[jrd259]

For a more recent take on this, see James Scott's "Against The Grain". Scott presents evidence from archeology that the early state (at the dawn of state-organized agriculture) had to exert considerable effort to prevent agricultural workers from departing to pursue a hunter-gatherer or pastoralist lifestyle. If you're not an elite, the latter is more pleasant in every way. In other words, most people at the time of the transition to mass agriculture did not consider it an improvement.

Note that Scott's subject is the early state; he does not address the very-long term benefit that arose only after many millennia. He does give some account of how these early states (gradually) prevailed over the alternatives. Nor does he address the other major economic/productive transitions from grain empire to modernity (e.g. industrialization, digitization). That's for some other book.

I should also add the Scott shows that there were cultures with a mixed agriculture/hunter gatherer lifestyle, and that some places moved back and forth for various reasons; and also (in case you've read other word by Diamond) that Scott has a different take on "collapse" of early states: since they were, in general, highly coercive, some (but not all) of what we see now as a collapse were net improvements for the lives of all but the few at the top; they did not (always) include major loss of life, but only appear to be collapses because fewer permanent artifacts were created.