I mostly agree, but the whole worked only 15 hours a week stat is almost certainly not correct. It came from a paper that only counted time outside of camp as work, so time spent in camp processing food wasn't counted. The actual number of hours varies massively - seasonally and geographically - but probably closer to 30-40.
"Without any external pressure, multiple peoples concluded that settling and eating grass was preferable to being nomads."
Portraying it as an individual choice is inaccurate. The process of populations becoming sedentary(and agrarian) spans over multiple generations and wasn't really reversible. The early settlements likely only worked because they had some method to force people from leaving and the later settlements had to be sedentary because their neighbours were sedentary, it had a cascade effect. Oversimplified but that's the gist.
I have had an incredibly similar experience, including falling back into being convinced I was in a 'loop' when my mind was tired or on psychedelics. I've always found it interesting how common this type of bad trip is and wondered if there's a reason why it's so common. Cultural context can have a large impact on the type of trips you have, but I would not have guessed that western culture would create this type of bad trip, in particular.
I haven’t seen the narrative that Ukraine is winning the war for at least 2 years. You should maybe choose better news sources, there’s a huge amount of very accurate reporting on it.
Additionally, the Russian economy is a wartime economy, which runs hot till it collapses or wins. It’ll be fine till it’s not, but it’s very hard to predict what that point is.
To be pedantic, it’s definitionally not reading. You listened to the book, you didn’t read it.
There’s just an odd legitimacy associated specifically with reading - that people want to access, and so makes other people weirdly snobbish/defensive of it.
That’s quite a controversial figure actually. The original paper that popularised this was the ‘Original affluent society’ paper by Marshall Sahlins. It marked a big shift away from the paradigm at the time, that saw hunter gatherers as having ‘Nasty, brutal and short’ lives.
The research that essay was largely based off was somewhat flawed though as it ignored time in camp processing food and crafting. So it only considered time spent actively hunting/foraging as work.
I say ‘somewhat flawed’ because work is a modern concept and applying it to a hunter gatherer context is quite difficult and comes with big debates on what is/isn’t work.
Adam Smith is often used as symbol of laissez-faire capitalism but was explicitly a proponent for regulation in situations where the market failed, such as this one imagine.
What you probably mean is that people take the concept of the invisible hand too seriously. Which was a relatively minor point in the book, and has somehow been magnified to the point of absurdity by the economic and political trends of the last 40 years.
Adam smith is way more reasonable than you’d think, given how he’s portrayed in the modern era.
I understand your point but all the resources and material goods in the world don’t matter if you can’t access them.
> Indeed, we don’t have the technology to save people from themselves, yet.
The plight of the poorest in today’s societies is far more of a social and political issue than a technological one. An issue America is particularly bad on, despite all its affluence.