the gap. It's only been the latter half of the 20th century that it's started to settle on a decently humane equilibrium -- and half the posters on this site then whinge about the evils of 'welfare'.

But denying even such fundamentals as life expectancies of history and injecting some fairy-tale fictions instead only makes you and your allies in this argument sound just plain silly.

Which fairytale fictions exactly? People seem to read every 3rd sentence I write and ignore every qualification I make, and further miss the base point utterly. What was the life expectancy of persons 150 years ago in Western society?

Hmm, the Schiller Institute, which you've referenced as authoritative in the past, seems to think that life expectancies in the West circa 150 years ago were around mid 40s in Europe, the most best at the time. Today they are around 70.

I will give you this, life expectancies grew very slowly from 400BC to 1300AD, when they dropped for a couple centuries, then started climbing quite rapidly after 1800.

Of course they also show you're full of shit about the 3 ages pre history, where archeological evidence puts average age at just about 18. That "eight-teen", not "eight eee". Of course there are some lucky specimens that lived in to their 30s, quite old for pre history for HG societies.

Paleo = 18
Meso = 26
Neo = 30
Early history = ~32
1AD = ~26
thru 1400 = ~35
Black Death = ~26
Colonial = 30 .. 40
Early Industrial = 40 .. 55
Post War = 55 .. 70

I've really gotta see the stats that explain away that trend as an aberration.

Really, picking straw man comparisons is irrelevant. If you want a comparison you have to pick *statistically likely birth conditions*. That is, you can't compare the best of your set to the worst of mine. You have to pick where you'd probably have been born in each era, and how likely you'd have been to survive, and what your quality of life would have been.

Have you netted out infant mortality?

That is, what is life expectancy at birth vs life expectancy at say 20 years of age? You are just publishing life expectancy at birth figures, which means with a 25% infant mortality rate (dying between 1 and 5) the overall mean is dragged down considerably.

So you would need to present an array rather than a single vector of data.

The funny thing is, this is a side debate not of my construction or of anything but incidental interest -- I haven't raised the question of any kind of mortality in my writing, except that some people here seem to have drawn a connection that massive economic inequality in a society = greater longevity for all, for some reason -- not just technical developments. This thesis is arguably disproved by comparing the current US mortality rate with other comparable countries.

I am just debating that once you reached late adolescence/early adulthood, your life expectancy was considerably greater -- more to make the point. I am not contesting that considerable work has been done in vaccination and sanitation over the last 100 years of history (and sanitation has been a large part of it) or that the 2nd half of the 20th century hasn't resulted in enormous leaps forward in technology. These arguments are quite beside my other arguments. The debate, to my mind, is whether the famous US indifference to inequality and its relatively poor welfare state leads to worse life outcomes than in other comparable countries with more equitable income distributions (as per the thread topic, more or less). This appears to be so, as US life expectancy is lower than many other advanced nations, and its healthcare system is ranked 37th in the world for quality by the WHO, with denial of access to care one of the outstanding features.

Coming into this discussion late, but for what it's worth I work in a union. Yes, it carries its own set of frustrations, but overall, I feel more confident in my job security and benefits than in the last several jobs I held in the private sector. At the end of the day, I would much rather be annoyed by a lazy coworker than:

1) Working with crappy benefits
2) Wondering all the time if my manager is trying to get me fired
3) Working forced overtime without pay
4) Having to work someplace for a year just to qualify for their non-matching 401k program.
5) Wondering if speaking out about an unethical practice will get me fired

Randy H says: come spend a weekend in lovely Marin, where at any of our $40 lunch coffee shops you can listen to a deadly serious conversation about why they have chosen to not immunize their children.
Once again, for those of you who think Randy is kidding... when we were interviewing pediatricians, ours asked us whether we would be immunizing our children (I don't imagine this is a conversation that occurs where I grew up in the Midwest). At any rate, when we said, "Yes", she replied that was good as they wouldn't accept non-immunized kids into their practice. The funny thing is, when an "outbreak" does happen, these idiots are the ones who are going to be asking for your children's "papers", as other non-immunized kids represent the greatest threat to their non-immunized offspring. (At this point, the heartless can insert a suggestion for a non-immunized playgroup...)

