I think it's a mistake to say "nothing much happened" during the hundreds of thousands of years that humans existed before the dawn of agriculture; rather, the things that happened during that period are largely unknown to us, because no archaeological evidence is left for them. We can know what kind of stone tools people were using 100,000 years ago, because stone tools are durable enough to survive and be observable to us now; we don't know what stories they told, what they believed, what their social norms looked like. All those things might have changed many times over, with many of those changes feeling incredibly momentous at the time, only to be forgotten after decades or centuries or millennia, leaving them utterly unknown to us now!
Also, the clothing and wood tools that people used might well have changed a lot more than we know, given that these things are perishable and rarely appear in the archaeological record.
Good one! But, "What Smith is saying is that a market economy leads to a more efficient allocation of a quasi-fixed pool of resources, which is true but also not what led to the explosion of prosperity over the next 250 years." What did?
Don't speak too fast, for the wheel's still in spin...
1) The rise of living standards in the industrialized world might be seen as a by-product of imperialism (and vice-versa). Since 1970, we've seen a (relative) stagnation of living standards among the working class in the developed world -- arguably as a by-product of decolonization. Now we're seeing the political blowback!
2) "It’s also conceivable that today’s human children will be the creators of a cohort of self-replicating and self-improving AI robots that colonize the galaxy" -- after those AI products have colonized Planet Earth. Meanwhile -- one way or another -- the human species might now be about to lose its perch as the planet's apex predator.
This actually does put into a dark frame why most of the “classic epic poetry” of ancient history, from the Iliad to the Mahabharata, concentrates on glorifying violence and the violence-producing classes of people, rather than the farmers, the artisans, the metalworkers, even the highly-skilled ones.
More broadly, it highlights why bros who consider themselves quite manly and like to brag about their survivalist and “livin’ off the land” skillset, also like to wax rhapsodic over guns and violence, as opposed to, say, clothesmaking.
Read in that frame, much of the grand, eloquent rhetoric glorifying Agamemnon, Achilles, Arjuna, Yudhishthira, etc., comes off less as grand, eloquent rhetoric, or even as “classic literature”, and more as fearful, timid ass-kissing under the threat of the guy with the biggest sword pointed at your face.
Basically, these encomiums to great, legendary kings and what-not are just another form of protection money, paid at gunpoint to the biggest gangster with the most fearful reputation for violence. As are, in their own way, every medieval courtly tale, every samurai nostalgia trip, every ode to Caesar and the grandeur of Imperial Rome, etc.
Game of Thrones came perilously close to revealing that dark, encompassing truth, though the incoherent finale muddled that message a bit. But it looms over basically all romance we have for old kingdoms and empires, and ultimately, over literature itself.
And unfortunately, it puts the “survivalist” instinct into dark relief too. Many guys preparing for the end of civilization are not merely planning to “survive”. They’re fantasizing about being the biggest, baddest motherfucker on the block, with the biggest guns, forcing all those without their violent “skills” to do the hard work for them.
They’re not wanting merely to be the Vuvalini, in other words. They think they’ll be Immortan Joe.
Something to think about, if we’re tempted to denounce industrial democracy as “decadent” and long for those dark times.
I think you should’ve mentioned how English living standards in 1720 were higher than they were in 1320. It’s quite an important bit of the Industrial Revolution that it emerged out of a country who was about twice as rich per capita as what was needed for subsistence for centuries.
When you start talking about history on such long time scales, it becomes necessary to think about the very difficult question of what humanity's purpose is or should be. In discussing the standard of living all the way back to before homo sapiens, Matt tacitly assumes that the degree of individual well-being is at least a decent proxy for whatever humanity's purpose is. This is probably pretty resonant with current liberal thought, although one does need to think about the role that population statistics play. Is it the well-being of the most well-off human that counts? The least well-off? The average? The median? The sum? Nevertheless, under many possible choices of statistic, humanity will be seen to have gone backward for a long time after the invention of agriculture.
I call myself a Conservative Democrat these days (owing to the death of the true Republican Party), and I do not subscribe to the thought that individual well-being is the ultimate human good. I think our goal is a collective one, to grow and spread as far and wide as we can. In mathematical terms, life is a local reduction of entropy, taking in energy and producing pattern. In the aftermath of the agricultural revolution, living standards declined, but the surge in population and cultural complexity counts as progress in my view. I'm not against individual well-being, but I view it as a means, not an end. A single dictator on top of a pile of serfs is not a very complex, dynamic, growth-oriented structure for society, and the recent rise in well-being has furthered our ability to pursue my version of humanity's purpose. But I am more likely than Matt to see an ebb and flow of living standards as compatible with steady collective progress.
