“I wish I hadn’t ever been born and instead the past had one more person who otherwise wouldn’t have lived at that time”.
That is indeed what they meant: “I wouldn’t give them up, but if I’d never owned a computer, or had a car, or … I wouldn’t miss them”. I do find this reasoning a bit strange. You wouldn’t miss them, but you wouldn’t have them either. If someone invented one and showed it to you, you’d think it was amazing. But then you wish they never showed it to you? (Addictive things are an exception.)
And that’s just luxuries. What about “necessities”? If modern medicine didn’t exist and one of your kids died when they were young, you wouldn’t miss them? If your wife died during childbirth, you wouldn’t miss her?
Maybe it’s uncharitable, but I think of them as saying “I would be worse off, but I wouldn’t know it, so I’d be better off”. It just seems like a perverse belief about human wellbeing to me.
Well hedonic adaptationis a thing; there do seem to be things that work so that
when you first get it, you feel happy
then you get used to it, and return to the previous baseline happiness
but if you lose it, you will keep wishing it back and feel unhappy about having lost it
So in the long-term, getting it gave you no net benefit to wellbeing, and arguably even put you in a worse position, since you will now feel worse off if you lose it.
I’m skeptical of that reasoning because it suggests that the happiest man in the world would be born without limbs and sight and hearing.
I do think that people buy a new car and it’s the best thing ever, and then it just becomes their car. This happens to some people more than others, and it happens for some goods more than others. For instance, computers with internet access generate novel experiences all the time, which (for me at least) boosts you above baseline perpetually. I think it’s a mistake to forego good experiences to make your experience better.
In addition to Kaj_Sotala’s points about hedonic adaptation, I’d add that many technologies seem on-face to be strictly good, but actually carry significant costs. Additionally, the benefits don’t accrue to the individual, but instead towards some vague idea of progress.
It is incredible to have the internet to immediately answer any question I have. However, each question I take to the internet instead of a person in my life, it decreases my connection to community. I take a Lyft to the airport instead of asking a friend for a ride. Instead of stopping to ask for directions, I check an app on my phone. While these are certainly convenient and don’t seem like much, it seems clear that they are also eroding social bonds.
Any advantage gained by technology is given back in pursuit of more. Faster transport leads to people being more spread out, not better connected. Same for technologies like the phone and video chat. More efficient work hasn’t led to shorter work days or better lives. It is staggering that individuals today have far less leisure time than those in hunter-gather societies. Plus, it’s tough to imagine hunter-gather work being less fulfilling than the average job today.
If I had to be reborn as a random human in 2020 or a random human sometime between the end of the ice age and the first agricultural society, I’d easily choose the latter.
I agree that there are trade-offs between time periods but, for me, those trade-offs favour the present.
I did mention addictive innovations as negatives, but they can be handled. For example, I have to type in a long password every time before I can watch a Youtube video, which prevents me from mindlessly entering the website.
As for you not asking people for directions, you’re also talking to me (in text form, admittedly) probably from the other side of the world. And since we’re both on this website, we probably have a lot more in common than we would with a random person off the street.
Any advantage gained by technology is given back in pursuit of more. Faster transport leads to people being more spread out, not better connected.
Do people want faster transport? Yes. People then spread out because it’s a trade-off they want to make. It means they can retire earlier because they pay lower rental prices, and that’s more important than being a neighbour to as many friends as possible. By transitivity, this is an overall increase in wellbeing. It’s three steps forward and one step back, not one step forward and two steps back.
People can set bad goals that don’t make them happy when they achieve them. I think that’s what causes some people to want more and more. Because they are rarely actually satisfied. I suspect these people would have the same problem in earlier time periods (“Honey, the neighbours have a bigger grass hut than we do”), except they’d have a greater chance of dying from an infection. If you really want to, and you don’t think you’re permanently ruined modern technology, you can move to a less-industrialized society. They’re still around today. I’d note that the flow of immigration is away from those countries and towards more technologically advanced countries.
