I beg to differ. If you compare the average member of a hunting-gathering society to the average farmer, then sure, the hunter-gatherer has more time. That's because the farmer farms very intensively, and feeds everybody else in the society. If you take the average member of a farming society, on the other hand, probably about 1.5% of his waking time is spent farming. (3% of the population farms, and each farmer maybe spends half or maybe a little more of his waking time farming). Thus, farming does, in fact, lead to time freed up from acquiring food, but it does so unequally, letting those who choose to farm farm, and letting everybody else do something else.

Not to pick a fight here or anything but in your original message, you implied something completely different. You implied that the hunter/gatherers would have no time to make any discoveries since they'd be off looking for food all the time.

Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding, wealth inequality, class structure, war etc).

So I think the point is that with farming you get free time, but also all the bad things mentioned above. What Diamond is arguing is that hunter/gatherers didn't have to deal with most (all?) of the negatives but still had plenty of free time to pursue their leisure. That is, civilization might not have been set back just because we didn't adopt farming. In the end, it was sheer numbers that decided the outcome, not the best method.

1. I didn't write the original message.

2. Yeah, we have overcrowding, inequality, classes, and war. There are bugs in agriculture. Overcrowding just means that most people aren't dying off quickly like they did when there wasn't farming. Inequality just means that some people are now wealthy, where before nobody was wealthy. I'd bet war happened before, too; it just happens on a larger scale now because everything happens on a larger scale now.

3. You can't do most kinds of technology, education, or pretty much any other kind of endeavor if you have to spend all your time near enough naturally growing sources of food to not spend all your time in transport. Most kinds of art and technology come from concentrating appropriate quantities of appropriate kinds of people in one place. That's the point of universities, conservatories, and, for that matter, companies. Most interesting things in the world come from concentrating people.

Sorry, you're right... you didn't write the message. My mistake :)

> Second, one of Diamond's premises in this essay seems to be that farming and its consequences are, directly or indirectly, the cause of the malaise in the world (over-crowding, wealth inequality, class structure, war etc).

And he's not wrong; because farming is progress, and progress brings good things as well as bad things. But, as we're an intelligent species, we recognize bad things (yes, it takes generations) and work around them.

Again you're equating farming with progress. Can you say that if we hadn't adopted farming that wouldn't have made progress?

If we had stick with hunting/gathering, obviously it would not have been progress.

You might want to be careful about anachronism when stating facts.

It is true that very few today farm, but take into account that, within the past century alone, the yield of farmers has increased by an order of magnitude, not to mention the millennia of domestication and invention before it. For most of agricultural history, the percentage of farmers was much higher than 3%.

For example, from Wikipedia's article on Roman Agriculture:

>In the Roman Empire, a typical family of 3.25 persons would need between 7-8 iugera of land to meet minimum food requirements (without animals). If a family owned animals to help cultivate land, then 20 iugera is needed. There would not be a surplus production on this farm.

Well, all right, so agriculture sucked for a long time. It's still the case that the precursors to many of the good things we have today (e.g. computers) come from concentrating people in cities, which comes from farming.

That is true, but my point was merely countering the assertion that ancient farming cultures had more average free time than ancient hunter-gatherer cultures. I don't dispute that agriculture allowed technology to eventually flourish in the slightest; hundreds of millenia of slow-progress pre-agricultural prehistory are strong evidence of that.

Well, okay, but the point of the normal free time argument is that agricultural people have more time, and are therefore able to do more stuff. My point is, it may not be the case that agricultural people have more time on average, but it is the case that agricultural societies give enough people free time to do many more interesting things, and especially, enough free time to concentrate in cities and do things they couldn't do while not in cities. Which more or less negates the whole agriculture-is-a-mistake argument; once you show that agriculture lets you do lots of amazing things in cities, you can argue that those things are worth the various bugs in agriculture (most of which eventually get fixed anyway).

Actually, in traditional agricultural societies, almost everyone is a farmer. There's a reason that the vast majority of people in the middle ages were serfs -- it took that many people to feed themselves plus everyone else.

You can actually gauge how advanced a post-agricultural civilization is based on the percentage of the population that works in the agricultural sector. Most thresholds of technological advance (most notably, the industrial revolution) have allowed a smaller farmer class to feed an entire society.