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Comment by ppeetteerr | Hacker News Reader

This is common to all periods of the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...

Today, we take for granted that the production of each individual is greatly improved by machinery. We own multiple items of clothing, eat a varied diet, and live in homes of concrete heated and cooled by electricity. And this description applies to upcoming economies like Ukraine.

If you take the example of what a feudal Russian lived in the 1700, many built their own homes out of wood using an axe and wood from the forest, they would buy fabric and furs but had to make and mend their own clothes, they would hunt and work the land of their lord for sustinence. Their diet was restricted to seasons and death by famine and disease was rampant. The few coins they could accumulate went towards the purchase of must haves (metal tools, basic textiles, a furnace, and luxuries like animals). In winter, they would sleep on top of their furnace for heat, and their home was filled with smoke.

Urban centres were no different. The 1000sqft apartments we have today are 5-10x the size of dwellings in London or Paris during the same period. You can see this visiting the ruins of Rome too.

Life was tough but we forget how tough it was because most of us idealize the simpler times of the past.

View on HN

> The 1000sqft apartments we have today

For people in the SI-world (most of the world) confused by this imperial-speak, this roughly equates to 93 square meters.

This example clearly illustrates a superior point of basically all Freedom Units: you get more of them. More is more better.

You get less inches than cm. Less miles than km.

Not so free after all!

I was going to reply "fewer inches!" but then I realised that inches are (at least in principle) not discrete; half an inch is a perfectly reasonable measurement.

Anyone here know which of "less inches" or "fewer inches" is grammatically correct?

"fewer" is for things you can count.

Less length, but fewer inches.

> More is more better ... that's just simple science!

In the spirit of standardization, I think all systems of speaking besides American English should be made illegal in all countries. That way, no one will have to pay translators to unnecessarily switch back and forth between equivalent languages, or have to put up with any of those stupid British accents.

You can't deny the economic advantages of this. Who cares about losing cultural heritage? That's just for obstructionists like those filthy Americans. /s

A 93m^2 flat in Paris today would cost you around 2500-3000 euros per month in rent, or around twice the minimum wage. It's probably not the best example for the democratization of large dwellings...

Indeed... In London flats are averaging 30-50 sqmt, depending on area. Shared flats are a totally different thing and don't know if that would have been a thing in the past (maybe?)

> are averaging 30-50 sqmt

That's still 1.6-5.3 times more than they used to be, according to the original claim. Seems less dramatic than 5-10x but for an apartment that already feels tiny, it's a lot.

Makes you wonder if Hunter gatherer times were better. Due to the much lower population densities than feudal times there would have been less famine I imagine.

It really depends on where the people lived. Iceland survived for 1000 years on a diet of some root vegetables, fish, milk and mammals. I would not wish their existence on anyone today. People in warmer climates would have a better diet but it's clear that agriculture and husbandry were historically more desirable over pure hunting and gathering, even in warmer regions like Egypt.

That Icelandic diet sounds pretty similar to how I eat today. What's unhealthy about it?

It's not the same cooking you've come to expect. There is a whole wikipedia entry on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_cuisine#Medieval_Ice...

I assume your response is coming from a low-carb/paleo perspective? No leafy greens or vitamin-rich vegetables. The vegetables that are there (root vegetables) are carby and not especially nutritious. Huge vitamin deficiency across the board.

That is simply incorrect. For example, beef liver is about twenty times more nutritious than fruit by mass.

My original question was a bit cheeky as I already knew the answer.

Yes, but don't forget that for a relatively small amount of a beef liver you need to kill a whole cow. And when you kill the animal you couldn't cherry-pick the parts of the meat you use, everything was used while it lasted. The parts that could be preserved would last for a while and things like a liver would be eaten right away or used to make sausages. In the middle age common folks didn't eat meat as often as we do today, it was a luxury. They primarily used a lot of buttermilk, cheese and eggs instead.

Not when you eat the entire animal including organ meat as these folks undoubtedly did.

You get your diet from a warm supermarket. Or heck, delivered to your door.

The Icelandic ancestors didn't have that luxury in their country's bitter cold

> it's clear that agriculture and husbandry were historically more desirable over pure hunting and gathering, even in warmer regions like Egypt.