People of the past had terrible lives. Correct me if I’m wrong, but racial slavery was more common, witch trials were more common, war killed a greater proportion of the population, more people died from starvation or poor hygiene, religious and homosexual persecution was more common, child brides were more common, women were treated as second-class citizens (if they were citizens at all). To make a convincing case, you’d have to pick a specific time and place to live, show that it’s representative of “sometime between the end of the ice age and the first agricultural society”, and show, at the very least, that’s it’s not terrible time to live. Without that, you may be idealizing what it was actually like.
I definitely would not argue that now is the worst time in human history to be alive. My comment was that while humans existed only as hunter-gathers, the average life satisfaction was likely higher than now. Social bonds were closer, there was significantly more leisure time, and labor was maximally fulfilling. The ills that you highlight all came about following the establishment of agricultural societies and indeed continue to exist to a greater degree now than they did for pre-agricultural humans.
Just as there is no single way to gather and hunt, there are many different ways to cultivate plants and interact with non-human animals. Major forms of agriculture arose independently in at least seven different areas of the world. Each depended on a different mix of plants and non-human animals. Moreover, there are different mixes of horticulture, or small-scale gardening, with other activities, like gathering and hunting. So instead of talking about the origin of agriculture, we need to think about the many origins of agriculture. [...]
Inevitably a change in the mix of plants and animals will have complex effects, which can lead to different forms of social organization. Such changes are not automatic, and they are rarely once-and-for-all.
Putting together the many ways to hunt and gather with many forms of cultivating makes it clear Jared Diamond was playing fast and loose with the evidence when he wrote “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” Returning to his headline: “With agriculture came the curses of social and sexual inequality, disease, and despotism” (1987:66). Each of those terms is questionable, and some are blatantly untrue. The evidence is sometimes in the very sources Diamond uses.
… what about egalitarianism? In a 2004 study, Michael Gurven marshals an impressive amount of cross-cultural data and notes that hunters tend to keep more of their kill for themselves and their families than they share with others. While there is undeniably a great deal of sharing across hunter-gatherer societies, common notions of generalized equality are greatly overstated. Even in circumstances where hunters give away more of their meat than they end up receiving from others in return, good hunters tend to be accorded high status, and rewarded with more opportunities to reproduce everywhere the relationship has been studied. When taking into account ‘embodied wealth’ such as hunting returns and reproductive success, and ‘relational wealth’ such as the number of exchange and sharing partners, Alden Smith et al. calculated that hunter-gatherer societies have a ‘moderate’ level of inequality, roughly comparable to that of Denmark. While this is less inequality than most agricultural societies and nation states, it’s not quite the level of egalitarianism many have come to expect from hunter-gatherers.
In the realm of reproductive success, hunter-gatherers are even more unequal than modern industrialized populations, exhibiting what is called “greater reproductive skew,” with males having significantly larger variance in reproductive success than females. Among the Ache of Paraguay, males have over 4 times the variance in reproductive success that females do, which is one of the highest ratios recorded. This means some males end up having lots of children with different women, while a significant number of males end up having none at all. This is reflected in the fact that polygynous marriage is practiced in the majority of hunter-gatherer societies for which there are data. [...]
It is also instructive to compare the homicide rates of hunter-gatherer societies with those of contemporary nation states. In a 2013 paper entitled “From the Peaceful to the Warlike,” anthropologist Robert Kelly provides homicide data for 15 hunter-gatherer societies.
11 of these 15 societies have homicide rates higher than that of the most violent modern nation, and 14 out of the 15 have homicide rates higher than that of the United States in 2016. The one exception, the Batek of Malaysia, have a long history of being violently attacked and enslaved by neighboring groups, and developed a survival tactic of running away and studiously avoiding conflict. Yet even they recount tales of wars in the past, where their shamans would shoot enemies with blowpipes. Interestingly, Ivan Tacey & Diana Riboli have noted that “…the Batek frequently recount their nostalgic memories of British doctors, administrators and army personnel visiting their communities in helicopters to deliver medicines and other supplies,” which conflicts with the idea that hunter-gatherer societies would have no want or need of anything nation states have to offer. From 1920-1955 the !Kung had a homicide rate of 42⁄100,000 (about 8 times that of the US rate in 2016), however Kelly mentions that, “murders ceased after 1955 due to the presence of an outside police force.”
