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10,000 B.C.
It's not a great movie but it does offer a model of economic growth and the rise of freedom. To avoid unwanted spoilers, I'll put that model under the fold...
There are increasing returns to scale, set in a general Carneiro-Oppenheimer political equilibrium, albeit with multiple equilibria and possible revolution, depending on the behavior and path of charging woolly mammoths. Hunter-gatherer societies have martial virtue and also an idea or at least practice of liberty. They don't have agriculture or easy transport or efficient risk-sharing or an expensive priestly caste. The desire for plunder, slaves, and tax revenue causes the wealthier agricultural societies to raid the hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gathers can adopt the technologies of the wealthier peoples more easily than the overlords can/will adopt the ideologies of the hunter-gatherers. If the revolt succeeds (see the above remarks about multiple equilibria), the result is both liberty and a higher standard of living. For unknown reasons, female members of the hunter-gatherer society have market power in the agricultural society, even when they are slaves.
I'm not saying that model is true but I have heard worse from social scientists.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 8, 2008 at 06:23 PM in Film | Permalink
Comments
According to A.O. Scott's review there are also "flesh-eating swamp ostriches."
Posted by: Colin Danby at Mar 8, 2008 7:17:54 PM
Colin, that was the best response to one of Tyler's abstruse movie reviews I have ever read. Absolutely delightful.
Posted by: MostlyAPragmatist at Mar 8, 2008 7:26:40 PM
Another very fun review is at slate.com:
http://www.slate.com/id/2185924/nav/ais/
"So what if the construction of the pyramids didn't really overlap with the existence of the woolly mammoth? Can you honestly say you don't want to see a herd of crazed mammoths stampeding down the ramps of a pyramid in progress?"
Posted by: Jill at Mar 8, 2008 8:38:12 PM
Colin:
Bravo
Posted by: Bill at Mar 8, 2008 10:31:27 PM
The invention of agriculture did represent a certain loss of freedom; on the other hand, hunter-gatherer societies were often extraordinarily violent and brutal by modern standards, with 25-30% of adult males dying by homicide and widespread tribal warfare and abduction of women as sexual prizes. The inevitable triumph of agricultural societies, which supported a far larger population density and therefore simply outpopulated and pushed aside hunter-gatherers, was a good thing on the whole despite fuzzy-headed mythmaking.
Posted by: at Mar 8, 2008 11:23:03 PM
The hunter-gathers can adopt the technologies of the wealthier peoples more easily than the overlords can/will adopt the ideologies of the hunter-gatherers.
Actually, hunter gatherers often have only a cargo-cult level of understanding of an advanced society's technology, and no understanding of its complex social or economic underpinnings. By contrast, a more advanced society can usually readily understand (and romanticize) a primitive society's warrior ethos.
In fact the asymmetry of understanding is so large that civilization represents a singularity of sorts, in the sense that those who live in the "before" find the "after" to be utterly alien and incomprehensible. Agriculture was the key enabling technology for the transition.
Posted by: at Mar 8, 2008 11:41:04 PM
"advanced society". funny that. same one that has pushed the planet into "overshoot"?
hunting / gathering has an intelligence of a sort; naturally keeps populations in check in a dynamic way -- very little energy is invested by hunter / gatherers, so it is sustainable (that is very high EROEI, energy return on energy invested)
domestication of grain/livestock has only proven viable into the 20th century by the exploitation of "ancient sunlight" in the form of burning non-renewable fossil fuels (as the population chart has exploded, EROEI is going to one)
only time will tell...
Posted by: at Mar 9, 2008 10:36:52 AM
""advanced society". funny that. same one that has pushed the planet into "overshoot"?
hunting / gathering has an intelligence of a sort; naturally keeps populations in check in a dynamic way -- very little energy is invested by hunter / gatherers, so it is sustainable (that is very high EROEI, energy return on energy invested)"
When you say they invest very little energy, do you mean the use of fuels to power their lifestyles/societies? Because I think the hunter/gatherers spent quite a bit of time running around burning calories to catch calories. Unless you know of very fat hunters and very skinny farmers, I think the EROEI is the opposite. It is the farming society which can produce so many extra calories that it can support an intricate division of labor.
Posted by: Erik at Mar 9, 2008 12:29:52 PM
@Erik: Actually workweeks in hunter-gatherer societies are very short compared to current workweeks (16 a 18 hours versus 40 hours I belive), and extremely short compared to workweeks in subsistance agricultural societies, which were as long as 60 hours. So in effect hunter-gatherers have far more time to lie around, doing nothing.
Posted by: JSK at Mar 9, 2008 4:32:54 PM
Mar 9, 2008 10:36:52 AM says...
