[inglor_cz]

I am not sure if the choice is so binary, but neither am I sure whether you can sustain a reasonable compromise without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.

A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.

I think almost no one would be willing to return, say, to the early 1900s when it comes to medical science and available treatment options.

Things like anti-retroviral therapy and CAR-T are just too nice to have when something otherwise fatal hits you. But that requires top-notch chemistry and biology, which requires top-notch lab equipment and computers, which requires top-notch material science and industry etc.

I am not sure if you can sustain all of this if all the the relevant PhDs work 16 hour workweeks. I am also not sure which parts of the modern economy can be left out to regress to a previous stage of development if you still want to retain the capability to treat cancer with advanced biologicals. The supply chains are just too complex.

Maybe in the age of AI and robots the options are different, but not before.

[toasty228]

> A lot depends on what "in between" actually means.

Smaller local economies/communities like my grandparents had in the 60s don't sound too bad, especially if we keep a few nice things from today. Do you need aliexpress? Fruits shipped form the other side of the planets? Etc. Once everyone has electricity, water, shelter, food and a tight local community were good to go, I'd even argue the "progress" we made since then actually broke some of the core things we require to thrive as humans (purpose, stability, communities,...)

I don't care about medicine that save 0.00001% of the population if the price of it is what we're witnessing today tbh, otherwise there is truly no limits and no arguments to growth at all cost

[inglor_cz]

Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.

You personally may not care about regressing to 19xx medicine, but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.

BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago. United Fruit Company and its banana republics have a long, long (and dirty) history.

[nkrisc]

> Cancer kills about 25 per cent of the population and would kill maybe 35 per cent in absence of modern medicine. Granted, most of its victims are old people.

You have to dig a little deeper with your numbers, because everyone is going to die from something. Deaths from cancer would probably go down without modern medicine because most people wouldn’t be living long enough to die from cancer.

[inglor_cz]

GP seems to prefer the 1960s, which would mean that the "not living enough to die from cancer" would likely be off the table.

[toasty228]

And how many people suffer/die from obesity, diabetes and other lifestyle disease (lookup the main causes of deaths in the US, and their causes) ? All I'm saying is that there is a middle ground between "living in huts made of cow dung and dying at 35" and "75% of your population is obese and die from literal over consumption and lack of physical activity"

> but in a democratic society, I doubt that this would be an attractive policy for voters.

Trump was elected twice, the voters are brain dead cattle anyways

> BTW I believe that "shipping fruit around the world" was already a thing 120+ years ago

At what scale? People could go to the US in 1700 too, it doesn't mean that commercial airlines are sustainable at ANY rate

[inglor_cz]

At scale lucrative enough to stage coups in Latin America. Read up upon this.

Let us not even go deeper to the Age of Sail. Large-scale trade and consumption of sugar, tobacco and cotton fueled slavery operations from Virginia down to Brazil, long before a lightbulb was even a thing.

[Windchaser]

I mean, the better point there would be "we could scale back on our cost of living, if we wanted to". That is what I figured the "we don't have to ship fruit around the world" was trying to get at, even if bananas are actually pretty cost-effective. (Still usually the cheapest fruit in $/lb)

[pjerem]

> without a certain level of societal and economic complexity.

Well, the good news is that organizing societal and economic complexity and living into it is exactly what differentiate us from other species.

[inglor_cz]

OK, true, but the question is: what is the minimum workplace effort of living people that must go into that organizing process? Let us measure it in hours for the sake of simpliticy.

In the extremes, 1 hour weekly is probably too little and 100 hours weekly is excessive. But given how almost the entire world has converged to approx. 40 on average, I'd be surprised if it was very different from 40.

Yes, this may change with robots and AI.