Many of the recent articles in the popular media on hunter-gatherer societies have failed to represent these societies accurately. The picture you get from reading articles in publications like the New Yorker and the Guardian, or from anthropologists like Douglas Fry and James Suzman, is often quite different from what a deep dive into the ethnographic record reveals. The excessive reliance on a single paper published 50 years ago has contributed to some severe misconceptions about hunter-gatherer ‘affluence,’ and their relative freedom from scarcity and disease. There is a tendency to downplay the benefits of modern medicine, institutions, and infrastructure – as well as the very real costs of not having access to them – in these discussions. And, despite what some may wish to believe, the hunter-gatherer way of life is not a solution to the social problems found in modern nation states.
“Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was about twenty-six years,” says Armelagos, “but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years...
Neither of these numbers sound great. Living past 80 sounds a lot better to me. Why did pre-agricultural communities have early deaths compared to us if “the ills that you highlight all came about following the establishment of agricultural societies”? They had to die somehow.
Early farmers had health issues because they had a handful of crops and just ate those things. If you just eat corn and potatoes, you’ll die early. They didn’t have nutritional science. To say poor nutrition is a fundamental problem with farming is just incorrect. So I’ll concede agriculture made the average people worse off temporarily, but considering our life expectancy increases, I don’t see how you can say that the last few decades are still worse than hunter-gathers. In fact, he says as much:
Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day.
… [In agricultural societies, elites were healthier]
To people in rich countries like the U.S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an elite...
So people in rich countries are better off. Then the question becomes “Will the poor countries stay poor?” If they don’t, his whole argument is wrong. (Also the “Everyone’s poor, so there’s no inequality! Hurray!” argument is a bit strange.) I’ll bet that before China’s wealth increase, he would have said China would stay poor.
Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed.
Why is he assuming that had those same people stayed hunter-gathers, they would treat their women better? It seems like a completely unwarranted assumption.
Some epidemic diseases, I’ll concede, have been brought to us by farming, indirectly through increased population and population density, and directly through the farming of animals.
You’re also neglecting the massive population increases that he discusses. An extra life worth living is a net gain. The associated decreases in average wellbeing haven’t held up because of better nutritional science and healthcare so there’s not even a “repugnant conclusion” trade-off.
Neither of these numbers sound great. Living past 80 sounds a lot better to me. Why did pre-agricultural communities have early deaths compared to us if “the ills that you highlight all came about following the establishment of agricultural societies”? They had to die somehow.
This is almost entirely driven by decreases in infant mortality. The article specifically cites the scenario of a mother giving birth while still carrying their last would probably have abandoned that child. Life expectancy for those that reached adulthood was nearly 70, roughly the same as world average now.
Also, using “life expectancy” as defined by present society seems biased. Does it really make sense to include infanticide in life expectancy in hunter-gather societies, but not include abortions in modern ones, where it’s functionally the same thing? (this is not a moral judgment of either)
Ultimately though you are right that humans now do, to some degree, have longer lives than pre-agricultural humans. Evaluating this will come down to a personal choice between quality and quantity.
So people in rich countries are better off. Then the question becomes “Will the poor countries stay poor?” If they don’t, his whole argument is wrong. (Also the “Everyone’s poor, so there’s no inequality! Hurray!” argument is a bit strange.) I’ll bet that before China’s wealth increase, he would have said China would stay poor.
The quote you snip says that the rich in agricultural societies live better than the underclass in those same societies, not better than hunter-gatherer societies.
How are you defining “poor” and why is it bad? How can one argue that people who only need to work ~15 hours per week are “poor”. That is far richer than most the world today. The absence of gold or iPhones says nothing about the human condition.
Why is he assuming that had those same people stayed hunter-gathers, they would treat their women better? It seems like a completely unwarranted assumption.
The anthropological evidence (mostly observation of present day hunter-gatherer groups) indicates that hunter-gatherer groups have high levels of gender equality. Resource accumulation enabled by agriculture leading to gender imbalances is a possible explanation of this pattern.