It's clear that agricultural societies were more fit than hunter-gatherer societies.

Agricultural societies could breed more people and use them to kill the hunter-gatherers and take their land.

Even if the meat/vegetable eaters were bigger and stronger than the grain eaters, there were simply a lot more grain eaters.

Classic Greek myths are full of references to "golden age" men who were displaced by more degenerate modern, civilized men. I can't help read those myths as a story of the rise of agriculture.

Indeed, many of the Vikings who gave up on raiding often settled in what's now England, Ireland, and Normandy, whereas their discovery of Iceland was an accident and its settlement was only partly intentional.

These "golden age" men of the Greek myths also lived in palaces (palace of agamemnon) and practiced agriculture. In these myths some typical topoi are also cattle raids, palace intrigues and territorial disputes. These are not the hallmarks of hunter-gatherer societies. These myths should be treated as such, myths. Maybe they have a little historical truth in it, since the mycenean people (precursor to the archaic greek civilisation) definitly had palaces and an elaborate trade network spanning the eastern mediterranean. These are more advanced feats than pre-archaic greek civilisation, wich developed into smaller tribal and rural communities at the time before homer wrote his epics.

sounds like those would be the "degenerate modern, civilized men" or do you think the GP means the doric invaders?

Well, yes I did think that GP meant distinctly greek peoples. The demigod-like figures in the Illias are Achilles, Ajax, Hector and others wich are exceptionally strong compared to other humans. These characters fought alongside the Achaeans or Troy, so definitly on the side of civilised folk.

This is old but to be clear the Greek heroes were not golden age men. The golden age occurred before the heroic age and it was explicitly pre-agriculture:

> [Men] lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace.

> In the 5th century BCE, the philosopher Empedocles, like Hesiod before him, emphasized the idea of primordial innocence and harmony in all of nature, including human society, from which he maintained there had been a steady deterioration until the present.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age

As bad as Iceland might have been, Greenland was worse.

Hunter gatherer times were certainly not superior to today. That's a pervasive myth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage

While nobility is bullshit, better nutrition as evidenced by height and tooth remains is true, only catching up in the 20th century, except for the rich of course. Sorry I don't have a source. (The benefits of civilization may have only accrued to a small proportion of the population for most of history. )

Jared Diamond's essay The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race makes this argument quite convincingly: http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

Ordered this book but haven't touched it yet:

http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/55101875...

Doesn't look too happy to me -- maybe because I'm over 30 and would be dead. Also, I loved my mother (who is dead) -- but at least she didn't die in childbirth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

Life expectancy at birth was low because of high children mortality. If you've made it to adolescence, you could expect to live 50-80 years.

https://condensedscience.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/life-expec...

Losing many of my children, wives, and loved ones sure would make me sad.

It would surely make you sad, if you had time-traveled there. If you had been living there, you probably would be a bit more fatalistic and willing to accept untimely deaths as a part of natural order, having no experience of better life.

Does your logic also apply to the millions of people living in slavery and profound poverty today?

I concede that people adjust their expectations to norms that surround them. But I also feel there are certain floors in the human condition -- the death of a child being one of those rock bottoms.

Jared Diamond is not an expert. He's a pop culture writer.

If you want to explore the other side to that old essay, try this: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Worst+Mistake+in+the+His...

He's a physiologist, who moved to other disciplines, with a touch of anthropology. There are no experts-on-everything-human, of course, so that'll probably have to do for now. One can imagine better combinations for such a synthetic interdisciplinary topic, I agree - but there weren't a lot of other volunteers. Academia likes narrow specialists. No need to falsely disparage him as a self-appointed writer whose only credential is popularity, it isn't true.

"After graduating from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became a professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands." - Wikipedia

I'm not convinced by that call to authority. For example, what about Larry Summers? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers

Do you dispute his position on women in science? Or, should we take his position as correct for the same reasons that you list.

I did not say his only credit was popularity. I said he's a pop-writer, as opposed to, say, a peer reviewed expert in the domain.