Randy, I am not suggesting a return to the "bad ole days", but seriously, we are losing topoil 10 to 40 times faster than it is being replenished. That ain't sustainable over the long haul. You need to get yourself a CSA veggie box... and besides, if your local farm experiences a catastrophic failure, you can always go to the neighborhood Safeway :-)

Just heard of a couple that bought their rental on the Peninsula. We are talking a 3/2 near the $1 millon mark. I cannot imagine the calculus that went into this decision.

On a positive note, the Craigslist Bay Area ReduceOMeter just set a new record with 297 listings for July 20&21.

Regarding the secondary side debate that seems to have started concerning infant mortality in history, and the introduction of new diseases from domestication of animals, you might like to look at the following scholarly article, fortunately available in its entirety, which examines the debate in anthropology which has occurred over several decades as to whether mortality rates changed from palaeolothic to neolithic periods, and on until the 20th century.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PCG/is_2_20/ai_111014981/pg_1

Naturally, everyone on patrick.net seems to have read all of the literature on this topic already, and having been informed by it can therefore put the question to bed in a mere 5 seconds as already demonstrated -- I appear to be the only one to have gained only a smidgin of undergraduate training in this area, vs the PhD studies in histodemography clearly undertaken by everyone else, which is why their answers are so pithy and certain.

The fact that it has been heavily researched and debated for decades by leading anthropologists and is still a subject of debate does not worry the experts at patrick.net in their pithy, authoritative summaries. Instead, the 'Schiller Institute', that noted anthropological resource, can provide all the answers in one table. The Schiller Institute has been described by the London Metropolitan Police as a "political cult with sinister and dangerous connections", but their presented data and its sources are unimpeachable and heavily used in academic treatments of demotic history.

The patrick.netters clear understanding of the 'hygiene movement' of the early 20th century, and the fact that since the early 20th century and particularly since the 1950s quality of life and longevity increased significantly does not stop them from claiming that in fact it has been like this for 10,000 years of human history. Other experts contend that Georgian and Victorian life was often miserable for many, but patrick.netters know that it was actually a golden age of prosperity for all.

Nor do they conflate and confuse technological developments and breakthroughs which have accelerated and compounded with each other since the Enlightenment began, with rampant economic inequality -- they know these two phenomena are in fact one and the same -- scientists are in fact the richest people in society. The fact that infant mortality was extremely high prior to the 20th century, particularly in cities, while economic inequality in those times was also high, does not and should not trouble them, as this is the United States of Amnesia which can only look forward and never back.

The article Was there a Neolithic mortality crisis? Journal of Population Research points out that it is very hard to deduce any sort of information about longevity based on palaeo- *or* neolithic fossil evidence, which would call the Schiller data heavily into doubt. They may have backwards extrapolated, who knows, or made it up.

One possible source of guesstimated data is to study extant HG-type societies relatively unaffected by Europeans or other cultures, and look at their demographic age profiles. However, it is increasingly difficult to do as most tribes have had increasing access to other influences now. In the case of Australian Aboriginals, it is difficult when they have substituted (poor quality) Western foods for traditional foods, and been corrupted with alcohol and drugs, and caught new diseases -- it simply becomes a contemporary health problem of a new type. Rates of diabetes and heart disease are now very high, brought about by change of diet. Their cultures and social structures have been broken down by colonisation also, creating further problems. There are still other people around the world living simple HG-type or horticultural lifestyles however who could provide insight, in South America, the New Guinea Highlands and Africa...

In the case of combined MMR vaccinations, I'm still not convinced there isn't a link to encephalitis or autism. I would immunise against each separately over time. The Urabe strain of mumps vaccine was known to cause encephalitis or meningitis in some cases, before it was discontinued by the drug companies involved. The original papers claiming an MMR-autism link have been discredited somewhat, but I would rather be safe than sorry in this instance.

I'd rather be safe than sorry with my children too. I'm no medical genius, but seems to me the best way to do that is...

