When all of humanity was hunting and gathering and living at subsistence levels, the was no poverty. It only shows up with wealth.

Pretty simple.

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DoctorOetker 16 hours ago | parent [-]

This.

Every sedentary society has historically scared its members of the dangers of the nomadic lifestyle, heathens, ...

The implied conclusion being that since our ancestors switched from nomadic to sedentary it must have been preferable, a kind of informal democratic collectively and individually approved choice.

Surely sedentary must have been better, how else could such a transition have been sustained?

Rather easy how else: its perfectly possible for average or mean life quality under sedentary lifestyle to be a net setback compared to nomadic lifestyle, since slavery can't be effectively implemented in a nomadic lifestyle, whereas the sedentary lifestyle creates both the demand for labor (routine monotonous work in the fields) and the means to enable slavery (escaping nomadic tribes under Brownian motion is much easier than escaping from a randomly assigned position deep in a larger sedentary empire, even if you escape the sedentary village, the stable neighbouring village will happily return you to "your owner" so that he would hopefully return the favor if ever he catches one of "their slaves").

It's easy to claim a net improvement in life quality ... by discounting the loss of life quality of the slaves!

Nomadic lifestyle was simply outcompeted by sedentary-enabled slavery!

	▲	pdonis 15 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> even if you escape the sedentary village, the stable neighbouring village will happily return you to "your owner" so that he would hopefully return the favor if ever he catches one of "their slaves") Tell that to all the people who ran the Underground Railroad in the pre-Civil War US, not to mention all the other ways that Fugitive Slave laws were persistently violated. I think you are vastly underestimating the benefits of a modern "sedentary" society. But as I pointed out in my other post, if you really don't think they're benefits, then you can simply forgo them. Go and live an off grid subsistence lifestyle. There are people who do that. But of course they don't post on the Internet.
	▲	pdonis 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If you think a subsistence nomadic lifestyle is preferable to a modern "sedentary" one, then how are you able to post here? Subsistence nomads don't have Internet access (to name just one of umpteen things we "sedentary" moderns have access to that they don't). There are ways to live off grid if you really think it's preferable.