You’re also neglecting the massive population increases that he discusses. An extra life worth living is a net gain. The associated decreases in average wellbeing haven’t held up because of better nutritional science and healthcare so there’s not even a “repugnant conclusion” trade-off.
This is a different question entirely, evaluating the world as a whole instead of the average individual experience. It’s quite possible that the increase in quantity of life that has arisen is or will become “worth it”.
This is almost entirely driven by decreases in infant mortality. The article specifically cites the scenario of a mother giving birth while still carrying their last would probably have abandoned that child. Life expectancy for those that reached adulthood was nearly 70, roughly the same as world average now.
I have wondered how that factored into life expectancy. This is a good point.
The quote you snip says that the rich in agricultural societies live better than the underclass in those same societies, not better than hunter-gatherer societies.
Incorrect, that quote is ambiguous about whether they are better off compared to pre-agriculture. However, he also says
Thus with the advent of agriculture the elite became better off, but most people became worse off.
Which is important to match with his classing of most of the U.S. as “elite”. He’s explicitly saying that if you live in the U.S. today, you are probably better off. That’s why I said his argument rests on the poorer countries staying poor.
How are you defining “poor” and why is it bad? How can one argue that people who only need to work ~15 hours per week are “poor”. That is far richer than most the world today. The absence of gold or iPhones says nothing about the human condition.
Poverty is obviously a continuum and relative to the context. But my definition is that poorer people have fewer choices, including what goods they can attain, and including how many hours they work. You can live without all the technology and entertainment today if you want. For that life, 15 hours of work per week can be enough if you have a spouse that does the same. (Minimum wage in Australia is enough for that.) If you’re a medium-income earner, you can work half of that. Though, admittedly, if you are a middle-income earner probably can’t find a job that lets you work that much. But you can retire earlier having done less “total lifetime work”. I imagine pre-agricultural people work well into old age.
The anthropological evidence (mostly observation of present day hunter-gatherer groups) indicates that hunter-gatherer groups have high levels of gender equality.
That’s surprising to me, and shifts me towards that conclusion.
This is a different question entirely, evaluating the world as a whole instead of the average individual experience. It’s quite possible that the increase in quantity of life that has arisen is or will become “worth it”.
It’s not the original question, but is it relevant: Assuming that people were better off back then, what should we do about it today? The answer: nothing.
You’ve changed my view quite a bit, but I’d still easily prefer to live now (albeit in a rich country).
“Almost entirely driven by decreases in infant mortality” is exaggerated. Infant mortality was ~20% and childhood mortality (under age 5) was ~50%. Yes, a lot of the increase came from childhood mortality, but life expectancy increased at every age.
(Also, I don’t have time to dig into it now, but I am skeptical of the “15 hours” stat for hunter-gatherers.)
Note that life expectancy at 50 and the gap between life expectancy at birth and life expectancy at 1 year basically didn’t budge from 1850 to 1900, whereas life expectancy at birth jumped by 10 years over the same time range. I do think there are at least two distinct things going on (probably all of which are related to increased wealth and improved medical care).
That is indeed what they meant: “I wouldn’t give them up, but if I’d never owned a computer, or had a car, or … I wouldn’t miss them”. I do find this reasoning a bit strange. You wouldn’t miss them, but you wouldn’t have them either. If someone invented one and showed it to you, you’d think it was amazing. But then you wish they never showed it to you? (Addictive things are an exception.)
And that’s just luxuries. What about “necessities”? If modern medicine didn’t exist and one of your kids died when they were young, you wouldn’t miss them? If your wife died during childbirth, you wouldn’t miss her?
Maybe it’s uncharitable, but I think of them as saying “I would be worse off, but I wouldn’t know it, so I’d be better off”. It just seems like a perverse belief about human wellbeing to me.
Well hedonic adaptation is a thing; there do seem to be things that work so that
when you first get it, you feel happy
then you get used to it, and return to the previous baseline happiness
but if you lose it, you will keep wishing it back and feel unhappy about having lost it
So in the long-term, getting it gave you no net benefit to wellbeing, and arguably even put you in a worse position, since you will now feel worse off if you lose it.
