Coffee Is Hard - Hackdot

Re:Coffee Is Hard by chrisco255 on Friday October 18, 2019 @05:59PM (#21295396)

I think I've read several studies that indicate hunter gatherers worked less than agrarian societies. However, agrarian societies are better at producing predictable abundance of food, so they outpace hunters by far. I will admit that hunting is incredibly fun. I do think we lost something as a trade-off when we moved to agrarian/industrial societies.

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Re:Coffee Is Hard by bobbiechen on Friday October 18, 2019 @08:07PM (#21295987)

I recently saw an interesting review of Against the Grain by James Scott, which makes the claim that:

only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.”

And so early states led the way in agriculture in order to collect more taxes.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/14/book-review-against-th...

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Re:Coffee Is Hard by chrisco255 on Saturday October 19, 2019 @01:58AM (#21297028)

I dunno, I suspect this is a cause and effect sort of thing. The grains and abundance probably came first, civilization came second, and with that came taxes and government.

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