In any case, my primary request is that people consider the long list of refutations to the claims in his mass-market publications.

It should not be a call to authority. The only thing that matters are the individual arguments he exposes in the books, not the fact he's not an expert.

And history has also shown some experts can be wrong when the paradigm change of new ideas is too big.

However, and I say this is particularly important: all refutations I have read about his work focus on some particular detail, they are of the type: 'this number is wrong'. Of course it can be, he's speculating. And that's the easy part to fix! Just change the number in his argument with the correct one. Be constructive.

But I have never read a refutation that says: 'this line of reasoning is wrong'.

In fact, his work has been cited as an inspiration for 'Sapiens', which is a current best seller and it follows the same modus operandi.

If you're genuinely curious in reading a refutation, then you should read through the 10-year-old HN discussion linked above.

Or, try googling. For example, here is a relevant discussion on NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/01/14/169374400/why-do...

As ever HackerNews discussed this ten years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43118

(Tichy’s karma is just 110 short)

Would be fun to do a serious analysis of HN discussion, on the same topic, separated by 10 years. I don't mean identifying the occurrence -- I mean various characteristics of the discussion.

For example, perhaps certain facts have been more/less passionately supported after 10 years. Also aspects like tone.

Weak effort of combining "is true" with "don't have a source."

The noble savage is just a fictional trope. No one denies that people in past times had materially worse-off lives than we do today. But they probably had more freedom. In medieval times, you might have half of the year off for vacation: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/08/29/why-a-medie.... You could largely do what you wanted, were not surveilled, and could live on your own as long as others around you weren't disturbed. The point isn't that it was a superior way of life, but it evokes a qualitative perspective on life. Would you rather live in perfect health for 100 years in prison, or as a diabetic paraplegic in the outside world for 40? What about 20? What about a prison that was full of your closest friends, versus a world of your enemies? Quality of life defies a mere "but healthcare, science, infrastructure etc. is better today!" metric that everyone on HN seems to stick to. There are profound cultural changes that we can't assess objectively. Culturally, emotionally, we may be worse off today. Our 60 years of wage slavery in windowless offices might seem unconscionable to a medieval peasant drinking mead all day by a stream with his friends, even if he ends up dying at 50.

That's a very romantic view of medieval times (link is broken, by the way). Half the year off for vacation? I hope you enjoy vacationing at home, because if you're a serf, you're going nowhere. If you're a noblewoman, you're as likely to be married off for politics as not. Women in general were markedly less free - barred from education, property, public life, so on and so forth.

To further your analogy, would you prefer to be a diabetic paraplegic in the modern era, or the medieval? Because you're not going to be able to medicate yourself with the insulin you need, and there's not much work for paraplegics to do if they're not born into money.

> Our 60 years of wage slavery in windowless offices might seem unconscionable to a medieval peasant drinking mead all day by a stream with his friends, even if he ends up dying at 50.

We have the opportunity to change our lives if we don't want the wage slavery; entrepreneurialism is the whole reason why this site exists. For a medieval peasant, they can't move into the nobility, their inventions are not protected, they frequently aren't allowed to move around, travel is dangerous, communication with anyone outside the area they grew up in is more difficult due to language differences, hobbies are limited largely to what you can build yourself, since trade for items is difficult and expensive... the list of restrictions goes on and on.

In any case, the peasants of yesteryear are analogous to the working class of today, and they don't work in offices, windowless or otherwise.

I generally agree with your line of reasoning but for one part:

> We have the opportunity to change our lives if we don't want the wage slavery; entrepreneurialism

Entrepreneuralism often is just another form of slavery. You exchange serving your boss 8 hours a day for serving your customers (and/or investors) 16 hours a day. Most businesses are not innovative problem solving endeavours, they're mundane servitude in highly competitive markets. If you're lucky, it may lead you to significantly more wealth than your dayjob; if you're not, you just wasted years of working 16h/day for less reward than you'd get working 8h/day in a regular job.

The slavery only ends when you don't have to do work for other people in exchange for resources necessary to live a decent life. As a society, we're nowhere near that yet.

