Against the Grain
If a life of foraging is really better than a life of farm labor, why wouldn’t humanity find a path back from agriculture to hunting and gathering? The best guess is that early farm settlements faced a one-way demographic trap. Here is a simple illustration: Suppose that the first generation of farmers got a boost from farming. Instead of eating tw
... See moreJeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
Farming, after all, replaces natural ecosystems with human-made ecosystems that are engineered to yield far more foodstuffs per unit area. The plant and animal species not cultivated on farms are the sure losers, as humanity encroaches on the habitats of other species that are not directly conducive to food production or that compete directly with
... See moreJeffrey D. Sachs • The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions
Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ush
... See moreDavid Graeber • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so, there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and our a... See more