Bread, How Did They Make It? (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Bread, How Did They Make It? (2020)

acoup.blog

This and the ACOUP series about ironmaking[1] were some of the most illuminating pieces I've ever read about human history. Highly recommend this blog, it makes regular evening reading for me.

[1] - https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...

One thing I took from the bread series was how big of an impact energy storage had on social structures. The fact that it was hard to keep your last harvest edible for much longer than it took to grow your next harvest shaped /everything/.

If you want to used a stretched metaphor, this is happening again now as our industrial energy usage is transferring from foraging (using fossil fuels) to agriculture (primary production in the form of solar+wind) yet again and the the big question is how do we do storage when it's harder to just move onto the next berry rich valley.

I love this analogy, I'll be stealing this.

I wonder what learnings we can apply from the age of agriculture?

I found it interesting how the article sets up some ideological traps: it mentions a lack of efficiency, trade value, and so on. But then it explains that the lack of efficiency is required for the increased resilience and that trade value is ultimately meaningless because having a big pile of cash won't save you when nobody else has anything to sell to you. It even takes a moment to pause and double down on telling you that Malthus is just plain wrong.

It actually provides a nice example for a gift economy even in a system that already has money and markets: the solution to crop failures is not to barter by exchanging your non-food belongings for food but to build strong relationships by giving to others when you have plenty so they will share with you when you have little. Communal spaces are only mentioned in passing but it's also easy to see how if an orchard can double as pasture and plots are decentralized, one farm's orchard might be used by another farm for pasture as part of such a relationship.

If you're not already familiar, I would strongly recommend David Graeber's Debt as a very approachable introduction to the idea of gift economies and the myth of barter economies being the precursor to modern money-based trade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

I wouldn't go with anthropolgists on the highly complex subject of the history of monetary systems and debt. That field us best left to historians specializing in that question either working with economists or being economists themselves.

A university degree is just one of the many ways of certifying that you have spent a fair share of time studying a subject. The lack of such certificate shouldn't imply people lack studies, tools, and genuine interest in the matter. Check Graebers career, I wouldn't call him "just an anthropologist with 1 or 2 steps into waters unknown to him".

Just skipped his wiki page, again, and I don't see anything concerning economics, finance or the history of those. And before I take anyones opinion on a subject as trailblazing or a gold standard, I like to see actual competence in said subject. And yes, that includes actual education and training as well as experience in that particular field. Or experience in adjenct field relevant to the subject, e.g. what Gaerber did with his anthropological view on kingship. That makes for an interesting view, but still not for a gold standard or a leading opinion.

And especially history and finance are fields with so much ill understood concepts without proper training, that opinions are just that opinions.

I just skipped over to your profile and see no indication of education or formal training in critical thinking. Therefore, by your logic, it's a mistake to take your criticism and references to alternate authors seriously

I have a wikipedia page and a academic publication profile now? Together with public criticism of my work? Who knew!

Hmm, "skipped"? This is a usage for perusing text I've honestly never heard before. Don't you mean "skimmed"?

Skipped would imply bypassing it.

Is this a colloquium, or a typo?

Skimmed, obviously.

Split of toes happen, fourtunately...

Perhaps "peruse" would be a better word, both to describe the action and to confuse the reader!

No, he’s a tendentious left-wing political activist, which is an even bigger sign he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to economics.

Any sufficiently advanced historian is indistinguishable from an anthropologist

This is the first time I've seen an adaptation of the phrase, that is actually insightful. Thank you.

I'm surprised that this was flagged, and I wonder why. This blog's content gets linked here with some regularity, and I always find the writing to be interesting, thoughtful, and informative.

(2020)

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