The Malthusian Trap

An extra optional reading for Economics 101b: UCLA's Jared Diamond on the invention of agriculture and on the "Malthusian" trap that agriculture creates:

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race: By Jared Diamond, University of California at Los Angeles Medical School, Discover Magazine, May 1987, Pages 64-66.

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.

At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We’re better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?

For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It’s a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it’s nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.

From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?

The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.

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. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

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.

So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren’t nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world’s worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don’t tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.

How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.

In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.

Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner’s sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.

One straightforward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. 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.

Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced bya bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."

The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don’t think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it’s become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (today just three high-carbohydrate plants–wheat, rice, and corn–provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn’t take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the élite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an élite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be iimproted from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?

Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts–with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.

Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden. In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.

As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.

Thus with the advent of agriculture and élite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.

One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on eperson per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it’s because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it’s old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don’t have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.

As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It’s not that hunter-gatherers abandonded their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn’t want.

At this point it’s instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering façade, and that have so far eluded us?

Comments

[Brad DeLong]

Test

[Total]

I count nine billion people now living on the planet, with an average life span of ? (in the 40s, 50s, 70s for the United States). What is the carrying capacity using hunting and gathering?

Comparing hunter/gathering at the end of its development (ie after the techniques and tactics of it have been pretty thoroughly worked out and passed down from generation to generation) to agriculture at the beginning of its development (when farmers didn't under crop rotation, etc) strikes me as a serious methodological flaw.

[wcw]

Then compare apples to apples. Per the article,
hunter-gatherers work 15-20 hours a week.

How much time do advanced capitalist workers put
in for their food, clothing and shelter?

NB, here is a link to what my neighbors pay for
shelter: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/04/REHS_sfrancisco.txt

[Ken Houghton]

I'm inclined to suggest that we discovered agriculture at 11:54pm and found ways to make it work (that have not yet been universally applied, to be certain) around 11:58:30.

"Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny."

At the risk of sounding like an NRO columnist, that's like saying we chose to build and pave the roads instead of leaving them cobbled, and so ended up with Lincoln Navigators, a war in Iraq, and the current Bush Administration."

[Maynard Handley]

While the article as a whole seems plausible, one item in particular strikes me as unconvincingly argued:

"Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter-gatherer counterparts–with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease."

What exactly is the argument here? It would appear to be something along the lines of more frequent pregnancies equals physically weaker women who can then be dominated by men, but that hardly squares with the next paragraph talking about getting the tiny woman to carry the huge bag of rice. I'm afraid the article as a whole does zero to convince me, either through facts stated or through a plausible argument, that inequality between sexes arose as a result of agriculture. I've no idea; maybe it very well did; I'm just saying that this article sheds no light on the subject.

[andres]

Hmmm. Diamond's argument is ok in and of itself, but it leaves out one highly important detail. Those self-important elites created by agriculture did not simply limit themselves to art, religion, making war against other nations, and slaughtering rebellious peasants. Because they needed to correctly reproduce and distribute the agricultural surplus (a problem absent in HG tribes), they also created mathematics, geometry, astronomy, engineering, and eventually the other sciences as well. That is, agriculture created incentives to gather scientific knowledge and that may still help us get out of the Malthusian predicament.

Yeech. I sound like some smug, optimistic Julian Simon clone, but there it is.

[knzn]

The critical question is whether or not life in general is a good thing. If life is good, then more life is better, and agriculture is good because it enables the expansion of life. It’s clearly better to have 1,000,000 people living good lives than 1,000 living very good lives.

On the other hand, if life in general is bad, then agriculture is bad because it enables the expansion of life. This is true whether agriculture improves or diminishes the average quality of life. It’s better to have 1,000 people living very bad lives than 1,000,000 people living moderately bad lives. (This might not be true, depending on how convex the utility function is in its negative range, but my point should be clear.)

