Re: High Technology of the Past

From: Emlyn (emlyn@one.net.au)
Date: Wed Dec 27 2000 - 02:59:10 MST


----- Original Message -----
From: "Damien Broderick" <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2000 10:52 AM
Subject: Re: High Technology of the Past

> At 11:29 AM 27/12/00 +0930, Emmers wrote:
>
> >Hunter gatherers apparently spent about 2 hours a day in work-like
(staying
> >alive related) activity, and from there it's gone downhill
>
> Emlyn, this is *ridiculous*.

OK, I've got a book in front of me... "Macrosociology" (3rd ed), Stephen K
Sanderson, 1995. Here's an OCRd passage (I think I've caught all the
boo-boos), beginning page 508:

----
The Quantity and Quality of Work
There is little doubt that the quantity of work has increased and its
quality has deteriorated over the past 10,000 years. Hunter-gatherers seem
to work less and enjoy more leisure time than the members of all other types
of societies. Evidence from contemporary hunter-gatherer societies indicates
that they strongly resist advancing their technology because they realize
this will bring increases in their workload. The members of horticultural
societies do indeed appear to work somewhat harder and longer than people in
hunting and gathering societies. But, as with the standard of living, the
truly marked change seems to be associated with the emergence of agrarian
societies. The workload in agrarian societies is markedly greater than in
all previous forms of preindustrial society. In the modern world, work
levels are still very high in both the industrialized countries and the
Third World nations. The average member of an industrial society may spend
on the order of 60 hours a week in subsistence activities, if we add to the
40 hours per week spent earning a living the time spent shopping for food
and preparing it, as well as the time spent maintaining a household. This is
about three to four times the average weekly workload of many
hunter-gatherers. The average Third World worker probably spends
considerably more time than this in all subsistence activities.
A basic assumption of the preceding discussion is that people seem to obey
what has been called a "Law of Least Effort" (Zipf, 1965; Harris, 1979).
This law holds that, other things being equal, people prefer to accomplish
activities with a minimum amount of energy expenditure. This seems to be a
basic feature of human nature. Thus, increasing the workload is something
people normally wish to avoid. Under what conditions will people work harder
and longer than would otherwise be the case? There are perhaps three basic
reasons why people will increase their energy expenditure: political
compulsion, economic necessity, and psychological conditioning. People will
work harder and longer when other people gain power over them and force them
to increase their workload. They will also increase their work activities if
compelled by a declining standard of living to intensify their productive
efforts. Finally, people can be conditioned to believe that hard work is a
moral virtue, laziness a moral defect (this idea has been basic to the
Protestant work ethic of Western civilization in recent centuries). The
first two of these have been the leading causes of the intensification of
the workload over the past several millennia.
---
> Ignore the fact that the ancient affordances
> of the hunter gatherer world have vanished (plenty of game roaming free
for
> the taking, etc). If you were prepared to do without antibiotics,
> compressed durable information sources, protection from the naked elements
> and other toey hunter gatherers, etc, how much time do you suppose it
would
> take a halfway intelligent person nowadays to live at the subsistence
level
> of a stone age d00D? Squat in an abandoned house or office, scrounge food
> from bins or a handout center? Your communal quality of life wouldn't be
> much chop, because you'd find yourself sharing digs with chronic
> schizophrenics and the like, but it wouldn't take you no two hours a day,
> I'd reckon, especially if you can get away with wearing a loincloth and
> didn't mind your teeth falling out.
>
> Damien Broderick
>
Note that I didn't say anything about the quality of life, and I don't
suggest that you could live that way now.. well, actually some people do in
some remote corners of the globe, but we can't do it. People haven't adapted
increasing levels of tech (hunter-gatherer -> horticulturist -> agrarian ->
...) until forced to, because they generally result in more work per
individual. What they also do, however, is allow more people to live off
less land, which is good as populations rise; at a given density of
population, there is a minimum level of tech (and minimum amount of work)
required which will maximise your standard of living relative to others.
However, often the relative standard of living declined also as tech
increased; compare a hunter gatherer (not schizo junkies in squats) to an
agrarian serf. Compared to a hunter gatherer, an agrarian serf has much
worse health and life expectancy, for instance.
These days things might be turning around - see life expectancy for
instance. However, we shouldn't take us westerners as the model; at least
three quarters of the worlds people live in underdeveloped nations. Here's a
picture of the quality of life in such a country, written in the 60s when
the gap between developed and underdeveloped nations was not so large; we
are to imagine a typical american family, then go through the process of
reducing them to a typical third world family:
----
We begin by invading the house of our imaginary American family to strip it
of its furniture. Everything goes: beds, chairs, tables, television set,
lamps. We will leave the family with a few old blankets, a kitchen table, a
wooden chair. Along with the bureaus go the clothes. Each member of the
