> Prior to the rise of Rome, for example, average heights in regions that would subsequently fall under its yoke were increasing.
Agh no. Please don't use average utility (or its proxies like height or income) to evaluate societies. It matters how many people there are too! If disease wipes out half the population, and the remainder now has more to eat and grows taller, that is not a good thing.
Reading through that section, I was reminded of the old idea that upheaval sucks for anyone alive at the time, but it sure benefits the next generations born to the survivors/winners. If only those beneficiaries could, on the whole, absorb the lost knowledge and avoid the mistakes that led to the upheaval.
The book is Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp. I am hopeful for this one, most generalizations about collapse are not very good, they rely on avoiding the details of history and instead make sweeping generalizations.
Collapse is one of those tropes that is poorly treated, popular among people who aren’t interested in the details of history and only some grand lesson or some justification for some feeling in their gut about impending doom.
While I think Kemp is fatally weakened by his prior bias being too strong, there are many accurate and worth ideas here, most the legacy of Scott.
Of all of them, I'm most attracted by the concept that, through most of our evolution, our culture contained an immune system that limited the harm ambitious psychopaths could inflict. But our present culture is adapted to maximize the impact of those same psychopaths.
The article ignores agriculture and animal husbandry as the critical inflection point for property rights and mass conflict. You could argue proto-versions of these dynamics existed even in abundant hunting grounds—see Native American tribal warfare over territory.
More importantly, it misses technology as a third layer. As technology deflates the base layers of Maslow’s hierarchy, inequality matters less in absolute terms. The main constraint now is housing, but even that could be solved through vertical development and better long-term urban planning.
We might actually be at escape velocity to break the historical cycles described here.
Hyperbolic drivel: : “The people sitting in that building (Google HQ in London) are probably having a pretty good time. They have lots of ping pong tables and Huel. But the cobalt that they’re using in their microchips is still often dug up by artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting paid less than a couple of dollars a day.”
Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley still cleave to Hobbesian myths to justify their grip on wealth and power. Their techno-Utopian convictions, encapsulated in Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule. Promises of rewards in the afterlife have been supplanted by dreams of a technological singularity and interplanetary civilization."
- Google doesn't serve Huel
- Google has maybe two total pong pong tables in the London office and staff here are some of the most diligent coworkers I know.
- Google actively is working to, and has reduced, conflict cobalt from the supply chain.
- No one I know in Silicon Valley "cleaves to Hobbesian myths" to "justify" their grip on anything. Everyone I know shows up to work to provide for their family, grow professionally, or self-actualize.
- People who "dream of Singularity and interplanetary civilization" isn't a thing, no one dreams of this fantasy.
If the so called professional being cited here cannot avoid use hyperbolic drivel and unfounded fantasy to substantiate the claim, it's difficult to give credence to the case.
The US has a large cobalt mine in Idaho. It's closed.[1] They got all the way to startup, and then the price of cobalt dropped.[2] Peaked at $37, dropped to $10.
Right now about $22, but that's a recent spike. Break-even for that mine is around $20.
Similar to the rare earths situation, which I've mentioned before.
This is why we have raw material shortages. The materials exist, but prices are too volatile for the capital required.
> Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule.
I'd like to point that that mantra on its own can go in two wildly-different directions, depending on whether you believe "innovation" comes from:
1. An incremental process of millions of contributors doing small unsung pieces of work until eventually some threshold of opportunity, motive, preliminary ideas, and luck is reached which makes for a visible shift and simple story.
2. A magical threshold only broken through by Great Men, who were not lucky at all and deserve Great Wealth for their Greatness.
As you might guess, I subscribe to (1). Humans are wired to dislike randomness and broad causes, so we dramatically underestimate (and undervalue) all the people making innovations of higher-precision parts, or a chemical reaction that can use a cheaper reagent that's also waste from another process, or basic research like "these proteins are highly conserved in the virus."
- Google actively is working to, and has reduced, conflict cobalt from the supply chain.
That's good, but doesn't change the fact that the supply chain for tech exemplifies "the hub exploiting the periphery".
