When speaking in terms of populations, "better" is generally used in terms of outcome, i.e. the sense of "increasing odds of survival". Quality of life and survivability tend to align, but in the cases where they don't, evolution will obviously tend to select for the latter.

I think part of the overarching problem is that there's a tendency by some to frame the move from hunter-gatherer to agriculture as some sort of choice, when really the move has been pretty solidly dictated by circumstance. Expanding population drove the development of farming and became a feedback loop with it. The only way to "choose" to remain a hunter-gatherer society would be to either forbid farming, or to impose an artificial limit on population, neither of which are really possible in a decentralized tribal society.

>Better for quality of life for the average person? Probably not so much.

Sure, if you don't think medicine, technology, or literacy contribute to quality of life. All evidence suggests that, back then at least, large, organized social structures were very important for developing technology.

Even if technological progress was slowed, leading to a worse average quality of life compared to more advanced societies, wouldn't the lag be worthwhile if the society was more egalitarian by the time progress did happen?

Egalitarian? That just means equal protection under the law. I' guessing you mean something akin to everyone ending up with the same size basket of goodies at the end of each round of the game...

Of the societies we humans apparently know how to create... We know how to create societies with equal misery. We have from time-to-time been able to construct unequal societies with growing wealth, where everyone did better than their parents, over time -- and than those in many societies around them and in history.

What we have never been able to construct is a society where everyone is equal and wealthy and getting more-so. This may or may not be possible with human beings. One thing is certain -- we're not bees.

While poverty is a real tragedy and a real grind, a harm to people that should be mitigated, it's not clear that the fact that someone somewhere might be richer than me is any sort of tragedy whatsoever that needs to be addressed.

> What we have never been able to construct is a society where everyone is equal and wealthy and getting more-so. This may or may not be possible with human beings. One thing is certain -- we're not bees.

This is false, or at least unjustified. Sure, an equal society may not grow as fast as an unequal one, and so the latter may take the former out of the competition. But how can you conclude that such a society won't progress in isolation?

> But how can you conclude that such a society won't progress in isolation?

Don't know. We aren't bees or ants - we're tribal hierarchical apes - so we don't have a lot of isolated (or even positive) "everyone is equal here" examples to study.

The socio-biologist E.O. Wilson, when asked about such altruistic-sounding theories, responded: "Right theory - wrong species".

No. I don't care if your and my kids both starve equally.

Here's a hypothetical model of two societies:

1. Everybody starves equally for many years until technology progresses to the point where no one has to starve. The quality of food is a small percentage better each year.

2. Everybody starves in the beginning, and after every few years some small x℅ of people don't have to starve anymore.

Depending on the specifics of the numbers, it is possible that is you had to be born in one of the societies at a random time in their existence, you would choose the former. I don't see how it is possible to dismiss the former as worse than the latter for the average person without any more evidence.

While it's good to examine hidden assumptions---if you're on this site, you're probably an engineer, i.e. a knowledge worker, i.e. an occupant of a profession creation of which was made possible by the advent of large and complex (though perhaps not necessarily hierarchical, although they tend to be correlated) societies.