Greg Clark’s “Farewell to Alms” still tempts with one big, clean story: pre‑modern humanity stuck on a Malthusian treadmill until cultural-bio selection on “bourgeois” traits breaks the chains, and...
“ In [Clark’s] Malthusian world poor people died young and childless while the rich went and multiplied. The traits of the successful… were passed on…. “
Yikes, more self serving tech bro ideology. Throw in some skin color and the tech bros will lap it up.
I am unclear what these other "improvements" - luxuries, cultural, and domination dimensions buy the population at large?
Luxuries include what - decorated shells, a metal ornament, perhaps some stick furniture, glass windows? Who benefited from these? Just a small minority.
Cultural changes. Organized armies to support an aristocracy that then conquered other lands and returned with slaves? Hereditary leadership to stymie social mobility? Invention of money. Class structure and mobility? Again, a minority benefited.
Domination. Well, the dominated lost out.
In terms of improving the lot of the greater population, it isn't clear to me what the benefits were.
Jared Diamond once claimed that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was better for humanity than the invention of agriculture. It shows up in the diminished size of bodies, brain-to-body ratios, and the emergence of new diseases. Even today, we can see that agriculture, now including aquaculture, is hugely damaging to the local ecosystems, and more generally to the biosphere. We could do a lot better, but we don't.
I don't deny that humanity's lot, at least in some parts of the world, has vastly improved. I can be sure that food is always available to eat so that I don't experience lasting hunger. I have powerful toys like computers at my beck and call. My home is warm and dry. My bed is soft. Aches and pains have a number of remedies to alleviate any slight suffering. Generally, I feel safe (even here in gun-crazy USA). But if we look at the longer time frame, humanity may prove remarkably ephemeral. Just 40-80 millennia since the "cultural explosion", a tiny 4-8% of a 1 million year non-technological, non-cultural species survival, and 1/10th of that for species lasting 10 my. We are causing the 6th extinction of all other species on the planet. We have come close to devastating nuclear war at least twice in the 20th century. Our technology helps create pandemics. [It is just as well there is no "judgement day" for humanity]
You wrote an excellent book on how we might have used our technological gains to create a much better world...but we didn't. Right now, we are surely making things a lot worse, with just a few taking most of the surplus wealth and resources for themselves, and ensuring they benefit greatly while everyone else, including the species we share the planet with, does not. We may dream of starships in our future, but we may not have much of a future unless we can really remake our global culture to benefit all of humanity and the planet, too.
An unjustifiably hopeful corner of my brain hopes that we're close to this inflection point.
I think, by and large, the population explosion of the 20th century was an accident, and I'm not alone in thinking this, I know. However, while I don't agree with most pro-natalist arguments, I do agree that human life CAN be--ceteris paribus--good, and that the onus is on us all to make it as good as can be materially sustained for the largest number of people. However, a good life and what counts as a "materially sustained" to provide it requires quite a few asterisks.
The holdover, as far as I'm concerned, is in couched in two evolutionary mindsets which are so natural that it remains radical to reconsider them. The first, less controversial one, is material scarcity. I think that whatever might be used to define it, it can't be argued that a good life is as difficult to provide now as it was in the past. E.g., widespread vaccination is a thing, and periods of mass hunger which result in stunted growth rates tend to receive some level of international recognition, rather than being just "the way it is".
The second is more controversial, certainly, and definitely a Pandora's box. Quite simply: we still care about passing on our own genes more than can be rationally justified. I'm very far from an expert on these things, but we seem quite clearly (though it feels like a generous interpretation of the actions of many) to be at a point where ensuring species-level survival is being sacrificed under the presumptive mandate of the genetic-level survival of (some) family lines.
Our cultural needs to catch up with--and ultimately probably supercede--our natural biological drives.
I'm working on a critique of pro-natalism, so this is very helpful to me. As regards timing, even though most of humanity was still on the treadmill by 1900, Western Europe and its offshoots moved earlier, at least if you take famines as the measure. The last in England was in early C17 and in most of Western Europe in the years before the French Revolution. The Great Hunger in Ireland was human-caused rather than a reflection of actual food shortages
"If parents were not desperately poor, would they have fed their children diets to stunt them by four inches? Nope."
This sounds plausible, but I wonder how much parents understood. May have been tempting to fill up kids bellies with on cheap carbs if they didn't know the cost of missing vitamins and proteins? The pellegra epidemic, for example.
I do think that the long slog was primarily cultural and cumulative, albeit feeding on itself and speeding up, in ways that also affected science and technology toward the end of the runup to the Industrial Revolution. For instance, first optics, which dates back to Euclid, then spectacles in the Middle Ages, then the telescope in 1608 (officially), followed in surprisingly short order by Galileo, Newton, the microscope and the discovery of the vacuum through which the mundane heavenly bodies of Galileo's and Newton's universe hurtled, in ways that then laid the groundwork for the first steam engines (worked by vacuum, not positive pressure) and the rest of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was when these gains ceased to be primarily cultural and could now be measured in terms of miles of cloth, horsepower, tons of steel, and so on.
