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Past Plenty

Maciej and John have been talking about why modern people work so much, and whether they would be happier without agriculture or industry.

Why do modern societies work so much? Well, the answer is mostly darwinian. The people alive today are not the descendants of the happy, sane, or self-actualized people of a hundred years ago. You are the great-great-grandchild of somebody who managed to make their mangy, lice-ridden children survive to breed.

In other words, stable systems are not necessarily the ones that make their participants most happy.

It seems fairly well established that when English colonists landed in Australia, they were much less happy and health than the indigenous people they found there. But who won? For all their malnourishment and chronic disease, the British had firearms, rough discipline, and resistance to smallpox and measles.

Maciej looks at the overall good effects of food cultivation, and I certainly won't deny them. It's also good to think about the step-by-step system effects of one tribe from a continent of hunter-gatherers experimenting with food cultivation. I suggest that a few things will tend to happen:

• The individuals become less healthy, though having a less diverse diet and being more subject to famine or nutrient deficiency.
• They can possibly support more people per unit area, and therefore more people in a single tribe.
• Food production can become a specialist task, allowing people to become specialists in government or war.
• They are better able to accumulate food storage (grain silos, smoked fish, etc), and therefore to mount expeditions.
• Fixed captial assets (fields, stock, etc) biases the group towards fight rather than flight, and encourages military development.

I think these effects tend to give the tribe a long-term competitive advantage over its neighbours. In the long term, the technology-using tribes will conquer or convert their neighbours, even if that makes everyone less happy on average. People do not generally have the choice of: “would I rather be a serf, or a nomad?”. They have the experience of being pushed off the map or enslaved by an expanding cultivation society.

If it makes you happy to turn away from modern life and live in the bush for an hour or a week or a year then it's wonderful that you have the choice. Doubtless it is better for you, spiritually and physically, than to spend a day in an office.

My friend Robin enjoys extended outdoor expeditions. At the moment I think she is on a one-month canoe trip north of the Arctic circle. On a previous trip, in the far north-west of Australia, thousands of miles from a city, in one of the most remote regions of the world, somebody was hurt and had to wait as much as 24 hours to be flown to a world-class hospital. Surely they have the best of both worlds.

I have been reading bits of Food in History (Tannahill):

In Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, a worker might earn anything from 25p to £2 (62 cents to $5) a week. In 1840-41, 25p bought neither more not less than six four-pound loaves — just enough to feed a typical family of two adults and three children. It left nothing to pay the rent, nothing for tea, nothing for that little piece of bacon which was the poor man's substitute for meat.

A “good meal” meant something hot, filling, and quickly cooked — tea and boiled potatoes more often than not, since potatoes cost only about 5p or 12.5c, for twenty pounds. The man of the house might have a piece of pie or a sausafe from a cofee stall at midday, and at the weekend the whole family sat down to a Sunday dinner of broth, stew and pudding. It was a poverty-line diet, but a great man people lived on it — and a great many iede because of it.

Vaguely apropos to this, Stephane and I were driving through western Sydney today, around Eastern Creek. I have to say all the new tract housing is a little depressing in some way. That way is possible part snobiness, but also a wonder whether the sum of happiness is really increased by just having more and more people. I'd rather see growth focus on more-per-person, or even better-per-person, than over production.

John also talks about the fact that humans seem really unable to deal with long-term consequences, and environmental impact is probably the most serious of these. I wonder if (first-world) humans gained 300-year lifespans through technology they would start worrying about what the world would be like in a hundred years? I would like to think so, but I would not bet on it. On the other hand, changing technology makes it hard to imagine what life will be like in 50 years. One might semi-seriously gamble on, say, sunbathing now in the hope that there will be a cure for melanoma in a decade. Perhaps people will blithely burn fossil fuels, assuming that some solution will turn up.

posted Fri 11 Jul 2003 in /issues/economics | link

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