This is kind of me. Ive had a ton of jobs and it was always the jobs ive made the most at that i was the most miserable. You could not pay me to be a supervisor. Or a waiter for that matter. Give me something physical that i dont have to think at, or kiss ass like a waiter or salesman and im happy.
But i live a very ascetic life right now and could put everything i own in my old used car so i dont need or want much money…in the past i needed more and took jobs that made more. But like i said i was not happy.
“Researchers Gurven and Kaplan have estimated that around 57% of hunter-gatherers reach the age of 15. Of those that reach 15 years of age, 64% continue to live to or past the age of 45. This places the life expectancy between 21 and 37 years.”
ooo
While I think that you can live more or less fine a low consumption person in modern society, no small part of that is access to vaccinations and treatment of early childhood diseases, access to clean water and food, modern garments and textiles, the ability to use modern medicine in “emergency” situations, etc. Situations where ppl die on avg at 37 years are not, by in large, that pleasant.
It was only in the late 1800s that modern medicine started to significantly improve with, eg, widespread belief in and adoption of the practice of surgeons carefully washing their hands.
Of course it doesn’t sound pleasant to you if you’re framing it with modern technology and science. But just extend it by imagining what life is like 10,000 years from now to realize just how fucking awful you have it now.
I’m no anthropologist, but my wife’s job as an economist is to research and then try and promote to governments statistical measures that go beyond just traditional economic ‘productivity’. There lots of problems with that, but she thinks the biggest is that most of the measures researchers develop in this space do not obviously track traditional economic measures - that it just isn’t evident that countries and individuals having more money leads to more well being. That means that even governments who show a genuine interest then leave themselves open to easy attack, and when times get harder usually fall back to old ways.
A colleague of hers is Nepalese and we were talking about this and related matters a few weeks back, I brought up that in debates about capitalism, free trade etc. it’s usually taken for granted that it has lifted a massive proportion of the non western world out of dire poverty, and wanted her perspective as someone from one of those countries. She said that the latest research she had read implied that the only real positive influence on people lives were medical advances, and that after that the big raises in GDP and personal income hadn’t really altered things either in real opportunity or subjective experience. And that that fitted with her own experience of growing up in Nepal.
I know Clovis said that a re-examination of capitalism was outside the bounds of this thread, but to me at least, if I ever rhetorically slide close to talk of guillotines that’s where I’m heading. I think it’s a slogan from AOC that rich people aren’t the problem they’re a symptom, but they’re also the people with power and they aren’t about to give it up easily.
I’l also chuck this out there - the Terror being a freely chosen revolutionary excess (or, worse, an inevitable product of rebellion), and Napoleon’s megalomania being the cause of the Napoleonic wars are British historical propaganda. That doesn’t absolve either of them, but they’re no more the result of the revolution than they are of a myriad other factors.
“Look man, all I’m saying is if I’m going to take your package, the split needs to be fair. I mean, I’ve got to pay all my people the same and here you are upping the price on me!”
The Post-2008 Irish economic downturn had a profound effect on Limerick. The announcement in 2009 that Dell was to move its manufacturing facility from Limerick to Poland devastated the local economy. 1,900 jobs were lost at Dell and it is believed that for every job that was lost at Dell at least another 4 to 5 were at risk. The closure of the Dell manufacturing facility amounted to 2% of Ireland’s national GDP.[54] The downturn in the construction industry also cost many jobs as did the stalled Limerick regeneration programme which promised investment in Limerick’s deprived city areas. As of 2012 unemployment had become a major problem across the city with the unemployment rate in the city at 28.6% which was almost twice the national average.[46]
There’s another layer and it’s not just Fuck Your Subaru, though that does get me amped. People were literally riding horses round Limerick.
If you define ‘modern’ as including all time since ~Mesopotamia sure. Pretty sure the worst pandemics in history took place after the rise of major cities but before modern medicine.
Ebola would be insanely ugly if it arrived and there was no medical establishment to figure out how it spread and how to contain it. Very easily could be as bad as the black death. Could be worse.
Yeah there’s a reason why smallpox (and others) was so devastating to the Native Americans. They didn’t really have the livestock herds to create those kinds of pandemic diseases and had basically no defense against it… but they had more than enough population density for it to spread super far before burning out.
There’s a joke that is something like, two people are talking about the food somewhere and one complains about how vile it is and the other says “at least the portions are big”.
They did have agriculture though. Talking about the groups well outside of states. There’s a theory that they did so much slash and burn agriculture that their population decimation from contact with old world diseases led to so much reforestation that the uptake in CO2 was a significant cause of the little ice age of that period.
Yup I’ve heard, and believe that theory. It makes sense. I mean slash and burn farming is what our settlers did in what is now the American South when they arrived. It’s a brutally difficult way to farm physically which is a big part of what drove demand for slaves. The reason why slaves were the most valuable property in the South (as opposed to land) is that the land wasn’t worth much at all because it had to first be cleared, and then only had a few good years of production in it before it was time to move on.
To be clear it’s such a mediocre farming method that even with slavery it was barely economically viable before the arrival of the cotton gin. Afterwards of course it was extremely profitable, but you couldn’t get free people to trade their life expectancy for money (maybe it would be different if you paid them the vast majority of the profits, but you can’t build a massive mansion doing that) picking cotton so slavery was the optimal way to approach the business.
If the European settlers who had significantly better tools (better designed and made of steel) were doing slash and burn you can be sure that the Native Americans were as well… and it’s easy to see why they would have still hunted for a sizable % of their calories given the absurd prevalence of game.
Not the only study, but anthropologist David Graeber lived with people who were primarily hunter gatherers in Madagascar and studied them. They did have shorter average life spans (largely from infant mortality), but worked far fewer hours and were more secure, and seemed far more fulfilled and happy than most people. I’d take that life over factory worker in China or Bangladesh (the people who make our lifestyle possible) any day.
That description may well apply to settled populations, but unsettled groups used slash and burn agriculture for pretty low-work part of subsistence. They burned an area, grew something in the very rich and cleared area and then moved on, not returning for a long time. This kind of agriculture was practiced around the world for a long time until other prerequisites for state formation happened like the domestication of grain crops, which were easily taxed.