- No one I know in Silicon Valley "cleaves to Hobbesian myths" to "justify" their grip on anything. Everyone I know shows up to work to provide for their family, grow professionally, or self-actualize.
"Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley" is likely referring to the CEO/founder/VC class.
- People who "dream of Singularity and interplanetary civilization" isn't a thing, no one dreams of this fantasy.
That's patently untrue. A bunch of them post here.
And when one of the parties is a group of men with guns who abuse their neighbors in order to produce the something they're selling to the other party, it becomes exploitation in a quick hurry.
I use any number of professionals’ knowledge or skills or supplies just the same as I use natural gas to heat the home or water to hydrate myself or clean whatever.
Maybe something about the seller being under duress would be a start to defining exploitation.
I dream of those things as I believe a lot of others do on HN. I also provide for my family and achieve more in my career but those aren’t dreams, that’s just what I do everyday.
Dreams of the singularity and interplanetary civilizations are actually achievable at some point in the future. Random god king paychobabble isn’t.
I’m not for this Luddite bullshit and you’re severely harming any legitimate opposition to the billionaire class by undermining yourself.
'In the early twentieth century, anthropologists embarked on a more ambitious project - demonstrating that something about primitive culture proved that their own political faction was right about everything. Marxists discovered idyllic tribes untouched by capitalism, peacefully sharing their communal resources. Missionaries discovered that every primitive religion was merely a distorted form of Christianity, with a few extra gods and rituals added in to serve local appetites. Feminists discovered that women everywhere developed unique indigenous forms of resistance to patriarchal domination. Postcolonialists discovered that all the other anthropologists were racist.'
The survey of polity mortality this book is supposedly about seems fundamentally biased by the idea that power-seeking and inequality are inherently negative, when that's only a framework that is applicable to the 1859-1973 period of labor shortages relative to land under cultivation making economic growth dependent on restraining the expression of hard power.
In societies without a state there is almost universally a high rate of male mortality from infrequent violent squabbles (about once a year) over territory used for social production - game rangelands, prey pastureland, cropland, marriageable women, adoptable children, choice of protégés. When labor is in the normal case of oversupply second sons don't always make peace with having little to inherit and despots act as a way to restrain the activity of their class.
.
It seems a lot of damage done unintentionally in academic works conflating valuable discovery with unevidenced bias comes from being insufficiently reductionist.
People with dark triad traits don't materialise out of the ether, they are selected for by their effect on group reproductive fitness. Their motives and those motives' motives are accountable and transparent to sufficiently thorough psychoanalysis and the root causes for why they keep becoming privileged economically can be found by digging into the weeds of information theory.
If not ‘inherently negative’, how do you describe power-seeking and inequality?
Also, I read that portion of your comment to suggest that the concepts of inequality and power-seeking are only societally negatives when considering a specific (very recent) period of human history. Is that the claim you’re making? If so, why would classifying inequality as a negative aspect of culture/civilzation/nation/etc not be applicable outside your specifically referenced ~100 year period?
Let's flip this around. Consider specialization. Its necessary in a complex society correct? Are all specializations (jobs) going to be equally desirable? Should they all be equally compensated? That's going to create inequality all on its own. You can make similar arguments for power seeking too.
Life isn't fair. Trying to make it fair (counter-intuitively) often only results in more suffering. An anti-suffering ethos is going to be a lot more successful for you (or anyone really) than an anti-inequality one.
> In Kemp’s narrative, our retrograde rush toward these vicious social structures has been less about consensus than the relentless ascent of the wrong sort of people. Goliath hierarchies select for assholes — or, to use Kemp’s preferred epithet, “dark triad” personalities: people with high levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism.
> In this way, humankind gravitated “from hunting and gathering to being hunted and gathered,” Kemp writes. Early states had little to distinguish them from “criminal gangs running protection rackets.”
... are fair assessments of how we got here, imo. If you have criminals in control, able to institute a self-serving brainwashing culture (education) in the populace for a few hundred years, we are where you would expect - with people demanding forcible extraction from their masters out of fear (government, taxes).