Somehow, Diamond (and almost everyone else) seems to think that the average quality of life is what matters. This makes no sense. If the goal is to maximize happiness, then more people implies more happiness; if the goal is to minimize suffering, then more people implies more suffering. But what reasonable welfare goal is served by maximizing average happiness (or minimizing average suffering) while ignoring the total?

Of course the question becomes more subtle when you allow for the possibility that some lives are worth living while others aren’t. I’m sure someone could write down a model in which, given some particular assumed distribution of positive and negative welfare, the procedure of maximizing average happiness turns out to come close to the goal of maximizing total happiness. But that’s obviously going to depend on a very strong assumption about the distribution.

On the whole, I’m inclined to side with the negative utilitarians (and against the view that has been conventional at least since the beginning of literature). For the most part, life is bad. Therefore, agriculture is bad.

[pebird]

Clearly, agriculture did not evolve, but was introduced to humans by a designer of high intelligence.

[J Thomas]

I believe that Marvin Harris made this exact same claim more clearly, though with a different mix of evidence.

This is an example of a "tragedy of the commons" argument. Even if you try to behave responsibly, others who don't will encroach on you. So simply behaving responsibly is not an evolutionarily stable solution.

There are a whole collection of arguments why agricultural societies tend to be patriarchal. For a minor example, when people live in dwellings that are harder to sneak out of then it's easier for husbands or fathers to enforce chastity or monogamy.

When there's a strong class structure the upper-class men can have more women. That leaves some lower-class men without any, and one way to deal with that is to send out lots of raiding partis that will get some of the men killed while others bring back trophy wives or slaves.

When women have more children there are more dependent on somebody else to help take care of them. The more dependent children the harder it is for a woman to care for them all unaided. Unless there's a social structure that helps her, she's more dependent on a man. Unless there's a social structure that punishes him for dumping her for somebody younger, her bargaining position with him is more impaired.

There are a lot of these theories, and some of them have more evidence than others. Anthropologists have found lots of patriarchal agricultural societies while matriarchal ones are rare and exciting. That says a little bit. On the other hand there are lots of relatively peaceful agricultural societies while the yamaono and indonesian headhunters etc are rare.

And there are so many variables it doesn't have to go just one way. I visited the mattaponi native american reservation where they had a museum set up with some beautiful exhibits. One of those explained that when the english first visited, they had a small population of exceptionally healthy people. Now, one of the customs the english noted was that every one of them would jump into the river every single morning, no matter what, unless they were too sick to get out of bed and totter that far. And I hopothesised that anybody who wasn't in very greath health who did that every day all winter, would probably die. Leaving them with a small superbly-healthy population. But I did nothing to test that idea.

[a different chris]

>was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered

Hah, just spend some time browsing American Farm Bureau publications and you'll start to believe it!!

(www.fb.org to start)

[J Thomas]

knzn, the point here is that you don't get to choose what your society does, nobody gets to choose, it simply selects whatever it happens to select somewhat independent of what any individual wants or chooses and independent of any individual's long-term best interest, even independent of any group's long-term best interest.

It simply doesn't matter what the utility function is, if you get stuck with something you're stuck with it -- whether it's good for *anybody* or not.

I used to enjoy reading about this sort of argument in the sociobiology literature. They were real good at following up the logic, though not always at all good at collecting evidence.

The reasoning was that if there's *anything* that living things vary in, and if it might somehow result in varying "success" where "success" could be either increased reproduction or whatever the individual chose, and if the individuals could pass the something on to their descendents (maybe by teaching them) or if they could pass it to other individuals who had a similar concept of success etc, then the principles of natural selection and evolution would apply.

They came up with all sorts of clever ideas. One I particularly remember, they claimed that various female apes show unmistakeable signs of estrus. But human females don't. So they spun increasingly elaborate theories about how this would benefit pre-human females. Like, a female could keep various males around with sex but have her babies with the chosen one by timing things right. Or she could have one good provider to help her raise her babies but choose someone better to get pregnant with.