“ In [Clark’s] Malthusian world poor people died young and childless while the rich went and multiplied. The traits of the successful… were passed on…. “
Yikes, more self serving tech bro ideology. Throw in some skin color and the tech bros will lap it up.
I am unclear what these other "improvements" - luxuries, cultural, and domination dimensions buy the population at large?
Luxuries include what - decorated shells, a metal ornament, perhaps some stick furniture, glass windows? Who benefited from these? Just a small minority.
Cultural changes. Organized armies to support an aristocracy that then conquered other lands and returned with slaves? Hereditary leadership to stymie social mobility? Invention of money. Class structure and mobility? Again, a minority benefited.
Domination. Well, the dominated lost out.
In terms of improving the lot of the greater population, it isn't clear to me what the benefits were.
Jared Diamond once claimed that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was better for humanity than the invention of agriculture. It shows up in the diminished size of bodies, brain-to-body ratios, and the emergence of new diseases. Even today, we can see that agriculture, now including aquaculture, is hugely damaging to the local ecosystems, and more generally to the biosphere. We could do a lot better, but we don't.
I don't deny that humanity's lot, at least in some parts of the world, has vastly improved. I can be sure that food is always available to eat so that I don't experience lasting hunger. I have powerful toys like computers at my beck and call. My home is warm and dry. My bed is soft. Aches and pains have a number of remedies to alleviate any slight suffering. Generally, I feel safe (even here in gun-crazy USA). But if we look at the longer time frame, humanity may prove remarkably ephemeral. Just 40-80 millennia since the "cultural explosion", a tiny 4-8% of a 1 million year non-technological, non-cultural species survival, and 1/10th of that for species lasting 10 my. We are causing the 6th extinction of all other species on the planet. We have come close to devastating nuclear war at least twice in the 20th century. Our technology helps create pandemics. [It is just as well there is no "judgement day" for humanity]
You wrote an excellent book on how we might have used our technological gains to create a much better world...but we didn't. Right now, we are surely making things a lot worse, with just a few taking most of the surplus wealth and resources for themselves, and ensuring they benefit greatly while everyone else, including the species we share the planet with, does not. We may dream of starships in our future, but we may not have much of a future unless we can really remake our global culture to benefit all of humanity and the planet, too.
An unjustifiably hopeful corner of my brain hopes that we're close to this inflection point.
I think, by and large, the population explosion of the 20th century was an accident, and I'm not alone in thinking this, I know. However, while I don't agree with most pro-natalist arguments, I do agree that human life CAN be--ceteris paribus--good, and that the onus is on us all to make it as good as can be materially sustained for the largest number of people. However, a good life and what counts as a "materially sustained" to provide it requires quite a few asterisks.
The holdover, as far as I'm concerned, is in couched in two evolutionary mindsets which are so natural that it remains radical to reconsider them. The first, less controversial one, is material scarcity. I think that whatever might be used to define it, it can't be argued that a good life is as difficult to provide now as it was in the past. E.g., widespread vaccination is a thing, and periods of mass hunger which result in stunted growth rates tend to receive some level of international recognition, rather than being just "the way it is".
The second is more controversial, certainly, and definitely a Pandora's box. Quite simply: we still care about passing on our own genes more than can be rationally justified. I'm very far from an expert on these things, but we seem quite clearly (though it feels like a generous interpretation of the actions of many) to be at a point where ensuring species-level survival is being sacrificed under the presumptive mandate of the genetic-level survival of (some) family lines.
Our cultural needs to catch up with--and ultimately probably supercede--our natural biological drives.
I'm working on a critique of pro-natalism, so this is very helpful to me. As regards timing, even though most of humanity was still on the treadmill by 1900, Western Europe and its offshoots moved earlier, at least if you take famines as the measure. The last in England was in early C17 and in most of Western Europe in the years before the French Revolution. The Great Hunger in Ireland was human-caused rather than a reflection of actual food shortages
"If parents were not desperately poor, would they have fed their children diets to stunt them by four inches? Nope."
This sounds plausible, but I wonder how much parents understood. May have been tempting to fill up kids bellies with on cheap carbs if they didn't know the cost of missing vitamins and proteins? The pellegra epidemic, for example.
I do think that the long slog was primarily cultural and cumulative, albeit feeding on itself and speeding up, in ways that also affected science and technology toward the end of the runup to the Industrial Revolution. For instance, first optics, which dates back to Euclid, then spectacles in the Middle Ages, then the telescope in 1608 (officially), followed in surprisingly short order by Galileo, Newton, the microscope and the discovery of the vacuum through which the mundane heavenly bodies of Galileo's and Newton's universe hurtled, in ways that then laid the groundwork for the first steam engines (worked by vacuum, not positive pressure) and the rest of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was when these gains ceased to be primarily cultural and could now be measured in terms of miles of cloth, horsepower, tons of steel, and so on.