Stone age economics
«Muchos de los ensayos contenidos en este volumen los escribí en distintas oportunidades durante los últimos diez años. Otros fueron escritos especialmente para esta publicación. Todos ellos fueron concebidos y reunidos aquí con la esperanza de constituir una antropología económica, es decir, algo distinto de las interpretaciones prácticas de las economías y las sociedades primitivas [...]» Clásico indiscutible y obra de referencia en los estudios de antropología, la presente obra (Stone Age Economics, 1974) contribuyó de manera significativa a la crítica del evolucionismo lineal, abandonando la visión clásica preponderante en los tratados de antropología económica y planteando la necesidad de desarrollar una nueva forma de análisis más apropiada para las sociedades históricas paleolíticas y para la historia intelectual de la antropología.
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What Hacker News says
- Sahlins is one of the GOATS of modern anthropology
Stone Age Economics will change your life if you’re new to anthropology and think the modern society is representative of our social lineage….rather than us living in an extremely new, completely alien context, for a 250,000 year old animal
- > Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do?
Unambiguously yes. This is well documented and impossible to ignore.
Marshal Sahlins described it best in Stone Age Economics but reading Graeber will get you there or Levi Strauss if you’re into the whole structural anthropology thing
- Didn't expect to learn about Sahlins posthumous book via HN's front page. Stone-Age Economics and The Original Affluent Society (the title a pun on a book well-known by 1960s intelligentsia, Galbraith's "The Affluent Society") were interesting reads.
- "Stone Age Economics" by Marshall Sahlins
- > Anyway, AI/AGI will not yield economic liberation for the masses. We already produce more than enough for economic liberation all over the world, many times over. It hasn't happened.
In Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics, he studies work time of hunter gatherer tribes in Africa, Papua New Guinea, the Amazon etc. They often less work less than 40 hours a week. The hunter gatherer painting in caves in Chauvet seemed to have leisure time. Less hours than some fresh college grad pounding out C++ or C# for Electronic Arts any how.
The past 50 years has seen the hourly wage stay flat while the profit workers create is sucked up by the heirs.
Paying for four years if college to get a CS degree, then studying Leetcode, interning, working cheap as an associate/junior used to be seen as a good path, but obviously since late 2022 this has stagnated for most.
- Throughout human existence there have been only a few means of distribution of resources.
In hunter/gatherer days within small bands, and also to a large extent within families (but perhaps a bit less now) the method was Generalized Reciprocity[1], where people basically take care of each other and share. This was supported by the extremely fertile and bountiful forests and other resources that were shared between early people.
Later, the large "water monopoly" cultures like ancient Egypt had largely Redistributive economies, where resources flowed to the center (the Pharaoh, etc.) and were distributed again outwards.
Finally we got Market Exchange, where people bargain in the marketplace for goods, and this has been efficiently able (to a greater or lesser degree) to distribute resources for hundreds of years. Of course we have some redistributive elements like Social Security and Welfare, but these are limited.
Market Exchange relies now on basically everyone having a Job or another means to acquire money. But with automation this breaks down because jobs will more and more be taken by the AIs and then by robotic AIs.
So only a few possibilities are likely: either we end up with almost everyone a pauper and increase dole payments just up to the point where there's no revolution, or we somehow end up with everyone owning the AI resources and their output, taking the place the forests and other ancient resources played in hunter-gatherer days, and everyone can eventually be wealthy.
It looks as if, at least in the USA we are going down the path of having a tiny oligarch class with everyone else locked out of ownership of the products of the AI, but this may not be true everywhere, and perhaps somehow won't end up being true here.
[1] Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins https://archive.org/details/stoneageeconomic0000sahl/page/n5...
