- Even more variety of fresh, healthy fruits, vegetables, and meats than before (especially in winter)

- Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and art)

- Vastly lower mortality (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself? Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead)

The way I look at it, agriculture made things way worse... until we advanced far enough to get way, way better.

And even if you argue there are some populations in developing countries which are still worse-off, it's hard to believe that's going to last long as economic development progresses.

By Diamond's reasoning, we could live far longer on this planet if we lived like chimpanzees, scavenging what we could from the natural bounty of the land without bending it to our will. But I don't particularly want to be a chimp. Couldn't his argument be reframed as "the worst mistake in the history of the world is the human race"?

"Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place."

—Ben Franklin

Note that Scott's subject is the early state; he does not address the very-long term benefit that arose only after many millennia. He does give some account of how these early states (gradually) prevailed over the alternatives. Nor does he address the other major economic/productive transitions from grain empire to modernity (e.g. industrialization, digitization). That's for some other book.

I should also add the Scott shows that there were cultures with a mixed agriculture/hunter gatherer lifestyle, and that some places moved back and forth for various reasons; and also (in case you've read other word by Diamond) that Scott has a different take on "collapse" of early states: since they were, in general, highly coercive, some (but not all) of what we see now as a collapse were net improvements for the lives of all but the few at the top; they did not (always) include major loss of life, but only appear to be collapses because fewer permanent artifacts were created.

Also, I'm guessing from the style and topic this is the same Jared Diamond who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel? Particularly the clock idea I believe is repeated there.

It's also curious to note that this copy seems to have been OCRed, given that there's at least one occurrence of "fanners" instead of "farmers".

Agriculture led to industrialization. When someone can make guns, and when others can't... Someone is getting conquered.

"One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"

Places where there is easy access to food have never evolved any technological progress and the societies are still messed up, because they never had to understand co-operation and just have tribalism of some sort. Just compare africa (probably the richest country in resources) with eg. europe.

What a stupid article.

But we're not looking at the free time of only farmers, but of society as a whole, thanks to specialisation and division of labour. Farmers produce food, others produce other goods and service and trade them for food. Economics 101: everyone is better off and more efficient because they do whatever they have a comparative advantage at.

Maybe, it is unfair to call it a mistake without knowing what life would have been at this point in time (or say in future.).

TL;DR: agriculture.

The funny thing about that argument is that chimpanzees, and all other creatures, exist in some kind of hierarchy, usually involving sex and power. His premise is simply wrong.

For a more convincing argument along these lines, see Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_%28novel%29?wprov=sf...

It posits that, amongst other things, agriculture (food supply) is allowing us to violate laws of nature by overextending population beyond what is sustainable. Of course, you can't violate a scientific law, so the metaphor used in the book is akin to a plane careening towards the ground and everyone claiming they took off and flew so there can be no problem now.

I'm not sure if I would rather live in a doomed and enlightened (sounds like an oxymoron) society than an ignorant but stable world of hunter gathering tribes.

What good is all our technological advances if it also leads to ecological collapse that nullifies all of it?

It's not really intended to be much of a serious argument, is my guess. In 1987 the idea that members of agricultural societies didn't necessarily live better lives than hunter-gathers wasn't as widely known or accepted. He presents that idea in a popular magazine in proto-clickbaity terms.

Perhaps those immigrants getting on boats that are so much in the news in Europe and the US?

Things exist which did not then, but many of the problems which exist now did not exist then. Global warming, anthropocene mass extinction, discussion of a new nuclear cold war on Russia's western border - go back 10,000 years and these problems fade away, particularly ones that could lead to human or other mass species extinction.

Of course being human in 2018 seems ok to white American heterosexual makes of the upper middle class (or higher), but that is a small percentage of humanity.

The hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon don't seem anxious to enter Brazilian wage slavery. Why should they, mining interests are currently massacring them.