71–80 of 86 posts
As appears in Debt by David Graeber [0]: Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that. Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing? Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it? Samoan: And why would I want to do that? Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I meant all the way back to the birth of agriculture. See Against the Grain by James C. Scott.
A bit skeptical since he wrote Seeing Like A State but I'll put it on my list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This line of reasoning is the same as the line of reasoning behind the idea that hunter-gatherers had it better than we do. It works until: - Your kid breaks their leg. - A natural disaster destroys your home. - You get cancer. - Psychopathic marauders sack your town and rape and kill everyone. - A draught causes a famine. - Your baby is born with a birth defect. ... and so on. I strongly suspect that humanity set of…
Hunter gatherers did have it better than the early agricultural societies. They worked much less during any given day, lived longer, and were healthier. Hunter gatherer societies can live as long as people in modern, developed societies. You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. With those, it makes a human life almost a tragedy, stretched out due to modern medicine a…
Yeah theoretically if nothing bad happens to you you can live to 80, just like people in developed countries. The difference is that all the random causes of death (eg. dysentery, or infection because you cut yourself) drags down the life expectancy down to significantly below 80. In other words, people in "modern, developed societies" living to 80 is the average outcome, but for hunter gatherers that might be the 99th percentile outcome. Your comment casually ignores this.
Is this because doing nothing is "popular", or because non-industrial societies don't produce enough calories to do more? There's an interesting blogpost[0] about extreme poverty in 20th-century Africa: > He describes the narrow alleys of his neighborhood being packed with bayayes who just sit and stand around all day. Like, for the entire day. They have no jobs, no money, no goals, and they eat so little that they h…
As appears in Debt by David Graeber [0]: Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that. Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing? Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it? Samoan: And why would I want to do that? Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine,…
This line of reasoning is the same as the line of reasoning behind the idea that hunter-gatherers had it better than we do. It works until: - Your kid breaks their leg. - A natural disaster destroys your home. - You get cancer. - Psychopathic marauders sack your town and rape and kill everyone. - A draught causes a famine. - Your baby is born with a birth defect. ... and so on. I strongly suspect that humanity set of…
"Throughout his studies of isolated populations on native diets, Price was continually struck by the contrast of native sturdiness and good health with the degeneration found in the local white populace, living off the “displacing foods of modern commerce” such as sugar, white flour, canned foods and condensed milk. Nowhere was the contrast more evident than in Africa. In addition to their susceptibility to chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, intestinal problems, appendicitis, gall and kidney stones and endocrinological dysfunction, the Whites also showed little resistance to infectious diseases carried by mosquitoes, lice and flies. “In all the districts, it was recognized and expected that the foreigners must plan to spend a portion of every few years or every year outside that environment if they would keep well. Children born in that country to Europeans were generally expected to spend several of their growing years in Europe or America if they would build even relatively normal bodies.”1 By contrast, the native Africans exhibited a very high tolerance to infectious disease including malaria carried by mosquitos, typhus and fevers transmitted by lice and sleeping sickness borne by the tsetse fly." [1]
"The remarkable metabolic and cardiovascular health of hunter-gatherers and other small-scale populations has long made them attractive models in public health. Given the similarity in health profiles across ethnic groups, it is clearly their environments, rather than genetics, that keep people within small-scale societies so healthy. Indeed, from Australia to the Americas, these populations develop the same metabolic and cardiovascular ‘diseases of civilization’ when they move away from traditional lifestyles and adopt Western diets and activity levels 46." [2]
"Indeed, the modal age at death for hunter-gatherer populations examined by Gurven and Kaplan is ~72 years (range: 68–78 years), near the value for the US population (85 years) in 2002." [2]
"Here, we analyse famine frequency and severity in a large cross-cultural database, in order to explore relationships between subsistence and famine risk. This is the first study to report that, if we control for habitat quality, hunter–gatherers actually had significantly less—not more—famine than other subsistence modes." [3]
"Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9″ for men, 5’ 5″ for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3″ for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors." [0]
[0] http://www.meissinger.com/uploads/3/4/9/1/34919185/diamond_w...