Erik
It is true that hunter / gatherers are more "efficient" in terms of EROEI. Ask a wildlife biologist friend: When you watch a nature show, you are seeing those infrequent bursts of energy when a predator stalks or chases prey, not the hundreds of hours of footage where the predator (or prey) was lying around chewing cud or swatting flies.
The fat farmer you describe is ONLY a fixture of the 20th Century. Don't forget the predictions of mass famine that were made in the mid-20C. The way we dodged that bullet was the Green Revolution, namely boosting crop yields through industrial-scale monoculturing and the use of petroleum-based fertilizers.
Point remains: 1) human population has soared; 2) food EROEI is constantly declining; 3) man has exploited fossil fuels to enable 1+2.
...and 1 & 2 & 3 are not sustainable.
:)
Posted by: at Mar 9, 2008 4:35:17 PM
thanks JSK -- beat me to the draw!
10:36:52 AM
Posted by: at Mar 9, 2008 4:37:41 PM
Consider too the following:
During the 20th Century we not only:
- consumed half(?) the world's fossil fuel endowment
- irreparably destroyed topsoils (also an "energy endowment")
- drawn down the world's aquifers (many of which were trapped and ancient)
- and on and on.
to support agriculture.
But also
- first, women joined the workforce
- second, men and women worked more hours
- lately, households have been borrowing to sustain consumption.
Wish I knew where the next "fix" comes from!?
10:36:52 AM
Posted by: at Mar 9, 2008 4:47:54 PM
Why the discussion in the abstract about the differences between hunter gatherers and farmers, it looks like the off spring of farmers are "so fat" as to not know any hunter gatherers in the first person. Africa has plenty of past and even current examples contrasting the path of these two groups and how they interact. By the way JSK's argument about fossil fuels is laughable, Agriculturalists in East Africa had gained significant economic and political advantage over hunter gatherers long before fossil fuels were introduced to those societies.
In places like East Africa, a sojourn through north western Kenya, Southern Sudan and Eastern Uganda into the land of the pokot and Karamajong, will give you a much better sense of how brutal and difficulut hunter gatherer lives are (16-18 hr work week??????). The tipping points for starvation, and the level of internicine violence, comapared to those of neighbouring agriculturalist societies is stark. A fairly good argument can be made that the current political crises in Kenya, has one of its roots in this ancient struggle between the two groups.
For a sense of the intellectual frontline of this issue, read some of the discussion papers generated during the early eighties, by the Kenyan Ministry of planning and development-no pun intended. The extent to which Hunter gatherers were falling behind in economic and social indicators, and innevitably polictical represenation, was ringing alarm bells in the Kenyan government. Policy conclusions centered around coercing many hunter gatherers into immersing their kids into the educational system, derived from Agriculturalists (The british). This debate continues to this day in places like Kenya, Botswana and Namibia, where much hand ringing takes place over the relative state of Bushmen or Hoten Tot, versus the rest of the populace.
My point folks is that their is allot of real life examples with very interesting and sometimes surprising differential outcomes, to explore right here right now, without resorting to the tepid imagination of hollywood. 10,000 B.C. is a formulaic modern era movie, about very modern yearnings for freedom within large social organizations, just set in ancient times, therefore making available an orgin myth shell, and interesting animals, with a plot and cast unrecognisable to any hunter gatherer.
Sorry to get preachy, I have much more respect for all of you then it shows.
Posted by: nyongesa at Mar 9, 2008 7:50:57 PM
@nyongesa: What is 'laughable' is that you manage to write so much criticism with reading so little. In this thread, I did not make any remarks on fossil fuels what so ever. And the rest of your reply misses the points made earlier entirely.
Posted by: JSK at Mar 9, 2008 7:54:25 PM
Who is Carneiro?
I have put Oppenheimer's book, "The State", all on one convenient page.
Posted by: TGGP at Mar 9, 2008 8:04:29 PM
As technology advances and economies develop EROEI will naturally tend to 1 as a measure of efficiency of a system (i.e. all options are exploited). It tells you nothing about the sustainability of the system or productivity, only the extent to which it is optimised within technological constraints.
On that note our Anonymous contributor might also want to check the overall human energy consumption and productivity, not the EROI ratio. This is an economics blog and we should not confuse marginal returns with productivity.
You're right about shorter work hours for hunter-gatherers. Low densities, low workloads, low productivity. But farming is more efficient use of resources; generating far more energy per acre; which rapidly reflects in more population, better weapons, shelter, etc. The hunter gatherers get crushed or swept onto marginal land, as anothe rposter has already observed. Hunter-gathering is simply an unstable equilibrium; first group to farming, wins.
And finally....energy doesn't, have to come from fossil fuels, does it?
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