<p>what … that’s a small fraction of the people that are alive today.</p>
<p><em>most</em> people (i.e billions) work to pay for food and shelter and that’s like it i think. right? compared to the hunter and gatherers those people are working more for less.</p>
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<p>I’ll let this one slide.</p>
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<p>But you have to provide a source for this one.</p>
<p>If you want to work 5 hours a day somewhere in the Amazonian rain forest, be my guest. However, I am curious as to why you’d want this, unless of course you have some sort of antipathy to a modern home with luxurious amenities, to all of the comforts of modern living.</p>
<p>You can work those hours in Western civilization and have plenty of money to live on, but your “leisure time” will not be as exciting as mine, I guarantee that.</p>
<p>@IceQube, The noble savage is a literary concept, nothing more. If you think that modern civilization is worse off than the Bushmen in Botswana, I think you’re high… -ly deluded. Do we now, for the first time ever, have the power to actually kill every living thing on the surface of this planet? Yes. Is this a likely outcome? No.</p>
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<p>The overwhelming number of people with jobs that have 40 hour workweeks seems evidence enough to me. People like to complain about working. They have a choice to work part-time. They choose not to. In face, many people decide to work overtime.</p>
<p>@IceQube, Just curious, how many people do you know that have (or had) a respiratory disease, or respiratory symptoms as a result of the levels of SO2 and other pollutants in the atmosphere?</p>
<p>It’s not that we’re not going down without a fight, it’s that we’re way better at fixing our problems than you realize, and we’re getting better at it all the time. There simply will not be a fight.</p>
<p>how much people work isn’t determined by how much people want to work. the fact that so many people work x hours a week isn’t evidence of their desire to work x hours a week.</p>
<p>don’t you agree that people will work however long they have to get enough currency to pay for basic living expenses? Black American slaves didn’t work so much for so little because they wanted to, no, they were born into a society where they <em>had</em> to work a lot of survive. It’s not clear to me that the same thing isn’t going on today for a large % of the population - albeit on a less severe, less obvious scale.</p>
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<p>First, you have to get out of that mindset: the one that decides what expenses are “basic” or “necessary” for “living” with “dignity.” </p>
<p>If you want to see what I mean, I’ll give you an illustration. </p>
<p>If someone can live in a backwater state in a one-room sublet apartment for $150 a month, is a mobile home rental that costs $200 a month a luxury? How about a sublet with a private bathroom for an extra $75? If someone can live on rice, water, and limes (to prevent scurvy) for $25 a month, are beans a luxury? </p>
<p>I will also spoil something for you. Believe it or not, there are no laws against moving to a one-room sublet in Ohio, getting a part-time restaurant job, and living on Top Ramen and things you steal from the kitchen of the restaurant at which you work. You can also bike to work instead of drive, making a car a luxury and not at all “basic.” In fact, you can walk!</p>
<p>Judging by the fact that I have no intention of doing this, because 25 hours a week and a “harder” life allow me all sorts of so-called luxuries, and judging by the fact that there are many, many, many people who do not choose to do that very possible thing, I will infer that people enjoy giving some things up for luxuries like cars, eating out, going to the movies, and owning mobile homes. </p>
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<p>Please, when you are a slave to a person other than yourself, come back to me. For now, you are a slave to your own desires and purchases — which many people call “needs” so that others will give them money — and they are yours to control in the first place!</p>
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<p>well why people who study existential risk to humanity are most fearful for our future is not because they feel we don’t have the ability to solve the problems we know about. No, they think problems such as the declining environment, natural disasters, etc., we will be able to get under control. The fear comes from the problems that they believe we will not be able to predict - unknown, unknowns - which will post sudden risks we are not prepared to deal with…</p>
<p>of course, all these threats come from new things, so from technological developments. some foreseeable candidates for such threats include advanced biotechnology (bioweapons, nanotechnology) and perhaps most worrisome, advanced (smarter than human) artificial intelligence, among other things. </p>
<p>anyway that is just seems to be the consensus of the very intelligent people who have wrote books/papers about existential risk to humanity. All agree that there is probably a greater than 15% chance of humans going extinct this century.</p>
<p>When I have to wake up early in the morning to go to school, I wish that I am a hunter gatherer. When I come home from school, I am glad that I live in this time. We don’t need to worry about predators for most of time.</p>
<p>jimbo I tried to make this point before… </p>
<p>most (or at least a large percentage) of those who work 40 hours/week are getting objectively less ‘goods’ than the hunter and gatherers that lived before us. </p>
<p>this is probably true of hundreds of millions of people in China, don’t you think? most people are not smart and wealthy enough to go to college and get a degree and a higher paying job, which they could subsist on by working part-time.</p>
<p>The jobs that are available to a significant amount of people who are alive today do not ‘pay’ as well as the jobs available to our ancestors. they require longer hours for the same quality food/shelter.</p>
<p>that has to be true, doesn’t it?</p>
<p>Jimbo: Your future employer will love you.</p>
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<p>hmm my mindset is that what people want from money (or from working) is determined by biological instincts and that person’s environment (which includes whatever social/cultural pressures exist in it). </p>