[1] https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/traditional-diets...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hunter gatherers did have it better than the early agricultural societies. They worked much less during any given day, lived longer, and were healthier. Hunter gatherer societies can live as long as people in modern, developed societies. You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. With those, it makes a human life almost a tragedy, stretched out due to modern medicine a…
>Hunter gatherer societies can live as long as people in modern, developed societies. Yeah theoretically if nothing bad happens to you you can live to 80, just like people in developed countries. The difference is that all the random causes of death (eg. dysentery, or infection because you cut yourself) drags down the life expectancy down to significantly below 80. In other words, people in "modern, developed societi…
Notably, the health span of hunter-gatherers may be longer. Those who survive have healthier older years. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia are very rare in H-G culture at ages where they become widespread in subsistence culture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This line of reasoning is the same as the line of reasoning behind the idea that hunter-gatherers had it better than we do. It works until: - Your kid breaks their leg. - A natural disaster destroys your home. - You get cancer. - Psychopathic marauders sack your town and rape and kill everyone. - A draught causes a famine. - Your baby is born with a birth defect. ... and so on. I strongly suspect that humanity set of…
Hunter gatherers did have it better than the early agricultural societies. They worked much less during any given day, lived longer, and were healthier. Hunter gatherer societies can live as long as people in modern, developed societies. You're ignoring the amount of stress and mental disorders skyrocketing in modern societies. With those, it makes a human life almost a tragedy, stretched out due to modern medicine a…
As appears in Debt by David Graeber [0]: Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that. Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing? Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it? Samoan: And why would I want to do that? Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine,…
Doing nothing and relaxing in a tropical paradise sounds great until everyone else gets the same idea and wants to do the same and moves there. Then, your island is no longer self sufficient, and the only jobs locals are qualified for are low-skill services for foreign tourists.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Hunter gatherer societies can live as long as people in modern, developed societies. Yeah theoretically if nothing bad happens to you you can live to 80, just like people in developed countries. The difference is that all the random causes of death (eg. dysentery, or infection because you cut yourself) drags down the life expectancy down to significantly below 80. In other words, people in "modern, developed societi…
The average life expectancy of hunter-gatherers is low mostly due to high infant mortality followed by mortality of those under 15 years. If you live to 15 you have a pretty good shot of living to 60. The modal age at death is 68-78 [0]. Notably, the health span of hunter-gatherers may be longer. Those who survive have healthier older years. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia are very rare in H-G culture a…
Even that's "mostly" from infant mortality, a significant non-infant mortality still remains. From your linked article
>~60% of newborns in these populations survive to age 15 and ~40% to age 45. Those who survive to age 45 can expect to live another ~20 years
In other words, even if you survive past 15, there's a 33% chance that you won't make it to 45.
>Notably, the health span of hunter-gatherers may be longer. Those who survive have healthier older years. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and dementia are very rare in H-G culture at ages where they become widespread in subsistence culture.
Is there a direct source for the healthspan claim? The study you linked substantiates the individual disease instances being lower, but that could also be caused by dying at around 68-78, before those ailments usually set in.
As appears in Debt by David Graeber [0]: Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that. Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing? Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it? Samoan: And why would I want to do that? Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine,…
Laying on the beach all day is a lot more enjoyable when, when you’re done, you have a nice, safe home to go back to, good food, health care, etc. It’s easy to romanticize having nothing but real life is complicated. Living primitively is simple but it’s not easy.
To transition now? I might be scared. I might miss my computer. I might think too highly of myself and less about the collective, nevermind seven or eleven or sixteen thousand generations hence. I'm at the "raise a child" stage of life and even now I (think I) accept my own death if were to happen today. The stories I care about involve humans existing alongside so much other life for thousands of years hence, with an unbroken history (oral or otherwise) so those at the end of life on earth have a really interesting story to look back on. Measuring humans in the billions and cheetahs in the thousands is not a healthy sign (for example).
[0] Feral : Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, by George Monbiot
See also : The Old Way : a story of the first people, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (lived with the Zhu/wasi (the slash is a click), or Ju/wasi as her mother spelled it, for about five years in the 50s and noted the changes over the decades from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist, with efforts to maintain culture along the way)