Everybody loves to hate on farmers, and I don’t disagree, but I think they’re often ignoring a crucial question: was farming much more stable than foraging? I think you should discount farmers’ greater misery by looking at the overall rates of death in each civilization—it’s possible that doing so would make farmers look better.
Which life would you prefer:
“Certain Poverty”: You are born into a Malthusian world of poverty and hard labor, earning barely subsistence wages from your tiny plot of farmland.
“Death or Riches”: You are born just before the Black Death -- 50% chance that you die in early childhood, 50% chance that you grow up the proud owner of TWO plots of farmland and thus your lifelong wages are comfortably 2x the subsistence level. If you survive the plague, you still have to work hard for most of your life, but you can relax a bit—you have a buffer against emergencies, and you don’t have to constantly work yourself to the bone fighting for every scrap.
Clearly it’s a moral philosophy question—people who really dislike suffering might prefer to choose the “death or riches” option compared to the “certain poverty” option. Personally I might go for “certain poverty”. Intelligent people differ and I’m not sure which option is correct. But IMO it would be silly to just compare the rich survivors from “death or riches” to the population of “certain poverty”, since that comparison is ignoring the biggest drawback of “death or riches”—the fact that half of them died as children! “Dead men tell no tales”, and all that.
If overall death rates are higher in forager societies than in farmer societies, that might indicate that forager lifestyles are more like “Death or Riches”, while farmer lifestyles are like “Certain Poverty”. People debate rates of violence and war, but I’m also talking about:
accidents (stuff like “got bitten by a venomous snake and died” or “broke my leg in a fall, now I’m crippled for life and it might get infected” seems more likely in forager lifestyles)
disease (farmers famously die from epic plagues like smallpox; this is probably way higher than the forager burden of disease which comes more from malaria and weird parasites and STDs and stuff.)
famine (both farmers and foragers are very vulnerable to having a bad year when all the food runs out and everyone just dies… this is more famous as a farmer problem, but I wonder if the foragers actually have it worse, with little villages blipping out all the time. Isn’t the relative stability of farming yields the very thing that allowed it to spread across the world and take over as the dominant lifestyle?)
Of course, there’s a good chance that a full analysis of the above would just make the farmers look even worse than they already do (they were more miserable AND they had higher death rates), perhaps because infectious disease just overwhelms all the other factors. But if the analysis indicates that farming is a more stable life than foraging, I think that would be a big point in favor of farming, since that would mean that many people would choose a safer farming life even if it meant enduring more misery.
Everybody loves to hate on farmers, and I don’t disagree, but I think they’re often ignoring a crucial question: was farming much more stable than foraging? I think you should discount farmers’ greater misery by looking at the overall rates of death in each civilization—it’s possible that doing so would make farmers look better.
Which life would you prefer:
“Certain Poverty”: You are born into a Malthusian world of poverty and hard labor, earning barely subsistence wages from your tiny plot of farmland.
“Death or Riches”: You are born just before the Black Death -- 50% chance that you die in early childhood, 50% chance that you grow up the proud owner of TWO plots of farmland and thus your lifelong wages are comfortably 2x the subsistence level. If you survive the plague, you still have to work hard for most of your life, but you can relax a bit—you have a buffer against emergencies, and you don’t have to constantly work yourself to the bone fighting for every scrap.
Clearly it’s a moral philosophy question—people who really dislike suffering might prefer to choose the “death or riches” option compared to the “certain poverty” option. Personally I might go for “certain poverty”. Intelligent people differ and I’m not sure which option is correct. But IMO it would be silly to just compare the rich survivors from “death or riches” to the population of “certain poverty”, since that comparison is ignoring the biggest drawback of “death or riches”—the fact that half of them died as children! “Dead men tell no tales”, and all that.
If overall death rates are higher in forager societies than in farmer societies, that might indicate that forager lifestyles are more like “Death or Riches”, while farmer lifestyles are like “Certain Poverty”. People debate rates of violence and war, but I’m also talking about:
accidents (stuff like “got bitten by a venomous snake and died” or “broke my leg in a fall, now I’m crippled for life and it might get infected” seems more likely in forager lifestyles)
disease (farmers famously die from epic plagues like smallpox; this is probably way higher than the forager burden of disease which comes more from malaria and weird parasites and STDs and stuff.)
famine (both farmers and foragers are very vulnerable to having a bad year when all the food runs out and everyone just dies… this is more famous as a farmer problem, but I wonder if the foragers actually have it worse, with little villages blipping out all the time. Isn’t the relative stability of farming yields the very thing that allowed it to spread across the world and take over as the dominant lifestyle?)
Of course, there’s a good chance that a full analysis of the above would just make the farmers look even worse than they already do (they were more miserable AND they had higher death rates), perhaps because infectious disease just overwhelms all the other factors. But if the analysis indicates that farming is a more stable life than foraging, I think that would be a big point in favor of farming, since that would mean that many people would choose a safer farming life even if it meant enduring more misery.