Even modern-day hunter-gatherers, who in the nature of things don’t inhabit the most promising land, work shorter hours and enjoy happier lifestyles than do the poorest of modern-day subsistence farmers. The problem with the hunter-gatherer lifestyle wasn’t — and isn’t — that it’s too labor intensive, it’s that it was too land-intensive. A hunter-gatherer lifestyle can only support a small number of people on a given parcel of land. If people somewhere start engaging in a more settled lifestyle, what happens is that population density can go way up. That facilitates the division of labor and the creation of specialized warrior castes and so forth. Consequently, a settled society will probably be able to conquer a hunter-gatherer population and/or drive them off their land. Thus, once this quality-of-life-destroying innovation comes into being it tends to spread inexorably. The higher level of inequality agriculture permits allows some people to be better-off than any hunter-gatherer, but average living standards plummet even as pure quantity of people alive goes way up, a la Derek Parfit’s repugnant conclusion. It’s only with the coming of the industrial revolution that societies with higher average quality-of-life than those enjoyed by hunter-gatherers come into existence. And over time, that circle of beneficiaries of industrialization has tended to spread.Back in the early 90s it was hunter-gatherer nomad societies that were seen as sort of problematically violent and patriarchal, and the early agricultural societies that were settled, peaceful, and (perhaps) matriarchal. Now we're back to the noble savage approach to hunting societies that shoot deer by day and barbecue at night. As long as they can trade with the agriculturalists for beer, it's a redneck's backwoods paradise.
Otherwise it's a pretty persuasive argument. I'm just not sure I buy into the idea that you can measure quality of life and argue that one group is happier than another, or that the average quality of life is better for one group than another. Were the Vikings happier than the Egyptians? Were the Mongols better off than the Incans? Who can say?
My other issue is that we had the happy-go-lucky hunting lifestyle for hundreds of thousands of years. Basically for as long as we've existed as homo sapiens sapiens. But it's only in the last 10,000 years that we've had art, architecture, myth, literature, technology, etc., etc., all the way up to and including the computer I'm currently typing on. So how do we measure history against pre-history? Were people really better off before the invention of bread, football, and books?
Finally, Parfit's "repugnant conclusion" is just bizarre. He basically argues that it's better to be born than to not be born (pro-life) and therefore, larger populations are always preferable to smaller ones, even if it means that the a very large population is very poor and miserable and that a smaller population is better off and happy. So forget population control, forget education, forget medicine, forget technical advances, forget the environment, forget resource management, forget the water supply, forget global warming. What matters, according to this argument, is that every child not born, is a net social, moral, and ethical loss.
In other words, it's better to exist as gray goo than to be nothing at all.
But what I really think I see here is not a real representation of the historical past, but a desire for something better and different that might relieve the disastisfaction of our post-industrial now. It's a common temptation to want to escape the difficulties and limitations of our complex society for something simpler, something more pastoral, something more back to basics. In the industrial age, the ideal escape was back to the simplicities of the village and the farm. Now in the in the information age, we seem to be fantasizing about the happiness of pre-literature, pre-technological life, when all you needed to know was where the bison were and how to count 1, 2, or many.
