From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Tue Apr 02 2002 - 21:11:10 MST
>
> Jared Diamond asks whether agriculture was worth it:
>
> http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/anthro/learning/lifeways/hg_ag/wors
> t_mistake.html
>
I think this is relatively well-worn ground in Sociology & Anthropology.
Yes, people were way better off in all kinds of ways as hunter-gatherers,
certainly as compared to the average human possibly even now.
What talk of average standard of living hides, of course, is population
changes. You can't really compare the average standard of living of people
in a post-agriculture world to people in a pre-agriculture world; the
average post-agriculture person would never have existed without
agriculture.
I think this is an extremely significant point. Many people seem to regret
the moves to the post-agriculture (and post-industrial, etc etc) society;
but few of them seem to recognise that they owe their lives to it. Jared
Diamond doesn't seem to, certainly.
Humanity has a history of these leaps. Hunter-gatherers became
horticulturalists, horticulturalists became agriculturalists, who became
industrialised, and on to now. At each stage, we are told that people traded
a lower average standard of living for an order of magnitude increase in
population (except note that there is evidence to suggest that average
standards of living have increased in the last century, bucking the trend).
I have this in mind when thinking about the "population problem". Extropians
often deny that there is a problem, which is maybe slightly misguided;
certainly there is a pressure surrounding the world's current population and
projected growth. Not as much as many sources might have one believe, I
think, but still more than nothing.
I wonder whether this comes from an intuitive support by Extropians for more
people, which is something I fully support. The more I've read about and
thought about the "population problem", the less I've been able to find any
way to justify restriction of population. Go into the "overpopulated" future
and hand-pick 9 of 10 people to remove from existence; that's what a policy
of population restriction does by implication (and it's what Jared Diamond
must be able to do, by extension, in the present, except his ratio is
something like 99 from 100). I guess if you follow a philosophy derived from
humanism, you must come to the conclusion that people (sentients and
potential sentients) are the primary objects in your philosophy. When can
your philosophy direct you to limit their numbers (ie: cause some potential
people to never exist) to achieve some other end? This is what Eliezer
refers to as subgoals stomping on supergoals.
When I think of increasing population, I say Bring it on! Population
pressure drives technological progress, and I do think we may be on the
verge of technologies that can help us escape this gross-pop vs
living-standard tradeoff. Oddly enough, I think that the hunter-gatherer
lifestyle, in an abstract form, would suit libertarians rather well, and
certainly seems to be highly suited to an individualist philosophy (although
bear in mind that hunter-gatherers actually experience a high degree of
social coercion). Maybe we'll re-achieve the high tech version of a h-g
lifestyle; space based lifeforms falling across the universe, hunting matter
and gathering energy.
I'd love to see a world (universe!) where we could increase population by
orders of magnitude, and actually increase the average standard of living as
well. We (humanity) can probably begin doing that within a present human
lifespan; astounding!
What a stupid time to be deploring agriculture.
Emlyn
(the far-flung future pressure for space-based sentients to band together in
competition for resources, in a loose analogue of the agricultural
revolution, is a subject for another post...)
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