(Thinking that starting your own business is freedom from the man is confusing irrelevant freedoms, like the ability to choose your customers, choose your logo, choose your working machine, with actually important freedoms, like choosing whether to have customers at all.)

We are all bound to our basic needs. Whether we satisfy them by earning a living in a windowless office, or hunting for food and potentially dying in the field, does not change the reason we all do what we do: for survival.

A person today is less of a slave to his environment than in the past, although this is more the case in Canada and Scandinavian countries, than in the US.

Now you could say that people worked less in past times, but you could also work half a year and enjoy the rest of your time labour-free, so long as you sacrifice a lot of luxuries (running water, police service, paved roads, fire department, any means of connectivity, etc.)

If you are OK with medieval levels of wealth then you can also take half the year off. In fact, you could probably take 11 months off if you live in a hut and buy a sack of potatoes once a week.

What about a prison that was full of your closest friends, versus a world of your enemies?

You wouldn't be sent to prison in the first place.

"The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people's bodies. In everyday life, passers-by saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls."

>medieval peasant drinking mead all day by a stream with his friends

Mead was expensive since it require lots of honey and was mostly used for special occasions. Most they did drink weak beer because they had learned that in some places peoples drinking water did die more often than the peoples drinking beer. The beer was weak because they did not know how east works and it was probably flat. So don't confuse it with what we know as beer now.

I do also have a hard time believing they in general had more freedom, maybe the top 10% had more freedom than what many have now? Which is far from what the top 10% have now

Actually, nutritionally they were far better off. Domestic plants have a broader spectrum of vitamins but far less of any one vitamin; a varied wild diet is vastly superior to what we eat now. Plus less work per day (except during times of starvation, due to little rain.) Give the book "The Old Way" a read for more direct information about just how much we've lost.

Less famine, much more war. Population densities don't stay down on their own -- people can breed quite rapidly in good conditions. What happens is that population rises to the point where there is no longer enough food for everyone, and then territorial clashes start happening, until someone identifies a weak neighbor tribe and slaughters them. So everything is better until that week you're fighting for your life, and the life of everyone you know and love.

This is exactly how chimpanzees live today, and matches well with most of the archaeological remains we have of primordial hunter-gatherers. Our forebears lived very violent lives.

That sounds like a pretty good explanation for most conflicts up to the present day. We are just chimpanzees that wear clothes and can talk.

Don't forget our bizarre and inexplicable neoteny. We are the Peter Pans of the primate world.

> Our forebears lived very violent lives.

I've been reading some books on the subject that claim the contrary, also based on archaeological proofs (and on identifying faults with the existing studies). So I wouldn't state that with such confidence.

See RoboTeddy's comment for some details on this POV.

And also, if we look at bonobos, another primate closely related to us, we might get a completely different perspective on life in the distant past. It's just that we discovered chimpanzees first.

Actually, contrary to your claim, bonobos do wage war against each other. They behave very similarly to chimpanzees and humans, as they form coalitions and organize attacks to exterminate rival groups.

It appears that some people prefer to focus on a very specific behavioral trait pinned on bonobos (having sex with group members to diffuse conflicts) just because it fits their preconceived notion of an ideal outcome involving absence of conflicts in general and war in particular. Some people even pin the name "hippie ape" in what looks like a desperate attempt to validate their personal ideals. Yet, bonobos are indeed known for organizing attacks on neighboring primate groups for the express purpose of killing and even eating them.

I wasn't claiming anything, just providing a different perspective (see the "might" in my sentence).

But could you please shed some light on this sentence:

> Yet, bonobos are indeed known for organizing attacks on neighboring primate groups

Are those primates other bonobos? That could be called going to war. If not, it's called hunting: those other primates are just food. It's not like we go to war against whatever other animals we are eating.

There's Lynn Saxon's book The Naked Bonobo that debunks a lot of popular myths about Bonobos - https://www.amazon.com/Naked-Bonobo-Lynn-Saxon/dp/1523945516

To the parent's comment though, bonobos don't actually form patrols and they tend to avoid contact with other groups, so intra-group conflict is lower for bonobos than chimpanzees.