And eventually a female sociobiologist published a story that claimed most human females don't know themselves when they ovulate, and she looked for a sociobiological reason for that. She reasoned that women would like to have just a few children and be happy taking care of them, and they wouldn't willingly have very large families that would run them ragged. But prehuman females who didn't know when they were fertile would be more likely to get pregnant by accident and have more children then they'd willingly have. So the genes that got them to do that would be selected -- because evolution doesn't act to help people be comfortable. Evolution only acts to help them outcompete their neighbors at raising children.

And it's the same argument here except the unit of selection isn't the gene or the individual, but the lifestyle. If people find a way that makes them "successful" by objective measures like their ability to kill people or their ability to breed quick, then it *will* spread whether or not anybody really wants it to.

It's similar to the economic argument about "What if everybody did it?". Faced with a chance to make money that looks utterly unethical, the proper homo economicus response is "If I don't do it, somebody else will.". So you do it, no matter how awful it is, because you might as well get the money instead of watching somebody else do it to you and get the money.

[Les Brunswick]

Andrew Bard Schmookler describes this whole set of dynamics in great detail in The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (U. of California, 1985).

What I like about this whole line of reasoning is it gets away from the moralistic view that things used to be paradisal until humans freely decided to become evil, or the similarly moralistic view that we were all beastly savages until people in the West decided to become good. In general, what you believe about the original state and why it is no longer here is closely related to your beliefs about human nature, and these in turn are closely connected to your beliefs about what is the good society. One group of philosophers who got this pretty right was the classic liberals, like Hume and Smith. Most other social philosophies have gotten both the social history and the psychology wrong--Rousseau is a good example, ditto the various Abrahamic fundamentalisms.

One thing that has gone well more recently is how industrialization and the free market have made it possible for many societies to escape authoritarian government and return part way to the original democratic ways. Even more recently, nuclear weapons plus various developments that have made imperialism unprofitable have pretty much eliminated major warfare (Greg Easterbrook had a story in the New Republic on this a few months back.) So perhaps we have partially escaped the dynamics that threw us out of the original state.

[conchefritter]

We have found the Intelligent Designer.

It's ADM.

That aside, the piece is a solid recognition of (as I have read over the years) the growing challenges to widely-held assumptions that agrarian societies as they emerged were a swimmingly wonderful development for humans. I suspect that it is mixed, difficult, and brought a host of social constructs we are not sorting out well. Galbraith was fairly good in this area when examining the maturing of political cultures as they moved from ag to industry, but that's not enough. It's time we recognize and explore more deeply how humans live when we don't assume that surpluses of capital or labor or whatever are the Holy Economic Grail that benefit most.

[knzn]

J Thomas, Diamond seems to me to be making a welfare argument (or one could say, a normative judgment) about agriculture. He call it a “mistake”, not meaning that any individual made an irrational or misinformed decision, but meaning that the human race as a whole is worse off. My point is that, if you’re going to judge agriculture in welfare terms, you need to focus on the fact that it increased population. That effect – whether you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing – far outweighs all the other effects (including those that result via increased population). Unless Diamond means to argue that life was absolutely good for HGs and absolutely bad for farmers (and post-ag people), in which case population growth only compounds the other presumed evils.

[J Thomas]

knzn, you could easily be right about Diamond's intention. I read it as emphasis that the system doesn't have our best interest at heart, that evolution heads toward more "fitness" which doesn't correlate with anything in particular, that a million people each doing what looks like the right thing can box themselves into a corner they can't get out of.

See, by his argument ultimately it doesn't *matter* whether people are better off or worse off. We don't get to choose, we can't go back regardless. It doesn't matter whether we think we're better off and it doesn't matter whether we're really better off. We're stuck with it.

He might later make the point that we're also stuck with urbanization. It doesn't matter whether we think we'd be better off if everybody went back to their little home on the prairie and had a subsistence farm. We can't do it. We're stuck with fossil-fuel agribusiness, there's no way out, and if we don't find some way out before the fossil fuels run out then we're just plain stuck.

