Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkoubaa | Hacker News Reader

> From the dawn of humanity to the eighteenth century, human life was dominated by starvation, poverty, wars, and pandemics.

Actually no, human life only started to be dominated by this after the shift from hunter gatherer to agrarian societies.

View on HN

As is usual, the issue is that 'it depends'.

Starvation and disease of course were primary concerns of prehistoric peoples and can be experienced by nearly all larger life forms.

Poverty really only came into existence once things like 'wealth' were invented. Those things only really came into being once people started to live in larger communities, though not exclusively food based ones. Places like the Chaco Canyon Culture show signs of 'wealth' (and therefore poverty), but only in it's early period, and then only kinda.

War is a bit of a funny one too, as it kinda depends on what we mean by war. Where is the demarcation between family feuds and true warfare?

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a good read into the recent developments into the 198,000 years of human history BC.

https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/...

Marshall Sahlins studied hunter gatherer bands, and many work less than forty hours a week. Programmers I know can't figure out how to get down to a forty hour a week workweek to survive, but these hunter gather bands in sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon seem to have figured it out.

Ive worked at a half dozen companies and never been pressured to work more than 40 hours as an engineer. So many have figured it out.

foraging only works if there's a sufficiently low population density. the Amazon is so plentiful it even allows these communities to stay relatively fixed, in other climates they had to move around a lot (after relatively exhausting an area)

of course we work a lot more because we want some of that economic surplus to reinvest it back into things that we think will improve our life. a relatively constant life wouldn't require that. also our decision-making and surplus distribution system is very very inefficient compared to a few hundred strong community's.

economically we can afford to build millions individual cars and houses and offices, fully furnish them, and do this again-and-again when old buildings get demolished, old stuff gets dumped into landfills.

we can afford to build tanks and bombs and then do that again and again, and to maintain standing armies.

unfortunately efficiency and longevity is just not a global concern :(

I assume those groups are now protected and effectively have some government granted monopoly on their hunting and gathering land.

Always easier to have a good life with extra help from the government :)

Not really, they're being killed off by mining companies.

That's sad to hear.

Suggests they don't really have it all figured out though. Being able to defend yourself from invaders is an important thing to figure out, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com