The Original Affluent Society (1972)

The fatal flaw is the assumption that he thinks he knows someone else's thoughts and feelings. It's a bizarre thought experiment void of any relevance to the modern world.

Population is the first issue. Pre-industrial life probably wasn't as horrible as some make it out to be, with the life expectancy, once one survived childbirth, closer to 55 than 20. (The 20-30 figure included infant mortality.) However, hunter-gatherer lifestyles don't support a high population. That means, as populations increase and tribes branch out and split, but inevitably people run out of room, war. In the "original affluent society" of pre-agricultural humanity, the major wars of nations didn't happen, but low-level tribal wars caused a death rate of about 0.5% per year. That's 8 times the murder rate in Flint, Michigan, the most dangerous city in the US as of now.

Agricultural society can support more people per unit of land. That also means that they will have more soldiers and conquer or assimilate the hunter-gatherers. (Nomadic raiders, however, will typically be fitter and militarily superior... but their existence is predicated on that of the agricultural people, so that doesn't scale either.)

So, ultimately the pre-agricultural "affluent society" was one with a high rate of violence and not much stability, and it got wiped out pretty handily by agricultural (or industrialized) neighbors. All that said, it is correct to note that the standard of living for the average person did not improve much between the Stone Age and (arguably) approximately 1800 AD. Economic growth existed, but it was gobbled up by population growth. In some ways, life got better each century and, in others, it got worse, but for the average person there wasn't much progress from the neolithic up into modernity and, with the psychiatric calamity of workplace Taylorism, people are arguably even unhappier than they were in all of those societies where life was nasty, brutish, and short. So, subjectively, I think the argument is strong for a lack of progress (that is, in 2014, entirely the fault of society's poor leadership). People are richer now and live longer, but still mostly miserable. That said, every phase of society was an inevitable consequence of the former and "the original affluent society" would never have made it, couldn't possibly scale up to our current population of 7 billion, and had a rate of violent death that we'd consider appalling.

What I think has changed is the nature of work and our demands of it. In primitive societies, "work hours" didn't make sense because people hunted, gathered, fought, cooked, and built shelters as needed. There was a heterogeneity to it. Modern work is psychological monoculture, with work quality apportioned according to social status and rank, which means that it's mental torture (extreme boredom) to be of low status. Primitive "work" (which wasn't done in measured hours) had horizontal heterogeneity, whereas in modern society the only antidote to crushing boredom is vertical growth, leading to a low-level and generally nonviolent, but also inescapable, sense of competition and stress. Pre-agricultural life had its flaws and people had good reasons to escape it (and, one should note, the transition to agriculture tended to unfold over thousands of years in most societies, with intermediate states of some hunting/gathering and some agriculture) but it was probably less boring than the average desk job today.

Except that hunter-gatherer tribes routinely starved during lean periods. As much as the author pines for a golden age, it simply didn't exist.

This fellow should read more books on paleoanthropology and fewer on philosophy.