[JS Narins]

The Kalahari Bushmen don't have current competition for hunting and gathering, do they?

[J Thomas]

The way I read it, particular people own each patch of bushman land. In good years they let anybody harvest, there's enough for all. If things get bad then it's somehow different, but the report I read was from a good year.

[arel]

Perhaps having more children was just an adaptation. If your moving around alot or have to carry children that's extra baggage. The value of children becomes more obvious on the farm, since by the age of oh...5-8 they start being able to do something useful. Similiarly the change to metropolitan life decreases the need for children...so it goes...

And people make similiar arguments today, like; who says office jobs are so much better then factory jobs (which were supposedly better then farming), look at the obesity, diabetes and heart disease that result from sitting all day. Now we have to pay hundreds of dollars to join a gym to run on a treadmill after the office.

As well, people make arguments about specific community changes based on development ideas that are considered progressive. I remember hearing about a community in India that used to plant sugar cane, then developers came in advised that they should plant grapes because they were so much more profitable. Grapes are much more labor intensive (this is how the story went) and trickier to cultivate therefore it completely disrupted the peoples lives...no afternoon naps, no predictability around the work week...

I think Diamond has a great point, and I think we can slice and dice the evidence for pros and cons many ways depending on what we wish to look like an ideal lifestyle....more computers:.less toil and trouble, "shorter work weeks", etc.

[piotr]

One could argue that humans had at least 50,000 years to perfect hunting-gathering lifestyle. After neolithic revolution there was a period, of, say, 5-10,000 years of transition that ultimately lead to vast improvements in health (especially if you floss your teeth and exercise).

That sound facecious, but it seems that after the revolution (neolithic one) human creativity improved. Yes, the pre-agricultural art is nice, but it is a bit monotone. Look at Australian aborigines -- several painting styles for 50,000 years? Mind you, I have nothing against their art, but the variety is not its strength. Compare the with the variety of styles exhibited by agricultural tribes of Oceania.

Is health the chief value? Perhaps the first mistake was to develop brains that are too large for our good. I would guess that an everage gorilla works fewer hours and is healthier than an average human hunter-getherer. Brains make us what we are, and the neolithic revolution is also very large part of what we are.

Diamond reminds us that progress has its price, and that this price deserves to be re-examined. Is it worth to pay it? Do we have to pay it? Perhaps we could be healthier, and be working shorter hours while still enjoying the fruits of 21-st century technology? Our women are definitely not doomed to patriarchy and bearing children every other year, so perhaps we are not doomed to commute one hour each way and work 40 hours a week with copious unpaid overtime. It can be instructive to ponder the healthy lifestyles of hunter gatherers, but we do not need to regret that we are not.

[Glen Bowman]

Diamond says "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."

This is an invalid analogy. Much of the Irish potato famine had to do with politics and with prejudice, not necessarily with the inferiority of agriculture when compared to hunting and gathering.

[Art Hickman]

The way you survive is not as important as limiting the number of people. In my way of thinking, the world is over populated by 50% at least. Something that can be corrected over 2 generations without having to resort to draconian measures. Growing your food or gathering your food are just ways to do it. Keeping populations stable is the real issue.

[Joerg Wenck]

In another life, Jared Diamond might be reborn as an archaeologist (subspecies of hunter/gatherer) searching through the remains of human civilization left behind after a meteor hit earth. Apparently Diamond is trying to put his feet into the giant footsteps of the dinosaurs here.

[Tim Worstall]

I find it amusing that a University Professor should think that the agricultural surplus, the very thing that allows the existence of a University Professor, is a bad thing.

Don’t we call that self-hatred?