So to distill DS' arguments to a readable form:

* Longevity in modernity is only increased because of less babies and kids dying before adolescence.

-- This is false, incidentally, by the Schiller data which shows population growths along with infant mortality, and longevity. DS is wrong because populations grew very fast, meaning both decreased infant mortality and increased longevity.

* Everything modern from animal husbandry to industrialization injected death and suffering into the human condition. Maybe less babies and children died, but that's beside the point.

* If one survived the gantlet of things from disease to predation to malnutrition to starvation to infanticide to abandonment to intertribal conflict that might kill them from birth to around 14 years of age, one would have lived longer than Methuselah in a hunting-gathering-we're-all-equals paradise. More kids live through childhood today, but for what? A pathetic life of enlightened education, unparalleled learning and communication, and free time to sit around and blog about how much nicer it might have been to be a brave 70 year old aboriginal tribesman.

Anyway, it's been a good debate as always.

The perspective DS is arguing is not an isolated phenomenon. I hear derivations of this all the time, especially here in hyper-hypocritical Marin County. DS is unique only because he actually tries to back up his positions, which is why it's so fun to deconstruct them. Sort of like when someone actually tries to prove the Earth is only 12,000 years old or we never landed on the Moon.

It's really interesting. And I think a bit sad. And very hypocritical, to a point of arrogance, but very interesting nonetheless. But it's all moot. Progress will march on. We aren't going to return to hunting-gathering tribes of 16 year old marauders with clubs and spears, outside of something quite terrible happening like a nuclear war or an asteroid strike. At which point, of the .01% of us who survive would try our best to retain anything we could from the "good old days" of modernity.

Has anyone figured out a way to set up a killfile on this blog?
TIA
SP

Randy,

Perhaps I've fallen prey to hypocritical nonsense, but there are aspects of the H-G discussion which interest me. Not because it attaches to fashion, nor because its origins are prescientific, both of which are irrelevant.

In order to skip the idealogues, I search NCBI PubMed for research abstracts and studies. Consensus is that we're a stone age genotype, but there's no consensus on what this means practically. So I stay tuned.

"you only got rich by exploiting others"

Well... certainly there ARE other ways (but this is the most expedient!)

I post a listing (for free) on Craigslist? Let's make it say... "Work at Home"? I have a "training system/whatever" we'll be selling for... I dunno $2,000? And YOU get to keep HALF the profit! (Let's assume the "product" is basically worthless, as they usually are)

I say I have people making 10-15?K a month. And why not. So I get a hundred guys on board selling this... "product". Now, if they're lucky they'll sell TWO a month (or 2K). But since I have A HUNDRED guys out there pounding the phones I make ONE HUNDRED K a month! Not bad!

So you tell me? What's easier? Getting on the phone, or getting on Craigslist?

Folks, I full well realize there's little empathy for sales people (because we tend to focus on the end buyer) but a "sales person" is about 1,000 times more likely to be taken advantage of and abused then a person in the sex trade, foster child or altar boy. Sorry, that's how it is. Until this changes, look for the abuse to "trickle down".

Bruce

Consensus is that we’re a stone age genotype, but there’s no consensus on what this means practically.

I agree. I'm at the mercy of the best science and data which I fully expect to develop over time. Given scientifically demonstrated evidence of anything DS posits I'll happily incorporate that new learning into my world view.

I just know this: I wouldn't have wanted to be a cave man. If I got to choose any century to be born into from the Stone Age to 21stAD, I'd choose 21stAD. Maybe being a pre-history hunstman would be a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Isn't there some Mitochondrial DNA evidence that humans almost died out well into our evolutionary line that coincides with some sort of cataclysmic volcanic event? That episode alone would have pushed life expectancies down to well below DS' claims of octogenarian berry pickers. I read about this some time ago in Science, but I don't know if it's been discredited since then.

For me, food would definitely be the worst features of living the noble savage lifestyle, followed by boredom, lice, the bad teeth and lack of bathing opportunities.

Humans could use a serious genetic upgrade. Now that we're sedatory internet dwellers with a high life expectancy, how about:

Skinny genes
New set of teeth at 35, 50, and 70
Youthful skin pores
Better cancer fighting genes
Lifetime pigment production
Extra lung, liver, pancreas, heart, etc
Wasabi gland...

