Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : A Neutral Corner -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (2191)	8/2/2006 8:48:36 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2253

Coming from a viewpoint of a hunter who believes hunting is almost a sacred ritual, I think the answer to this question is simpler. Hunting puts us at one with the ecosystem. That is, we are part of the ecosystem and subject to its waxing and waning. It's well known that lynx populations rise shortly after a population explosion of rabbits, only to fall precipitously after they clear out the rabbits or the rabbits fall to an epidemic. As hunters we are subject to the same rules as lynx. Farmers, on the other hand, store up food against famine. Human populations based on agriculture don't have high peaks and deep valleys; instead, they have rolling hills that keep getting higher and higher. The land can only sustain so much hunting and gathering, which keeps populations in check. Agriculture has temporarily allowed humans to violate this principle. We will find out someday that the principle still applies, unless we change our ways.

To: TimF who wrote (2191)	8/21/2007 7:15:38 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 2253

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" ---------------