In a blog post about the book "A Farewell to Alms", Tyler Cowen has a good counter argument to the idea that hunter-gatherers had a higher standard of living than agricultural societies did for a long time after mankind started to switch to agriculture (some argue until the industrial revolution)
"...1. Did hunter-gatherers really have living standards as high as people in 18th century England? By focusing on the long run, Clark neglects the pains of equilibration. Hunter-gatherers who survived to 30 maybe had decent lives, but population was very low. It was kept low, in part, by lots of brutal and painful death. We can't just focus on the steady-state conditions in making welfare comparisons. Modern research is also discovering that primitive societies have very high levels of war and violent death; if we're playing time travel games, I'm opting for 1800, and not just to have a chance of hearing Haydn. I'll also take modern Tanzania over the hunter-gatherers, in a heartbeat, contra what Clark implies..."
marginalrevolution.com
Also from the comments to that blog post, an argument based on revealed preferences
"I have just started the book (I got it late from Amazon) so I can't fully discuss all of the issues in the first hundred pages. But one question I do have is this: if people in industrial societies weren't really better off than those in rural backwards hunter gatherer societies up until the 1800s (which the book argues), is there any evidence of people moving from the cities of Europe to live a hunter gatherer lifestyle? If not, why not? There doesn't seem to be many barriers to entry into the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the author suggests that many hunter-gatherers lived a better life than those at the bottom of societies in cities.
Posted by: willgarvin at Aug 21, 2007 8:04:33 AM"
And two arguments against the books factual conclusions, the first about how accurately its data really reflects the marginal standard of living.
"The theories about hunters-gatherers being better-off than 15th century Europeans are largely based on anthropometric data about body stature. Now it's well possible that an average hunter was taller - and hence supposedly richer, better-off - because he could consume meat more frequently than city dwellers whose lifes were, by and large, better but whose diet was corn-based.
Posted by: J. at Aug 21, 2007 9:07:17 AM"
and the 2nd which points out that even if people living at the margin, may possibly have been no better off than hunter-gatherers, there where many (even if a minority) people who didn't live at the margin
"...That said, wouldn't the Malthusian Trap occur only at the *margin* of society? That is, the poorest "strata" of society will always be at subsistence, balancing between reproductive viability and starvation. However, members of infra-marginal strata, to the extent that they exist, earn Ricardian rents, or higher incomes. Hunter-gatherer societies, I suspect, are more uniform in productivity terms, implying that more of the population are near the margin. Today, some people may still live on the margins of society, but this margin is much thinner in developed economies and the rents to the most important scarce productive assets (human capital?) are greater.
In between, as societies developed more specialized roles for their members, those who had the scarce resources that enabled them to move into more productive roles (brawn, brains, disease resistance, entrepreneurial skill), would out-produce those at subsistence levels. To the extent that division of labor has been increasingly possible and that entry into the higher echelons has been increasingly unavailable to those at the margin, *average* income should have risen even if *marginal* income did not.
Posted by: MW at Aug 21, 2007 9:09:36 AM"
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