It’s perfectly defensible to disavow any universal human purpose ordained by God or science or natural law, if such is your belief. But even absent that, there is still our own chosen purpose, whether it be unanimously agreed or not. If you don’t have even a personal opinion of what our purpose ought to be, you have nowhere to anchor any opinions you might have about what other people ought to do.
Correct; I absolutely consider humans and bacteria to be pursuing the same purpose, though humans are far ahead in the game. Or perhaps it is appropriate to include bacteria in our score, since we can’t really survive without them. Perhaps all of Earth’s biosphere, or at least a substantial subset of it, is properly part of our team, as the most efficient way for us to spread beyond our planet is to take much of it with us.
It wasn't really possible to become truly rich without flat-out stealing until about 1850. The first people to manage it were called "robber barons". Crab-bucket morality.
Honestly, it’s annoying AF that most of the really momentous political events in election years seem to happen right before our favorite pundits go on their big long happy summer vacations.
We need your hot takes and tweets, guys! Rest is for the non-pundit class!!
Really liked this when I first saw it and still do. I greatly admire dr Diamond but was always a little skeptical about the immiseration of the populace via agriculture, especially grain. Part of the problem is how crappy the evidence is, not too surprising considering the difficulty of the question. Turns out that in the past few years a guy has developed fancy new methods to analyze diet and reaches conclusions contrary to conventional wisdom. The methods are compelling. Don’t remember his name but if readers are interested I could figure it out.
Hi Matt: If you're getting interested in this stuff, there is a marvelous old book of anthropology, which you can find for sale second hand: Ralph Linton's The Tree of Culture. Be sure to get the hardcover copy which is unabridged. It was published posthumosuly from Ralph Linton's lecture notes, and is a way of summarizing the cultural history of human societies up until that time. There is an empirical richness to it -- and a sheer delight that it takes in cultural detail. It was published in the late 1950's, I believe, and that style of cultural anthropology went out of style. The effect now is that most people trained in anthropology are adept at deploying a wide range of concepts, and at talking about their own particular area of expertise, and don't feel at all embarrassed at knowing so little about what their field once set out to study.
Bottom line: there has never been a better time to be alive for more humans everywhere in the world than right now. The future is obviously unknown but humans have (or have developed) the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, often after a bit of difficulty and a crisis or two. The concern I have is whether the pace of change is now or will soon out-run our collective ability to adapt (relatively peacefully) so that we can recover from th inevitable crises. Stay tuned, keep calm and carry on.
Thanks again, Ms Yglesias, for entertaining me and also expanding my horizons. I believe I subscribed to this Substack on more or less day one. Best money I’ve spent. Happy fourth everyone!
This article published right before I felt confident enough to start commenting, and I won't add a whole lot while I'm out of town for the holiday. I've always held decent but not absolute skepticism of the Diamond argument, and I think there were some good comments under the original article as a counterpoint. But if we do stipulate that Diamond's argument should be deemed correct, then that would mean that the European conquest of the Americas and other overwhelming hunter gatherer lands not only caused a lot of death and destruction, but it did so in the name of spreading a lower quality of life. That's not an argument I hear much about when critiquing what happened to those Indigenous societies.
Tangential to your point, I was recalling all the stories from around Ben Franklin’s time of white people who’d been kidnapped by and then rescued from tribes ultimately running away to join the tribe again. (To say nothing of natives fleeing back to their tribes any chance they got.)
Looking at Matt’s graph, I wonder how much of that is because the average quality of life for the Europeans in America had yet to take off, and so the nomadic life of tribes was legit just better.
I don't think one could call the Aztec and Incan empires hunter-gatherer societies. Maybe to some of the tribes in Northern America, but far from all of them (e.g., the Cahokian empire).
Agriculture, which is what lead or leads to the demise of hunter-gathering was invented and well established in the Americas for thousands of years before Europeans showed up.
I think it's a mistake to say "nothing much happened" during the hundreds of thousands of years that humans existed before the dawn of agriculture; rather, the things that happened during that period are largely unknown to us, because no archaeological evidence is left for them. We can know what kind of stone tools people were using 100,000 years ago, because stone tools are durable enough to survive and be observable to us now; we don't know what stories they told, what they believed, what their social norms looked like. All those things might have changed many times over, with many of those changes feeling incredibly momentous at the time, only to be forgotten after decades or centuries or millennia, leaving them utterly unknown to us now!