Modern middle class people in any developed nation would experience the life of an ancient or medieval king or noble as misery: totally awful sanitation, no modern medicine, limited food options, lack of access to information, slow travel, etc.
The same goes for the life of any hunter gatherer. Lack of modern medicine alone is huge. Living as a hunter gatherer might be okay if you were healthy. Get injured or sick and there’s nothing to be done. Infant and maternal mortality were also high.
The wealth of the present age is utterly unprecedented. If it collapses the fall will not be like other falls. I am skeptical about the value of any comparison with any historical example. This is too different in too many ways.
There are certainly lots of extra ways for your life to end in the past.
Bit of a silly comparison, though. Material comforts do not make one happy, poke around the internet inquiring about mental health if you are unconvinced. The more relevant comparison to past times wouldn't be a middle class worker vs a king, it's vs being a peasant. Give me the king job any day and twice on Sundays, I'll feel way more alive. I'll get used to the garderobes.
So then the question is... how have we let ourselves, in some of the richest nations in history, re-invent mental misery despite physical comfort? Work in an office job for 40-60 hours a week and then ferry your kids around to scheduled extracurriculars in the evenings and weekends to make their college applications look good so they can replace you in the middle-class-robot-drone-job. Is that the best we can do? Hustle 24/7, but in more comfort than scrabbling in the dirt for a historical king?
It will always be true that the best you can do is hustle 24/7 as long as your bosses have the ability to collectively replace all of you with immigrants from areas with lower levels of material comfort who are willing to accept worse conditions than you.
For this process to reverse, one of two things must occur:
1. Scab immigration is completely stopped.
2. Every society on earth normalizes to the same level of material comfort.
We didn't re-invent mental misery, globalization created the conditions to allow your bosses to impose it on you. The good news is it is likely temporary.
Being a medieval king would be insufferable compared to being a middle class drone today. That you (and many others!) find your staggering privilege unsatisfying is a lack of creativity and laziness on your part.
> Work in an office job for 40-60 hours a week and then ferry your kids around to scheduled extracurriculars in the evenings and weekends to make their college applications look good so they can replace you in the middle-class-robot-drone-job. Is that the best we can do? Hustle 24/7, but in more comfort than scrabbling in the dirt for a historical king?
Work 60 hours a week, sleep 56, suffer 4 hours per day with your kid (28hrs)... That leaves 24 hours (per week!) of freedom, information and wealth the richest king pre 1800 could only have dreamed of.
That's 1248 hours per year, 52 24 hour days, a month and a half of every year where you can travel anywhere on the globe, eat anything, do practically anything. Let's only count age 30-50 as good years, only 20 years of 52 days of pure freedom... That is a total of 2.8 YEARS of free time. No one, not even a king, ever in history up until modernity has had 3 years of not working with so few strings attached. Not even close!
Absolute imaginationless whining. Just because nobody showed you how to live your life doesn't mean there aren't people out there thriving beyond history's wildest dreams.
Sure you have to vacuum and do laundry and go to the dentist with some of that free time (offset by week long vacations not included above), but goodness you have to have no self awareness to complain about laundry. 50% of babies (virtually the same for kings and peasants) died in infancy in premodern times [https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past]. Your free time is greater than the length of the majority of humans lives pre-1800.
This may not be the best we can do, but it is beyond anything anyone could have fantasized accomplishing, and the only way to describe it is wonderful. Life was brutal and now it decidedly is not. You can do practically whatever you want, why decide to complain (about a lifestyle you chose!)?
Make good use of your life! MILLIONS of children died so that you could have the chunk of time you got!
> Prior to the rise of Rome, for example, average heights in regions that would subsequently fall under its yoke were increasing.
Agh no. Please don't use average utility (or its proxies like height or income) to evaluate societies. It matters how many people there are too! If disease wipes out half the population, and the remainder now has more to eat and grows taller, that is not a good thing.