Wasabi gland

Yes! I fully support such genetic engineering. In my perfect future I can fully select among a variety of genetic and bio-mechanical enhancements.

I also read somewhere that signs of human back problems are at least 150,000 years old in the fossil record. A byproduct of our "erectus" part of the equation. (Science magazine, probably sometime in the early 90s). Maybe the neo-luddites would like us to return to a pre-bipedal stage where we all enjoyed a Utopian bliss of no back strain or degenerative trauma.

I'll put my money with the guys decoding and enhancing the genes, thank you.

The real answer to all these terrible problems we face, like overpopulation, environmental decay, global warming, big scary asteroids, is to continue to develop our social, technical and scientific systems to overcome them. I could take your same arguments and roll them back to the middle ages and say that agriculture and dynasties caused non sustainability via cities and caused plagues. I’m partial to antibiotics and science solving plagues rather than killing off half the serfs and returning everyone to berry picking.

Ok, I missed the bulk of weekend debate here over neo-Luddism and HG-v.-post-Industrialism, but a couple of quick points:

Is it not possible to be concerned about sustainability of the earth's human population (and accelerating population growth, esp. among the poorest, least stable, least equipped nations) and other global-scale problems (Peak Oil, topsoil loss/degradation, etc.) and *not* be a technology-hating, Shamanic-yak-horn loving Neo-Luddite?

My own concerns about overpopulation and population growth expanding beyond technology's limits to compensate does not arise from a fear and/or hatred of technology and the relative comforts of modern society. Rather, it's just the opposite: I am gravely concerned that rising world population (esp. among the Third World) is going to suck more and more of our resources into future conflicts over declining limited natural resources (oil, food, fresh water, etc.) to the extent my own standard of living will greatly suffer.

I don't "hate" progress or want to deny its benefits to my family, my countrymen or anyone else in the world. Quite the contrary, I would love to see the rest of the world's standard of living rise to the level of First World industrial societies. However, I don't see this occurring in countries that already have relatively high population-to-natural resource ratios, and extremely high birthrates. How much of any nation's limited resources can be devoted to building out infrastructure, or public education, or R&D on high technology when a large % of the population is close to starvation and more hungry mouths to feed are being added every day?

Yes, the world's economy is not static, and improvements in agricultural technology do significantly push the envelope of population "sustainability" levels outward. However, let's not forget that the earth is still a basically closed system. Unless/until someone invents relatively inexpensive and scalable warp drive technology, this is the only large-scale habitable world we have. Malthus's basic observation that unchecked human populations tend to increase geometrically, while the food supply increases arithmetically is still valid, despite historic anomalies like the 1960s' "Green Revolution" (which BTW was only possible via massive increase in use of oil-fueled mechanisation, petrochemical fertilizers, insecticides, etc.).

I want a future world of sustainable prosperity, opportunity, good health, and a clean, healthy environment that everyone can enjoy for many generations to come. I just don't see how we get there from here without recognizing that there *are* some natural limits to human population growth. Whether or not we choose to impose some reasonable limits upon ourselves (contraception, limited family size), or do nothing and have the environment impose limits upon us forcibly (famine, war, plague, etc.) remains to be seen.

HARM

No quibbles.

We'll try to do (a), but it will be (b) that balances the accounts. It's just the way of things, though we do incrementally improve every cycle.

I view it as a constraints-problem. Even if you dialed up all productivity and efficiency by 100x, we'd still be at carrying capacity because we'd just consume and reproduce right up to that level.

It is the nature of our construct. It is the terrible trade-off we've made with iterative natural selection in order to survive as a species. Of course we should *try* to make things better. But we should also be fully self-aware of who we are as a species.

I dare say that, should we ever encounter another sentient, technology using species (highly debatable, I know, but most agree at least possible), they will inevitably also be evolved socially and physically from a terrible, violent, stressful history. Because that's what pushes progress forward. If you live in Eden and everyone is at peace, why build a rocket ship in the first place?