Also, the clothing and wood tools that people used might well have changed a lot more than we know, given that these things are perishable and rarely appear in the archaeological record.
Good one! But, "What Smith is saying is that a market economy leads to a more efficient allocation of a quasi-fixed pool of resources, which is true but also not what led to the explosion of prosperity over the next 250 years." What did?
I read Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker a while back and ever since I have always been on Team-Modernity.
Don't speak too fast, for the wheel's still in spin...
1) The rise of living standards in the industrialized world might be seen as a by-product of imperialism (and vice-versa). Since 1970, we've seen a (relative) stagnation of living standards among the working class in the developed world -- arguably as a by-product of decolonization. Now we're seeing the political blowback!
2) "It’s also conceivable that today’s human children will be the creators of a cohort of self-replicating and self-improving AI robots that colonize the galaxy" -- after those AI products have colonized Planet Earth. Meanwhile -- one way or another -- the human species might now be about to lose its perch as the planet's apex predator.
Sorry if I seem to be a killjoy. :-(
This actually does put into a dark frame why most of the “classic epic poetry” of ancient history, from the Iliad to the Mahabharata, concentrates on glorifying violence and the violence-producing classes of people, rather than the farmers, the artisans, the metalworkers, even the highly-skilled ones.
More broadly, it highlights why bros who consider themselves quite manly and like to brag about their survivalist and “livin’ off the land” skillset, also like to wax rhapsodic over guns and violence, as opposed to, say, clothesmaking.
Read in that frame, much of the grand, eloquent rhetoric glorifying Agamemnon, Achilles, Arjuna, Yudhishthira, etc., comes off less as grand, eloquent rhetoric, or even as “classic literature”, and more as fearful, timid ass-kissing under the threat of the guy with the biggest sword pointed at your face.
Basically, these encomiums to great, legendary kings and what-not are just another form of protection money, paid at gunpoint to the biggest gangster with the most fearful reputation for violence. As are, in their own way, every medieval courtly tale, every samurai nostalgia trip, every ode to Caesar and the grandeur of Imperial Rome, etc.
Game of Thrones came perilously close to revealing that dark, encompassing truth, though the incoherent finale muddled that message a bit. But it looms over basically all romance we have for old kingdoms and empires, and ultimately, over literature itself.
And unfortunately, it puts the “survivalist” instinct into dark relief too. Many guys preparing for the end of civilization are not merely planning to “survive”. They’re fantasizing about being the biggest, baddest motherfucker on the block, with the biggest guns, forcing all those without their violent “skills” to do the hard work for them.
They’re not wanting merely to be the Vuvalini, in other words. They think they’ll be Immortan Joe.
Something to think about, if we’re tempted to denounce industrial democracy as “decadent” and long for those dark times.
I think you should’ve mentioned how English living standards in 1720 were higher than they were in 1320. It’s quite an important bit of the Industrial Revolution that it emerged out of a country who was about twice as rich per capita as what was needed for subsistence for centuries.
When you start talking about history on such long time scales, it becomes necessary to think about the very difficult question of what humanity's purpose is or should be. In discussing the standard of living all the way back to before homo sapiens, Matt tacitly assumes that the degree of individual well-being is at least a decent proxy for whatever humanity's purpose is. This is probably pretty resonant with current liberal thought, although one does need to think about the role that population statistics play. Is it the well-being of the most well-off human that counts? The least well-off? The average? The median? The sum? Nevertheless, under many possible choices of statistic, humanity will be seen to have gone backward for a long time after the invention of agriculture.
I call myself a Conservative Democrat these days (owing to the death of the true Republican Party), and I do not subscribe to the thought that individual well-being is the ultimate human good. I think our goal is a collective one, to grow and spread as far and wide as we can. In mathematical terms, life is a local reduction of entropy, taking in energy and producing pattern. In the aftermath of the agricultural revolution, living standards declined, but the surge in population and cultural complexity counts as progress in my view. I'm not against individual well-being, but I view it as a means, not an end. A single dictator on top of a pile of serfs is not a very complex, dynamic, growth-oriented structure for society, and the recent rise in well-being has furthered our ability to pursue my version of humanity's purpose. But I am more likely than Matt to see an ebb and flow of living standards as compatible with steady collective progress.