I've been reading some books on the subject that claim the contrary

Could you please cite the names of one or two of those books? I'll start by citing "War Before Civilization" and "Social Conquest of Earth" as in the camp of "our forbears lived very violent lives".

> What happens is that population rises to the point where there is no longer enough food for everyone, and then territorial clashes start happening, until someone identifies a weak neighbor tribe and slaughters them.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's a hell of a simplification. Do you have sources for your two sentence summary of 250,000 years of human pre-history?

If you're curious about this, I'd recommend reading accounts of hunter-gatherer lives written by anthropologists! This book is fascinating in many ways: http://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/The-Dobe-Ju...

In particular:

* Level of food security (very high -- people only bothered to keep 3 days of food on hand, since it was so easy to get more)

* Their social living arrangements (persistent "living groups" of 10-ish people, multiple of which might be camping around the same water hole at a given time. so there's a collection of people you're often around that rarely changes, and then other groups you see and live with for a time periodically)

* Reasons why their population didn't explode despite lack of contraceptives (no crops --> no e.g. maize that can be turned into mash for kids --> kids breastfeed for years longer, which apparently acts as a contraceptive.

As others are saying, life undoubtedly was quite different for hunter-gatherers in other regions.

> * Reasons why their population didn't explode despite lack of contraceptives (no crops --> no e.g. maize that can be turned into mash for kids --> kids breastfeed for years longer, which apparently acts as a contraceptive.

Actually, it's far more probable that population were kept low because everyone got killed at a very high rate compared with the rate of reproduction. With no medical care to treat diseases of wounds and with both man and nature invested in killing off people, population growth tends to be kept low.

Malnutrition and starvation also have a strong impact on ovulation rate.

Read the The Life and Adventures of William Buckley [0] for an understanding of what hunter-gather life was like. No starvation, no disease, lots of children and yet a static population.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckley_(convict)

Systematic anthropologic research over more than a decade (in the case of this particular society), including interviews with everyone about the number of violent killings in the past, disagrees.

There are quality-of-living trade offs.

May I warmly recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens": https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/d...

It discusses this and other issues related to the cultural evolution of our species at length. Some of his views into modern life are especially eye opening.

From what I remember reading, agriculture was actually a downgrade from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Early crops were terribly hard to grow, had little nutrition value and agricultural practices too were primitive.

People started growing crops out of necessity. In terms of food security, hunting-gathering was far easier. The average hunter also worked far fewer hours than the average farmer in antiquity.

I wonder if agriculture caused societies to go through a population explosion just because it became economically much more worthwhile to have young children.

I'd assume in hunter-gatherer societies, children would not be that useful for hunting until they are fully grown, or in gathering until they've spent many years learning where to go to gather what. Also not useful in making tools, since those would take a lifetime to learn.

Whereas children are readily useful in traditional farming even at a younger age, because there are all sorts of places one can employ unskilled manual labor on a farm.

Hunter-gatherer societies had very low rates of demographic growth. And industrial societies are also seeing much lower population growth, because children are an enormous economic burden.

Additionally, hunter-gatherer societies require both women and children to be mobile. Pregnant women are a liability, as are children who can't walk by themselves.

This gives an impetus to at least wait 3-4 years between pregnancies.

There is no such pressure on agrarian societies.

> agricultural practices too were primitive.

I imagine there was no(t much) fieldwork, crops were raised on the side, if hunting and gathering was indeed easier. What else would explain foregoing that?

Still today I sometimes dismissively assume that sowing seeds and just waiting is the simplest thing ever. Maybe neolithic people didn't need to process the crops either, instead feeding animals and eating them then, which is less efficient, energetically speaking.

Until you remember everyone died from disease... and snakes (actual problem)... and larger tribes that decided "last night the moon was half, so it must mean we need to murder your tribe."

People became food raisers because it was a better life. It allowed plentiful food so that others could do things unrelated to food. Art... and science.

For one good documentary (or book), check out Guns, Germs and Steel. (it's usually found online and fun to watch!) A book which documents the reasons some civilizations went from tribes, to eventual empires, while others like one in Papa New Guinea remained hunter-gatherers. That tribe, for example, has no "beasts of burden" on the island, which were the initial "machinery" that multiplied the amount of work output a tribe could produce compared to one of only men.