Reading through that section, I was reminded of the old idea that upheaval sucks for anyone alive at the time, but it sure benefits the next generations born to the survivors/winners. If only those beneficiaries could, on the whole, absorb the lost knowledge and avoid the mistakes that led to the upheaval.
Seems like it’s not how many people are that matter, but more how people died to get that number. More people isn’t an inherent good.
The book is Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp. I am hopeful for this one, most generalizations about collapse are not very good, they rely on avoiding the details of history and instead make sweeping generalizations.
Collapse is one of those tropes that is poorly treated, popular among people who aren’t interested in the details of history and only some grand lesson or some justification for some feeling in their gut about impending doom.
While I think Kemp is fatally weakened by his prior bias being too strong, there are many accurate and worth ideas here, most the legacy of Scott.
Of all of them, I'm most attracted by the concept that, through most of our evolution, our culture contained an immune system that limited the harm ambitious psychopaths could inflict. But our present culture is adapted to maximize the impact of those same psychopaths.
The article ignores agriculture and animal husbandry as the critical inflection point for property rights and mass conflict. You could argue proto-versions of these dynamics existed even in abundant hunting grounds—see Native American tribal warfare over territory. More importantly, it misses technology as a third layer. As technology deflates the base layers of Maslow’s hierarchy, inequality matters less in absolute terms. The main constraint now is housing, but even that could be solved through vertical development and better long-term urban planning. We might actually be at escape velocity to break the historical cycles described here.
We still have to survive climate change and the current fad of authoritarianism. Positive thinking and technology aren't enough to save us on this one
Technology might be enough to save us from climate change, but it’s open whether ideology trumps (No pun intended) economics on this topic.
Solar energy is currently the cheapest form that exists, but the USA is still banning it in places.
ah the telltale em dash — you know what it means
It means pretty much nothing here on HN, lots of people were using it before LLMs. However, people constantly pointing it out is getting tiresome.
Hyperbolic drivel: : “The people sitting in that building (Google HQ in London) are probably having a pretty good time. They have lots of ping pong tables and Huel. But the cobalt that they’re using in their microchips is still often dug up by artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting paid less than a couple of dollars a day.”
Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley still cleave to Hobbesian myths to justify their grip on wealth and power. Their techno-Utopian convictions, encapsulated in Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule. Promises of rewards in the afterlife have been supplanted by dreams of a technological singularity and interplanetary civilization."
- Google doesn't serve Huel - Google has maybe two total pong pong tables in the London office and staff here are some of the most diligent coworkers I know. - Google actively is working to, and has reduced, conflict cobalt from the supply chain. - No one I know in Silicon Valley "cleaves to Hobbesian myths" to "justify" their grip on anything. Everyone I know shows up to work to provide for their family, grow professionally, or self-actualize. - People who "dream of Singularity and interplanetary civilization" isn't a thing, no one dreams of this fantasy.
If the so called professional being cited here cannot avoid use hyperbolic drivel and unfounded fantasy to substantiate the claim, it's difficult to give credence to the case.
The US has a large cobalt mine in Idaho. It's closed.[1] They got all the way to startup, and then the price of cobalt dropped.[2] Peaked at $37, dropped to $10. Right now about $22, but that's a recent spike. Break-even for that mine is around $20.
Similar to the rare earths situation, which I've mentioned before.
This is why we have raw material shortages. The materials exist, but prices are too volatile for the capital required.
[1] https://jervoisglobal.com/projects/idaho-cobalt-operations/
[1] https://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=co&u=...
I dream of interplanetary civilization sometimes
> Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule.
I'd like to point that that mantra on its own can go in two wildly-different directions, depending on whether you believe "innovation" comes from:
1. An incremental process of millions of contributors doing small unsung pieces of work until eventually some threshold of opportunity, motive, preliminary ideas, and luck is reached which makes for a visible shift and simple story.
2. A magical threshold only broken through by Great Men, who were not lucky at all and deserve Great Wealth for their Greatness.
As you might guess, I subscribe to (1). Humans are wired to dislike randomness and broad causes, so we dramatically underestimate (and undervalue) all the people making innovations of higher-precision parts, or a chemical reaction that can use a cheaper reagent that's also waste from another process, or basic research like "these proteins are highly conserved in the virus."
