"The material standard of living of a homeless person in modern-day Manhattan is several dozens of times higher than the wealthiest of kings ten thousand years ago." Can someone explain to me what their definition of "standard of living" is in this context? I get that they might have access to cleaner water, but surely easy access to food prepared for you and having a roof over your head in a snowstorm would sound re…
10,000 years ago, we were living in a pre-agricultural society (or, perhaps, only somewhat agricultural) Lots of wandering tribes, moving around following the food, hunting with sharp rocks. Hunger and starvation would be common, everything would be scarce, even for "kings" (which were really just tribal leaders) Modern construction wasn't a thing, dwellings were constructed out of sod, animal skins -- at the best, s…
"While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania...While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s."[1]
Obviously this isn't representative of all hunter-gatherer societies, but a >20 hour work week, high-protein 2000 calorie diet seems pretty nice. Of course there are some other nice benefits of modernity but saying being homeless in the US have a categorically higher quality of life is a stretch.