family may keep in his "wardrobe" his oldest suit or dress, a shirt or
blouse. We will permit a pair of shoes to the head of the family, but none
for the wife or children.
We move into the kitchen. The appliances have already been taken out, so we
turn to the cupboards and larder. The box of matches may stay, a small bag
of flour, some sugar and salt. A few moldy potatoes, already in the garbage
can, must be hastily rescued, for they will provide much of tonight's meal.
We will leave a handful of onions, and a dish of dried beans. All the rest
we take away: the meat, the fresh vegetables, the canned goods, the
crackers, the candy.
Now we have stripped the house: the bathroom has been dismantled, the
running water shut off, the electric wires taken out. Next we take away the
house. The family can move to the toolshed. It is crowded, but much better
than the situation in Hong Kong, where (a United Nations report tells us)
"it is not uncommon for a family of four or more to live in a bedspace, that
is, on a bunk bed and the space it occupies-sometimes in two or three
tiers-their only privacy provided by curtains."
But we have only begun. All the other houses in the neighborhood have also
been removed; our suburb has become a shantytown. Still, our family is
fortunate to have a shelter; 250,000 people in Calcutta have none at all and
simply live in the streets. Our family is now about on a par with the city
of Cali in Colombia, where, an official of the World Bank writes, "on a
hillside alone, the slum population is estimated at 40,000-without water,
sanitation, or electric light. And not all the poor of Cali are as fortunate
as that. Others have built their shacks near the city on land which lies
beneath the flood mark. To these people the immediate environment is the
open sewer of the city, a sewer which flows through their huts when the
river rises."
And still we have not reduced our American family to the level at which life
is lived in the greatest part of the globe. Communication must go next. No
more newspapers, magazines, books-not that they are missed, since we must
take away our family's literacy as well. Instead, in our shantytown we will
allow one radio. In India the national average of radio ownership is one per
250 people, but since the majority of radios is owned by city dwellers, our
allowance is fairly generous.
Now government services must go. No more postman, no more fireman. There is
a school, but it is three miles away and consists of two classrooms. They
are not too overcrowded since only half the children in the neighborhood go
to school. There are, of course, no hospitals or doctors nearby. The nearest
clinic is ten miles away and is tended by a midwife. It can be reached by
bicycle, provided that the family has a bicycle, which is unlikely. Or one
can go by bus-not always inside, but there is usually room on top.
Finally, money. We will allow our family a cash hoard of five dollars. This
will prevent our breadwinner from experiencing the trag edy of an Iranian
peasant who went blind because he could not raise the $3.94 which he
mistakenly thought he needed to secure admission to a hospital where he
could have been cured.
Meanwhile the head of our family must earn his keep. As a peasant cultivator
with three acres to tend, he may raise the equivalent of $100 to $300 worth
of crops a year. If he is a tenant farmer, which is more than likely, a
third or so of his crop will go to his landlord, and probably another 10
percent to the local moneylender. But there will be enough to eat. Or almost
enough. The human body requires an input of at least 2,000 calories to
replenish the energy consumed by its living cells. If our displaced American
fares no better than an Indian peasant, he will average a replenishment of
no more than 1,700-1,900 calories. His body, like any insufficiently fueled
machine, will run down. That is one reason why life expectancy at birth in
India today averages less than forty years.
But children may help. If they are fortunate, they may find work and thus
earn some cash to supplement the family's income. For example, they may be
employed as are children in Hyderabad, Pakistan, sealing the ends of bangles
over a small kerosene flame, a simple task which can be done at home. To be
sure, the pay is small: eight annas@about ten cents-for sealing bangles.
That is, eight annas per gross of bangles. And if they cannot find work?
Well, they can scavenge, as do the children in Iran who in times of hunger
search for the undigested oats in the droppings of horses.
And so we have brought our typical American family down to the very bottom
of the human scale. It is, however, a bottom in which we can find, give or
take a hundred million souls, at least a billion people. of the remaining
billion in the backward areas, most are slightly better off, but not much
so; a few are comfortable; a handful rich.
Of course, this is only an impression of life in the underdeveloped lands.
It is not life itself. There is still lacking the things that
underdevelopment gives as well as those it takes away: the urinous smell of
poverty, the display of disease, the flies, the open sewers. And there is
lacking, too, a softening sense of familiarity. Even in a charnel house life
has its passions and pleasures. A tableau, shocking to American eyes, is
less shocking to eyes that have never known any other. But it gives one a
general idea. It begins to add pictures of reality to the statistics by
which underdevelopment is ordinarily measured. When we are told that half
the world's population enjoys a standard of living "less than $100 a year,"
this is what the figures mean.
---
(Robert L Heilbroner, 1963, "The Great Ascent: The Struggle for Economic
Development in Our Time")
Emlyn
(running my new scanner at warp 6)


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