[John Emerson]

KNZN, your questions reinforce my conviction that utilitarianism might be a good rule of thumb for small decisions, but doesn't work as an overall philosophy. It's a fake kind of rationality, assuming that something unmeasurable (welfare) can be aggregated and maximized, and that alternative choices can be numerically compared. It's true that 5 billion people at an average welfare of +.1 produce more aggregate welfare than 5 million people with an average welfare of +99, but that kind of thinking seems silly to me, in more ways than one. It allows people to think that they're making a precise rational decision, when really they're not. (It reminds me of the fake understanding of the family in terms of contracts and a market, where it is assumed that father, mother, and child are engaged in exchanges of something or another, when actually they aren't).

Diamond's writing sounds like a crib from Sahlins' :Stone Age Economics". This kind of primitivism has a long history in political philosophy and anthropology, and is usually warned against.

I'd put this piece in the provocative devil's advocate category. I like everything Diamond writes, but always have the grain of salt ready.

One factor not named so far is that agriculture and storable food makes exploitation possible. Once the agricultural land is all in use, farmers cannot flee except by giving up everything they can't carry on their backs. They are thus subject to extortion. PAstoralists and hunter-gatherers are more mobile and much less controllable. Thus agriculture leads to heierarchy and ultimately centralized control and complex society. Diamond's point is that during long periods, the average peasant (usually 90% of the population in early agricultural societies) was probably not better off than the average hunter-gatherer.

Militarily, peasants were controlled by military elites living in fortified cities and castles. These military elites were often under military-political pressure from nomads whose subsistence was pastoral. The Mongols were the most famous, but there were many more, often a succession of steppe peoples controlled/ exploited a given agricultural population. These steppe peoples were militarily specialized; only when defeated did they live entirely on their pastoral production.

Hunter-gatherers and practitioners of shifting agriculture, because of their thin populations, have always been vulnerable to military pressure from agricultural peoples, which can afford standing armies and large militia callups.

[piotr]

I wrote before that utilitarianism is well suited for comparing SIMILAR situations, say, US economy with Clinton's tax laws and with Bush's tax laws, or even US and Russia.

The shift from hunting gathering to shifting agriculture increases the population by a factor of 10 to 50 (???) and leads to a deterioration in health. Good or bad? This is beyond good or bad. For example: is it better to be happy and stupid or unhappy and well informed.

I would draw this conclusion, which is rather important: when we observe one parameter improving, e.g. aggregate food production, we should not jump to the conclusion that we deal with a uniform improvement, in health etc. I recently read that in 16-18 centuries, SE Asia had smaller population densities than China and Europe, somewhat lower technological level -- and a better health.

A general phenomenon is that it is healthier to extract much less than the technologically feasible maximum of the resources from the environment.

[Saheli]

I even did a cntrl-F, but I can't find a point where Diamond makes even a guesstimate on the change in life span. He mentions the possibility of measuring it, but doesn't seem to give it?? That would seem to make a big difference in welfare to me. My understanding is that the leisurely, sleep-enabled, Kalahari bushmen don't live that long. Maybe I'm wrong?

[Alex]

A really serious case of postlapsarian romanticism, complicated by a lack of application to one's own situation. If not treated, hypocrisy and credibility loss may result.

[bonbon]

What a pile of shit.

[Michael Barnas]

Please remember, there are practical limits on utilitarianism. While my personal survival owes a great deal to recent technological progress, I also believe quite strongly that more life for more people is not a sufficient vision of a desirable future. As my first demography teacher, Phil Hauser, told us in 1970. If the human race continues to grow at its historical average rate of 2% per year, based on the last 2000 years, the period for which we have somewhat reliable data, the result, in about 5,900 years will be a solid ball of human flesh whose diameter is expanding faster than the speed of light.
There are alternatives. One alternative is obvious to anyone who has considered the growth of bacteria in a Petri dish: the population increases hyperbolically. Until it crashes or dies out completely.
Especially this week, it seem to me, our most urgent task is preventing the most catastrophic hard landings, especially those whose occurrence is utterly predictable. A good first step would be culling "leaders" whose imagination is clearly defective.

[jimbo]

Well, I for one am convinced that any development that ultimatly allowed Jared Diamond to come along and write his drivel must have been a bad thing...