[joconde]

>> We made a wrong turn a very long time ago

> What, inventing agriculture? Certainly some think that.

Are there really people who believe that? I've only read it in Sapiens by YN Harari, and it sounded like a ridiculous idea written to provoke thought, not an actual opinion. "Yes, hunter-gatherers could starve on a bad year, and they sometimes got eaten by tigers, but look at how un-alienated they were!"

The author probably wouldn't have been to write his book or share these thoughts to more than 30 people without the invention of agriculture...

[throwaway34241]

> I've only read it in Sapiens by YN Harari, and it sounded like a ridiculous idea written to provoke thought, not an actual opinion. "Yes, hunter-gatherers could starve on a bad year, and they sometimes got eaten by tigers, but look at how un-alienated they were!"

The argument I saw put more emphasis on things like nutritional deficiencies after the switch [1], reflected in average male height going from 5'9" to 5'3". Obviously in the long run agriculture became very efficient, but he makes a reasonable case that in the short run individual quality of life went downhill, with the main advantage being reaching higher population densities before being at the limit of the food supply, and so winning any conflicts with hunter-gatherer societies.

[1] http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

[dragonwriter]

The idea, at least as I’ve seen it a number of places, wasn’t that agriculture was a long-run bad idea, but that for a very long time it decreased the median quality of life (while also greatly reducing volatility in the quality of life for most people, and enabling extraordinary improvements in the quality of life for – again, for a very long time – an extremely narrow elite.)