You're quoting two different people here.
That's good, but doesn't change the fact that the supply chain for tech exemplifies "the hub exploiting the periphery". "Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley" is likely referring to the CEO/founder/VC class. That's patently untrue. A bunch of them post here.>tech exemplifies "the hub exploiting the periphery".
Two parties agreeing on a price for something is not exploitation. Both parties benefit from working together.
And when one of the parties is a group of men with guns who abuse their neighbors in order to produce the something they're selling to the other party, it becomes exploitation in a quick hurry.
There is also the fact that an agreement under a power imbalance can be, and often is, exploitative.
Marx's use of the word "exploitation" is misunderstood. Exploitation is using another person as a thing. Exploit as one exploits natural resources.
That is a poor delineation of exploit.
I use any number of professionals’ knowledge or skills or supplies just the same as I use natural gas to heat the home or water to hydrate myself or clean whatever.
Maybe something about the seller being under duress would be a start to defining exploitation.
I dream of those things as I believe a lot of others do on HN. I also provide for my family and achieve more in my career but those aren’t dreams, that’s just what I do everyday.
Dreams of the singularity and interplanetary civilizations are actually achievable at some point in the future. Random god king paychobabble isn’t.
I’m not for this Luddite bullshit and you’re severely harming any legitimate opposition to the billionaire class by undermining yourself.
'In the early twentieth century, anthropologists embarked on a more ambitious project - demonstrating that something about primitive culture proved that their own political faction was right about everything. Marxists discovered idyllic tribes untouched by capitalism, peacefully sharing their communal resources. Missionaries discovered that every primitive religion was merely a distorted form of Christianity, with a few extra gods and rituals added in to serve local appetites. Feminists discovered that women everywhere developed unique indigenous forms of resistance to patriarchal domination. Postcolonialists discovered that all the other anthropologists were racist.'
The survey of polity mortality this book is supposedly about seems fundamentally biased by the idea that power-seeking and inequality are inherently negative, when that's only a framework that is applicable to the 1859-1973 period of labor shortages relative to land under cultivation making economic growth dependent on restraining the expression of hard power.
In societies without a state there is almost universally a high rate of male mortality from infrequent violent squabbles (about once a year) over territory used for social production - game rangelands, prey pastureland, cropland, marriageable women, adoptable children, choice of protégés. When labor is in the normal case of oversupply second sons don't always make peace with having little to inherit and despots act as a way to restrain the activity of their class.
.
It seems a lot of damage done unintentionally in academic works conflating valuable discovery with unevidenced bias comes from being insufficiently reductionist.
People with dark triad traits don't materialise out of the ether, they are selected for by their effect on group reproductive fitness. Their motives and those motives' motives are accountable and transparent to sufficiently thorough psychoanalysis and the root causes for why they keep becoming privileged economically can be found by digging into the weeds of information theory.
If not ‘inherently negative’, how do you describe power-seeking and inequality?
Also, I read that portion of your comment to suggest that the concepts of inequality and power-seeking are only societally negatives when considering a specific (very recent) period of human history. Is that the claim you’re making? If so, why would classifying inequality as a negative aspect of culture/civilzation/nation/etc not be applicable outside your specifically referenced ~100 year period?
Let's flip this around. Consider specialization. Its necessary in a complex society correct? Are all specializations (jobs) going to be equally desirable? Should they all be equally compensated? That's going to create inequality all on its own. You can make similar arguments for power seeking too.
Life isn't fair. Trying to make it fair (counter-intuitively) often only results in more suffering. An anti-suffering ethos is going to be a lot more successful for you (or anyone really) than an anti-inequality one.
> In Kemp’s narrative, our retrograde rush toward these vicious social structures has been less about consensus than the relentless ascent of the wrong sort of people. Goliath hierarchies select for assholes — or, to use Kemp’s preferred epithet, “dark triad” personalities: people with high levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism.