I’m skeptical of that reasoning because it suggests that the happiest man in the world would be born without limbs and sight and hearing.
I do think that people buy a new car and it’s the best thing ever, and then it just becomes their car. This happens to some people more than others, and it happens for some goods more than others. For instance, computers with internet access generate novel experiences all the time, which (for me at least) boosts you above baseline perpetually. I think it’s a mistake to forego good experiences to make your experience better.
Yes, I’m not saying that I would agree with the reasoning, just that one can hold it in a consistent manner.
Yes, I think you’re right.
In addition to Kaj_Sotala’s points about hedonic adaptation, I’d add that many technologies seem on-face to be strictly good, but actually carry significant costs. Additionally, the benefits don’t accrue to the individual, but instead towards some vague idea of progress.
It is incredible to have the internet to immediately answer any question I have. However, each question I take to the internet instead of a person in my life, it decreases my connection to community. I take a Lyft to the airport instead of asking a friend for a ride. Instead of stopping to ask for directions, I check an app on my phone. While these are certainly convenient and don’t seem like much, it seems clear that they are also eroding social bonds.
Any advantage gained by technology is given back in pursuit of more. Faster transport leads to people being more spread out, not better connected. Same for technologies like the phone and video chat. More efficient work hasn’t led to shorter work days or better lives. It is staggering that individuals today have far less leisure time than those in hunter-gather societies. Plus, it’s tough to imagine hunter-gather work being less fulfilling than the average job today.
If I had to be reborn as a random human in 2020 or a random human sometime between the end of the ice age and the first agricultural society, I’d easily choose the latter.
I agree that there are trade-offs between time periods but, for me, those trade-offs favour the present.
I did mention addictive innovations as negatives, but they can be handled. For example, I have to type in a long password every time before I can watch a Youtube video, which prevents me from mindlessly entering the website.
As for you not asking people for directions, you’re also talking to me (in text form, admittedly) probably from the other side of the world. And since we’re both on this website, we probably have a lot more in common than we would with a random person off the street.
Do people want faster transport? Yes. People then spread out because it’s a trade-off they want to make. It means they can retire earlier because they pay lower rental prices, and that’s more important than being a neighbour to as many friends as possible. By transitivity, this is an overall increase in wellbeing. It’s three steps forward and one step back, not one step forward and two steps back.
People can set bad goals that don’t make them happy when they achieve them. I think that’s what causes some people to want more and more. Because they are rarely actually satisfied. I suspect these people would have the same problem in earlier time periods (“Honey, the neighbours have a bigger grass hut than we do”), except they’d have a greater chance of dying from an infection. If you really want to, and you don’t think you’re permanently ruined modern technology, you can move to a less-industrialized society. They’re still around today. I’d note that the flow of immigration is away from those countries and towards more technologically advanced countries.
People of the past had terrible lives. Correct me if I’m wrong, but racial slavery was more common, witch trials were more common, war killed a greater proportion of the population, more people died from starvation or poor hygiene, religious and homosexual persecution was more common, child brides were more common, women were treated as second-class citizens (if they were citizens at all). To make a convincing case, you’d have to pick a specific time and place to live, show that it’s representative of “sometime between the end of the ice age and the first agricultural society”, and show, at the very least, that’s it’s not terrible time to live. Without that, you may be idealizing what it was actually like.
I definitely would not argue that now is the worst time in human history to be alive. My comment was that while humans existed only as hunter-gathers, the average life satisfaction was likely higher than now. Social bonds were closer, there was significantly more leisure time, and labor was maximally fulfilling. The ills that you highlight all came about following the establishment of agricultural societies and indeed continue to exist to a greater degree now than they did for pre-agricultural humans.
I’d recommend checking out this article by Jared Diamond that reviews some of the anthropological evidence supporting this view: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race
But see also Many Origins of Agriculture:
Also Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer:
Neither of these numbers sound great. Living past 80 sounds a lot better to me. Why did pre-agricultural communities have early deaths compared to us if “the ills that you highlight all came about following the establishment of agricultural societies”? They had to die somehow.