<p>in the absence of any ‘society’ for instance people still want food and sex, but they don’t want cars and pretty clothes. </p>
<p>anyway, quality of life is of course subjective. I’m not saying that because our ancestors worked less than us that it proves they had higher-quality lives (as measured by their contentment/happiness or whatever). But I do think that it should cast some doubt on the idea that life has only got better on the average or something like that. or that it has gotten better on the average in all areas of life.</p>
<p>agrarian societies didn’t replace hunter and gatherer societies because the people in them had higher quality lives. They replaced them because they were more powerful and able to out-compete the hunter and gatherer groups.</p>
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<p>I can see the bestseller now:</p>
<p>Calm Down: Nothing is Going to Happen
Intelligent scientist Professor X pens an expos</p>
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<p>Tell it to your cell phone.</p>
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<p>You can’t just jump from hunter-gatherer to post-industrial in a day. The Chinese middle class will outnumber our middle class in a decade, and with that will come better working conditions that will percolate down to the lower echelons, as well as some much-needed socio-political reform.</p>
<p>Also, you fail to understand: people in China choose to move to cities. Their ancestors chose to give up hunting and gathering. The advantage, though it may not be clear to us pampered fourth generation post industrialists, is clear to them.</p>
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<p>The first agrarian was a former hunter-gatherer.</p>
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<p>I don’t know. I can be pretty combative.</p>
<p>^ aah I see :)</p>
<p>What did you see? Lol. ???</p>
<p>@enfieldacademy, We have better quality food and shelter than our ancestors, and our ancestors didn’t drive cars. I live in a small city in Texas. At my school, an upperclassman without a car is a rarity. By the beginning of sophomore year, I had bought a car with my own money, and I didn’t even have my license yet. I come from a very poor family, but we’re no longer seemingly poor when you compare us to even the most wealthy neolithic families. </p>
<p>I find it incredible that you would compare the quality of life of this decade to that of our ancestors in such a way as to call them both equal. You can work for 3 hours a day and survive. I can work for 8 and live. That’s the difference. That’s why we’re not all subsistence farmers anymore, because we’re not trying to subsist, we’re flourishing. </p>
<p>These are the most basic concepts you’re taught in a class such as an AP history. Specialization of labor, markets generating wealth, humanity pulling itself out of the darkness, into the warm lights of modernity, this is such a beautiful thing.</p>
<p>At this point, I’m fairly certain that you’re trolling, but in the case that you are being genuine, I have mixed feelings of disgust and pity toward you.</p>
<p>I’ll have to make a response to your thoughts on the impending doom of humanity later, or else I’m just going to end up making a joke about a James Bond villain and Friedrich Nietzsche to illustrate how laughable I think it is.</p>
<p>EDIT: Sorry to all, Jimbo covered it all well and put me to shame.</p>
<p>jimbo, people choose things for reasons. </p>
<p>saying ‘no, no, it can’t be a bad thing, many people chose it’ ignores why they chose what they did. </p>
<p>So, why did Chinese farmers people move to cities? </p>
<p>If the answer is '‘life kept getting better, and cities was where it was the best’ then, okay, they chose it. But was that the case?</p>
<p>my impression is that individual farmers were out-competed by growing farming industries, and that they had no choice but to try to improve their living conditions somehow so they wouldn’t starve. my impression is that farming became less profitable - life got worse - so they were forced to change their lives. </p>
<p>I don’t think that is the story behind every Chinese families’ migration to a city, but i think it is probably a pretty accurate story for a high % of them.</p>
<p>If that is why they ‘chose’ to move to cities, then I would question whether it was such a free ‘choice’ as the word ‘chose’ implies.</p>
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<p>Now, again. Why did people choose to live in Agrarian societies as opposed to hunter and gatherer ones when farming was discovered and implemented?</p>
<p>If the answer is hunter and gatherers became agrarians because they tested out agrarianism and they liked it more, then, okay, I am fine with saying it was a choice.</p>
<p>But what it the agrarian societies were able to sustain more people and so were more powerful. And what they used this power to dominate the hunter and gatherer tribes they came across, steal their food, there things, enslave them.</p>
<p>Then calling it a ‘choice’ does not seem really fair. </p>
<p>research indicates that people’s health declined when they become agrarians due to the inferior diet. homo sapiens’ brain-size and height were reduced quite dramatically around 10k years ago. why would people choose a lifestyle that made them less healthy?</p>
<p>maybe the answer really is that agrarianism won out because the agrarian societies were more powerful, not because the people in them had higher-quality-lives. don’t you think an answer close to that is a possibility?</p>
<p>I doubt you know the history well enough to argue either of these things one way or the other. I think you may have misconceptions about how much of a choice these life-style changes really were for the people who made them.</p>
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<p>if you believe that story of history very dearly, which it seems you do, of humanity and how we’ve changed, than I can see why you would be offended by someone not believing that story. someone who doesn’t believe that story sounds ungrateful doesn’t he.</p>
<p>I would ask what makes you so sure that the stories you’ve been told are the right ones though.</p>
<p>plenty of people in North Korea appreciate their country, their leader, and so on. they vilify others who dissent, who say no, our country is not what you think it is, etc. of course, they’ve been told stories that are not true. maybe the ones you’ve been told are likewise not true.</p>