----- 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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