Humanity has no purpose. Why would it? As humans we feel compelled to find meaning in our lives, but that's just a quirk of our psychology.
It’s perfectly defensible to disavow any universal human purpose ordained by God or science or natural law, if such is your belief. But even absent that, there is still our own chosen purpose, whether it be unanimously agreed or not. If you don’t have even a personal opinion of what our purpose ought to be, you have nowhere to anchor any opinions you might have about what other people ought to do.
Correct; I absolutely consider humans and bacteria to be pursuing the same purpose, though humans are far ahead in the game. Or perhaps it is appropriate to include bacteria in our score, since we can’t really survive without them. Perhaps all of Earth’s biosphere, or at least a substantial subset of it, is properly part of our team, as the most efficient way for us to spread beyond our planet is to take much of it with us.
"The dark portrait that Marx and Engels painted of the industrial revolution as immiserating the working class was completely wrong."
Marx celebrated the industrial revolution and saw it as a stepping stone to socialism and abundance.
It wasn't really possible to become truly rich without flat-out stealing until about 1850. The first people to manage it were called "robber barons". Crab-bucket morality.
I'm amused by Matt's failure to stick to his pledge to stop tweeting while on vacation https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1808924260338925792?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
And thank God for it!
Honestly, it’s annoying AF that most of the really momentous political events in election years seem to happen right before our favorite pundits go on their big long happy summer vacations.
We need your hot takes and tweets, guys! Rest is for the non-pundit class!!
Really liked this when I first saw it and still do. I greatly admire dr Diamond but was always a little skeptical about the immiseration of the populace via agriculture, especially grain. Part of the problem is how crappy the evidence is, not too surprising considering the difficulty of the question. Turns out that in the past few years a guy has developed fancy new methods to analyze diet and reaches conclusions contrary to conventional wisdom. The methods are compelling. Don’t remember his name but if readers are interested I could figure it out.
Hi Matt: If you're getting interested in this stuff, there is a marvelous old book of anthropology, which you can find for sale second hand: Ralph Linton's The Tree of Culture. Be sure to get the hardcover copy which is unabridged. It was published posthumosuly from Ralph Linton's lecture notes, and is a way of summarizing the cultural history of human societies up until that time. There is an empirical richness to it -- and a sheer delight that it takes in cultural detail. It was published in the late 1950's, I believe, and that style of cultural anthropology went out of style. The effect now is that most people trained in anthropology are adept at deploying a wide range of concepts, and at talking about their own particular area of expertise, and don't feel at all embarrassed at knowing so little about what their field once set out to study.
Bottom line: there has never been a better time to be alive for more humans everywhere in the world than right now. The future is obviously unknown but humans have (or have developed) the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, often after a bit of difficulty and a crisis or two. The concern I have is whether the pace of change is now or will soon out-run our collective ability to adapt (relatively peacefully) so that we can recover from th inevitable crises. Stay tuned, keep calm and carry on.
America. 🇺🇸💥
Comin' again to save the motherfuckin' day, yeah!
Thanks again, Ms Yglesias, for entertaining me and also expanding my horizons. I believe I subscribed to this Substack on more or less day one. Best money I’ve spent. Happy fourth everyone!
This article published right before I felt confident enough to start commenting, and I won't add a whole lot while I'm out of town for the holiday. I've always held decent but not absolute skepticism of the Diamond argument, and I think there were some good comments under the original article as a counterpoint. But if we do stipulate that Diamond's argument should be deemed correct, then that would mean that the European conquest of the Americas and other overwhelming hunter gatherer lands not only caused a lot of death and destruction, but it did so in the name of spreading a lower quality of life. That's not an argument I hear much about when critiquing what happened to those Indigenous societies.
Tangential to your point, I was recalling all the stories from around Ben Franklin’s time of white people who’d been kidnapped by and then rescued from tribes ultimately running away to join the tribe again. (To say nothing of natives fleeing back to their tribes any chance they got.)
Looking at Matt’s graph, I wonder how much of that is because the average quality of life for the Europeans in America had yet to take off, and so the nomadic life of tribes was legit just better.
I don't think one could call the Aztec and Incan empires hunter-gatherer societies. Maybe to some of the tribes in Northern America, but far from all of them (e.g., the Cahokian empire).
Hence why I said overwhelming and not entirely.
Agriculture, which is what lead or leads to the demise of hunter-gathering was invented and well established in the Americas for thousands of years before Europeans showed up.
Three Sisters auto-like