Early farmers had health issues because they had a handful of crops and just ate those things. If you just eat corn and potatoes, you’ll die early. They didn’t have nutritional science. To say poor nutrition is a fundamental problem with farming is just incorrect. So I’ll concede agriculture made the average people worse off temporarily, but considering our life expectancy increases, I don’t see how you can say that the last few decades are still worse than hunter-gathers. In fact, he says as much:
So people in rich countries are better off. Then the question becomes “Will the poor countries stay poor?” If they don’t, his whole argument is wrong. (Also the “Everyone’s poor, so there’s no inequality! Hurray!” argument is a bit strange.) I’ll bet that before China’s wealth increase, he would have said China would stay poor.
Why is he assuming that had those same people stayed hunter-gathers, they would treat their women better? It seems like a completely unwarranted assumption.
Some epidemic diseases, I’ll concede, have been brought to us by farming, indirectly through increased population and population density, and directly through the farming of animals.
You’re also neglecting the massive population increases that he discusses. An extra life worth living is a net gain. The associated decreases in average wellbeing haven’t held up because of better nutritional science and healthcare so there’s not even a “repugnant conclusion” trade-off.
This is almost entirely driven by decreases in infant mortality. The article specifically cites the scenario of a mother giving birth while still carrying their last would probably have abandoned that child. Life expectancy for those that reached adulthood was nearly 70, roughly the same as world average now.
Also, using “life expectancy” as defined by present society seems biased. Does it really make sense to include infanticide in life expectancy in hunter-gather societies, but not include abortions in modern ones, where it’s functionally the same thing? (this is not a moral judgment of either)
Ultimately though you are right that humans now do, to some degree, have longer lives than pre-agricultural humans. Evaluating this will come down to a personal choice between quality and quantity.
The quote you snip says that the rich in agricultural societies live better than the underclass in those same societies, not better than hunter-gatherer societies.
How are you defining “poor” and why is it bad? How can one argue that people who only need to work ~15 hours per week are “poor”. That is far richer than most the world today. The absence of gold or iPhones says nothing about the human condition.
The anthropological evidence (mostly observation of present day hunter-gatherer groups) indicates that hunter-gatherer groups have high levels of gender equality. Resource accumulation enabled by agriculture leading to gender imbalances is a possible explanation of this pattern.
This is a different question entirely, evaluating the world as a whole instead of the average individual experience. It’s quite possible that the increase in quantity of life that has arisen is or will become “worth it”.
I have wondered how that factored into life expectancy. This is a good point.
Incorrect, that quote is ambiguous about whether they are better off compared to pre-agriculture. However, he also says
Which is important to match with his classing of most of the U.S. as “elite”. He’s explicitly saying that if you live in the U.S. today, you are probably better off. That’s why I said his argument rests on the poorer countries staying poor.
Poverty is obviously a continuum and relative to the context. But my definition is that poorer people have fewer choices, including what goods they can attain, and including how many hours they work. You can live without all the technology and entertainment today if you want. For that life, 15 hours of work per week can be enough if you have a spouse that does the same. (Minimum wage in Australia is enough for that.) If you’re a medium-income earner, you can work half of that. Though, admittedly, if you are a middle-income earner probably can’t find a job that lets you work that much. But you can retire earlier having done less “total lifetime work”. I imagine pre-agricultural people work well into old age.
That’s surprising to me, and shifts me towards that conclusion.
It’s not the original question, but is it relevant: Assuming that people were better off back then, what should we do about it today? The answer: nothing.
You’ve changed my view quite a bit, but I’d still easily prefer to live now (albeit in a rich country).
“Almost entirely driven by decreases in infant mortality” is exaggerated. Infant mortality was ~20% and childhood mortality (under age 5) was ~50%. Yes, a lot of the increase came from childhood mortality, but life expectancy increased at every age.
(Also, I don’t have time to dig into it now, but I am skeptical of the “15 hours” stat for hunter-gatherers.)
Note that life expectancy at 50 and the gap between life expectancy at birth and life expectancy at 1 year basically didn’t budge from 1850 to 1900, whereas life expectancy at birth jumped by 10 years over the same time range. I do think there are at least two distinct things going on (probably all of which are related to increased wealth and improved medical care).