> In this way, humankind gravitated “from hunting and gathering to being hunted and gathered,” Kemp writes. Early states had little to distinguish them from “criminal gangs running protection rackets.”
... are fair assessments of how we got here, imo. If you have criminals in control, able to institute a self-serving brainwashing culture (education) in the populace for a few hundred years, we are where you would expect - with people demanding forcible extraction from their masters out of fear (government, taxes).
Modern middle class people in any developed nation would experience the life of an ancient or medieval king or noble as misery: totally awful sanitation, no modern medicine, limited food options, lack of access to information, slow travel, etc.
The same goes for the life of any hunter gatherer. Lack of modern medicine alone is huge. Living as a hunter gatherer might be okay if you were healthy. Get injured or sick and there’s nothing to be done. Infant and maternal mortality were also high.
The wealth of the present age is utterly unprecedented. If it collapses the fall will not be like other falls. I am skeptical about the value of any comparison with any historical example. This is too different in too many ways.
There are certainly lots of extra ways for your life to end in the past.
Bit of a silly comparison, though. Material comforts do not make one happy, poke around the internet inquiring about mental health if you are unconvinced. The more relevant comparison to past times wouldn't be a middle class worker vs a king, it's vs being a peasant. Give me the king job any day and twice on Sundays, I'll feel way more alive. I'll get used to the garderobes.
So then the question is... how have we let ourselves, in some of the richest nations in history, re-invent mental misery despite physical comfort? Work in an office job for 40-60 hours a week and then ferry your kids around to scheduled extracurriculars in the evenings and weekends to make their college applications look good so they can replace you in the middle-class-robot-drone-job. Is that the best we can do? Hustle 24/7, but in more comfort than scrabbling in the dirt for a historical king?
It will always be true that the best you can do is hustle 24/7 as long as your bosses have the ability to collectively replace all of you with immigrants from areas with lower levels of material comfort who are willing to accept worse conditions than you.
For this process to reverse, one of two things must occur: 1. Scab immigration is completely stopped. 2. Every society on earth normalizes to the same level of material comfort.
We didn't re-invent mental misery, globalization created the conditions to allow your bosses to impose it on you. The good news is it is likely temporary.
Being a medieval king would be insufferable compared to being a middle class drone today. That you (and many others!) find your staggering privilege unsatisfying is a lack of creativity and laziness on your part.
> Work in an office job for 40-60 hours a week and then ferry your kids around to scheduled extracurriculars in the evenings and weekends to make their college applications look good so they can replace you in the middle-class-robot-drone-job. Is that the best we can do? Hustle 24/7, but in more comfort than scrabbling in the dirt for a historical king?
Work 60 hours a week, sleep 56, suffer 4 hours per day with your kid (28hrs)... That leaves 24 hours (per week!) of freedom, information and wealth the richest king pre 1800 could only have dreamed of.
That's 1248 hours per year, 52 24 hour days, a month and a half of every year where you can travel anywhere on the globe, eat anything, do practically anything. Let's only count age 30-50 as good years, only 20 years of 52 days of pure freedom... That is a total of 2.8 YEARS of free time. No one, not even a king, ever in history up until modernity has had 3 years of not working with so few strings attached. Not even close!
Absolute imaginationless whining. Just because nobody showed you how to live your life doesn't mean there aren't people out there thriving beyond history's wildest dreams.
Sure you have to vacuum and do laundry and go to the dentist with some of that free time (offset by week long vacations not included above), but goodness you have to have no self awareness to complain about laundry. 50% of babies (virtually the same for kings and peasants) died in infancy in premodern times [https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past]. Your free time is greater than the length of the majority of humans lives pre-1800.
This may not be the best we can do, but it is beyond anything anyone could have fantasized accomplishing, and the only way to describe it is wonderful. Life was brutal and now it decidedly is not. You can do practically whatever you want, why decide to complain (about a lifestyle you chose!)?
Make good use of your life! MILLIONS of children died so that you could have the chunk of time you got!
I mean, middle class menial existences long predate industrialization. Just read Bartleby, the Scrivener.