This article seems to be a delusion based on the premise that 'primitive' people don't feel pain and sadness at the loss of their loved ones. And hence aren't saddened by the high infant and maternal mortality.
The fatal flaw is the assumption that he thinks he knows someone else's thoughts and feelings. It's a bizarre thought experiment void of any relevance to the modern world.
Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied.
Except that hunter-gatherer tribes routinely starved during lean periods. As much as the author pines for a golden age, it simply didn't exist.
This fellow should read more books on paleoanthropology and fewer on philosophy.
Marshall Sahlins is one of the most well respected anthropologists in the field, the context of the book "Stone Age Economics" was to refute the popular misconceptions of hunter gatherers at the time (1960s-1970s) within the field. This book does not have much to do with modern theories within the field on hunter gatherers. It's usually added to introductory anthropology books to refute commonly held notions about hunter gatherers that students may have.
The text reminded me of the foreword to Gibbon's history of the Roman Empire. Gibbon complains about esteemed historians who quote other esteemed historians, but never go to the original sources or collect raw data.
A few hunter-gatherer peoples still exist and have been observed by anthropoligists. Are those peoples actually healthier and and have lower mortality than modern Andorrans? (I'm just picking a country at random here.) Or is there some reason to believe that they would have been healthier, if the modern world did not exist?
He didn't claim lower mortality, nor that they wanted it. We assume living long is important, but some people value their lives less than others, just as some value their possessions less. It's the nature of tribalism to not value your life much. So I wouldn't count high mortality rates as "bad" any more than low possession counts.
Doubtful. The hunter-gatherer tribes that we encounter are (probably) fitter than average on account of remaining extant into the 21st century, and even those don't live long past their contact with industrial people.
Population is the first issue. Pre-industrial life probably wasn't as horrible as some make it out to be, with the life expectancy, once one survived childbirth, closer to 55 than 20. (The 20-30 figure included infant mortality.) However, hunter-gatherer lifestyles don't support a high population. That means, as populations increase and tribes branch out and split, but inevitably people run out of room, war. In the "original affluent society" of pre-agricultural humanity, the major wars of nations didn't happen, but low-level tribal wars caused a death rate of about 0.5% per year. That's 8 times the murder rate in Flint, Michigan, the most dangerous city in the US as of now.
Agricultural society can support more people per unit of land. That also means that they will have more soldiers and conquer or assimilate the hunter-gatherers. (Nomadic raiders, however, will typically be fitter and militarily superior... but their existence is predicated on that of the agricultural people, so that doesn't scale either.)
So, ultimately the pre-agricultural "affluent society" was one with a high rate of violence and not much stability, and it got wiped out pretty handily by agricultural (or industrialized) neighbors. All that said, it is correct to note that the standard of living for the average person did not improve much between the Stone Age and (arguably) approximately 1800 AD. Economic growth existed, but it was gobbled up by population growth. In some ways, life got better each century and, in others, it got worse, but for the average person there wasn't much progress from the neolithic up into modernity and, with the psychiatric calamity of workplace Taylorism, people are arguably even unhappier than they were in all of those societies where life was nasty, brutish, and short. So, subjectively, I think the argument is strong for a lack of progress (that is, in 2014, entirely the fault of society's poor leadership). People are richer now and live longer, but still mostly miserable. That said, every phase of society was an inevitable consequence of the former and "the original affluent society" would never have made it, couldn't possibly scale up to our current population of 7 billion, and had a rate of violent death that we'd consider appalling.
What I think has changed is the nature of work and our demands of it. In primitive societies, "work hours" didn't make sense because people hunted, gathered, fought, cooked, and built shelters as needed. There was a heterogeneity to it. Modern work is psychological monoculture, with work quality apportioned according to social status and rank, which means that it's mental torture (extreme boredom) to be of low status. Primitive "work" (which wasn't done in measured hours) had horizontal heterogeneity, whereas in modern society the only antidote to crushing boredom is vertical growth, leading to a low-level and generally nonviolent, but also inescapable, sense of competition and stress. Pre-agricultural life had its flaws and people had good reasons to escape it (and, one should note, the transition to agriculture tended to unfold over thousands of years in most societies, with intermediate states of some hunting/gathering and some agriculture) but it was probably less boring than the average desk job today.
1. "To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
2. "There are two possible courses to affluence. Wants may be "easily satisfied" either by producing much or desiring little."
Following this definition, it's easy to accept hunters are affluent if it can be shown hunter-gatherer tribes worked as needed and desired nothing.
The article makes no mention of whether this kind of society is sustainable over the long run, only that this kind of society, where it exists, is affluent.
I like the thought - to perpetually chase the limitless with the limited does sound like a fool's undertaking.
Six key variables explain three-quarters of the variation in annual national average scores over time and among countries. These six factors include: real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, freedom from corruption, and generosity.
"with the psychiatric calamity of workplace Taylorism, people are arguably even unhappier than they were in all of those societies where life was nasty, brutish, and short."
This is a fantastic quote.
Frederik Taylor is a daunting historical character but applying his methods to all aspects of organizing most of adult life in the industrial nations is just incredibly ... unimaginative and intellectually impoverished.
I'm not sure though, would I call the splitting work to simple sub level tasks Fordism or Taylorism, though, and which one causes more anguish: dividing the work to boring tasks (by Ford) or just trying to formalize the individuals work to a level of trivial minutiae and measuring everything (by Taylor) leading asymptotically to micromanagment at all scales. (I'm exaggerating of course.)
Based on my understanding of the history I would say the splitting is very much Ford, but Taylor's methods come to play after we have decided on the division labor, after which the token Taylorist comes to the show with a stopwatch and some silly non-value-adding key performance indicator chart and starts to take time.
Of course, all of this could be applied properly, I think, but somehow this cargo cult "scientification" through arbitrary measurement is a fantastically tenacious facet of the modern society.
The fatal flaw is the assumption that he thinks he knows someone else's thoughts and feelings. It's a bizarre thought experiment void of any relevance to the modern world.