But at no point does anyone suggest that hunter-gathering was "better." It was the thing everyone wanted to get away from but certain societies had an easier time doing it.

It's like that guy who eschewed modern society and went hiking out in Canada/Alaska with no research or even a map. He died. He died poisoned by simple plants that anyone would have told him not to eat. And he died less than a couple miles from a ranger station full of food, shelter, and an emergency phone/radio. "Oops."

Romanticize all you want. But never forget it's a fantasy.

Ukraine is downcoming if anything, its GDP/pers actually reduced when compared to 1991. Isn't true for other CIS states en masse.

One of my favorite essays about this is Brad DeLong's "our Economic Appetites" http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/01/we-are-live-at-the-wee...

I enjoyed how you've painted a bleak view of the past, not mention any of the nice things about times gone by and then pretend people longing for simpler times is a kind of ignorance.

You believe western civilisation has come a long way from the cesspool it mostly has been, while neglecting to think about the true cost of our material wealth, which is has resulted in much destruction of the natural world.

> not mention any of the nice things about times gone by

Unexploited natural resources aside, what are those nice things?

Also: unexploited natural resources are mostly nice in so far as they're available to be exploited. That you have metric shittons of coal or lithium under your feet is pretty much meaningless if you can't do anything with it.

People lived in 100sqft apartments?

People today still? In Paris, Chambre de bonnes "must have a minimum surface area of 9 m2"[1].

That's 96.87 sqft.

"The rooms usually have a surface area of around 6–12 m2" (65 to 129 sqft)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chambre_de_bonne

Well OK, but that goes somewhat against my parent comment who was trying to show that things were worse then!

At least in Vienna and Berlin a lot of modern small 1-2 BR apartments are the same apartments that 100+ years ago housed a whole family (or 2!).

For example we (2 adults + 1 toddler) live in an old 70m^2 (750 square feet) apartment that's built in a way suggesting it originally housed 2 families in the 2 large rooms (what we now use as 1 bedroom and 1 living-room) and shared the kitchen/bathroom. So it is very likely 8+ people lived here, and it is now considered small for the 3 of us.

The apartment building is from either the late 19th century or early 20th century.

I imagine a lot of these tiny "single-person" apartments in Paris used to house a lot more than 1 person 100+ years ago.

I recently stayed in an AirBnB studio in Paris smaller than 9m². The toilet was shared among the five studios on the same floor.

So it was a private room?

They still do today. Perhaps the average apartment in Paris was more like 200-250sqft, but living conditions were greatly worse off than today.

"Life was tough but we forget how tough it was because most of us idealize the simpler times of the past."

I would say that life was tougher for the poor indeed.

But if you take a rich peasant/small noble - they did not lived that miserable.

And the things we idealize about them - less complicated live (they did not had to worry about china, nor russia, nor korea, nor NSA, etc. only to dangers close to them, big nobleman, enemy neighbours), allmost no pollution/noise. Living close to nature, going hunting, working with your body in the field - are still valid, I think. If you had a self-sustainable village in times of peace, people had not to worry too much about other things, than the things they could see.

Or a native american hunter tribe. If they were strong - then they had a pretty good, altough simple live. Even though they were hungry in spring and occasionally fought wars.

So the idealisation is not per se wrong, people just don't know, that the image they have in their mind, is not valid for the average person.

So even if there would be a going back, I do not think it makes sense - but while going forward, we can still try to strive for the things we idealize about the past, like simplicity. And by that I do not mean giving up on technology or globalisation, just avoiding unnecessary complications. So ... more decoupling, modularisation, on the technological as well as on the political level, just KISS ... even though that it is not simple, I know, but it is still something worth going for. And not more global regulations, "free trade" agreements you have to study for years to understand and still missing out the secret parts, competing locked down systems going together with companys making their products harder to repair on purpose, and so on and on and on.

So I am dreaming of the day, when I can just print out the small broken part of my vacuum cleaner(or car, ... or computer) with the official specs, instead of having to by a new one, because this model gets no longer produced.

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