> a few billion others try to live on subsistence farming

There has never been as few famines as in today's world. I'm not sure what you are referring to. And expect for a few countries, life expectancy around the world as well as life standards are increasing progressively. As posted several times on HN, the future is about abundance, not poverty. Even people in Africa nowadays have mobile phones everywhere. Take your blinkers off.

Subsistence farming isn't a reference to famines, its a reference to inequality. My point was that even today, the majority of the civilized world spends their time doing endless agricultural labor for minimal benefit, even though one would think that we would have a better alternative implemented by this point (especially since anthro studies have shown that by and large hunter/gatherer societies spend much less time obtaining food and water than farming ones do).

And my earlier point on famine was that it was a much bigger problem for heavy agricultural societies in centuries past than it was for tribal societies; a bad harvest one year for a civilization could have disastrous effects, while a tribe could generally pack up and move.

And finally, while I agree that the future is abundance, I'm not convinced it's going to be abundance for everyone. Up to this point, wealth in every single civilization I can think of has been heavily stratified, with the top few percent taking the majority of everything (doesn't matter if its nobles, priests, corporate leaders or politicians). I don't really see this changing given our current political/cultural/economic systems, unless basic income becomes a thing (and even then, the stratification will remain; it'll just become irrelevant on a long enough scale of technological improvement).

You focus on the wrong thing. It's not about inequality, it's obvious that the rich should get richer faster. You don't expect the rich to have a 1 dollar salary increase while the poor gets the same thing. Obviously not. So, of course the gap is widening. And it's not necessarily a problem, because even the super rich can't spend all of what they earn, and that money ends up being recycled in the economy (investment, etc..).

It's rather about: is everyone getting richer ? And the answer is clearly yes. Even the poorer people are getting a bit more than before and can afford a better life than their parents. There is a clear progress in all strats of society. That's what abundance mean: it's not about who gets the biggest share of the cake, it's the fact that cake is growing and everyone gets more cake than before.

> It's not about inequality, it's obvious that the rich should get richer faster.

That the rich get richer faster and hoard more and more wealth while others fine their wealth decreasing over time is inequality.

> And it's not necessarily a problem, because even the super rich can't spend all of what they earn, and that money ends up being recycled in the economy (investment, etc..).

This is the trickle down theory, which is not true in any way whatsoever. Wealth does not get reinvested or redistributed in a way that reduces wealth disparity.

> It's rather about: is everyone getting richer ? And the answer is clearly yes.

This is demonstrably false. Don't confuse the availability of consumer goods with wealth. In the US, for example, actual wealth for low and middle class people/families has been declining for the last 30 years or so.

> Even the poorer people are getting a bit more than before and can afford a better life than their parents.

This is not true either. Homelessness, poverty, and unemployment rates are measured and we know that there is no long term downward trend for these things even as wealth disparity gets worse.

> That's what abundance mean: it's not about who gets the biggest share of the cake, it's the fact that cake is growing and everyone gets more cake than before.

Tell that to the people that are homeless or go hungry every day.

I've heard multiple references of the world wide poverty rate dropping by half in the last 20 years, here's a summary.

http://finallygoodnews.net/2013/06/20/half-way-there-world-w...

and the original article

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...

The article talks about reductions in extreme poverty, that is living on less than $1.25 a day. Note that doesn't really address wealth disparity, only that more people, esp. in China, are living with higher income.

However, this change doesn't make any statements about increasing equality for different economic classes nor does it talk about sustainability of a lowering extreme poverty rate. It also doesn't talk about various aspects about living just above that extreme poverty line or the challenge facing those people not living in places like China that have seen a big economic boom and are not likely to.

Still it's nice to know that at least people in extreme poverty are having their numbers decreased so drastically.

What?! It's all about inequality. The problem isn't everyone is getting richer it's that some are getting waaaay richer than other, they are grabbing the powers, making decisions and isolating themselves from the consequences of those decisions.

You can drain a lake for thing X until your lake runs dry. Who is least susceptible to change? Those with money . Either they move or they buy water).

The high Gini coefficient correlates and probably causes so many bad effects it shouldn't be ignored. It's not the one and only measure, and there are other important measures but it is a very good predictor of social unrest.

Not much social unrest in the past 50 years in all developed countries where inequalities have been growing when everyone gets richer.

And wealth is not a Lake. It does not run dry. You can create wealth. If wealth could not be created we would be super poor by now with 7 billion people on the planet compared to 100 years ago. But it's the exact opposite, we are hundred time richer than 100 years ago.

When everyone earns a little more than before over time, there's not so much cause for social unrest. Countries with growing economies tend to be more stable and peaceful Revolutions occur when people get poorer and lose hope for a better future.

Not much unrest? That claim seems dubious. What are your standards for not much unrest?

I never said it is a like a lake. I meant an actual lake. Lake was example how inequalities lead to richest people making policies that don't impact them. That is the biggest threat income inequality may present to any society.

Money is like gravity/mass. The more money you have the more money you attract. You may create wealth, but if you don't distribute it, some points may gather too much like their matter counterparts, turn into a black holes and consume the reality around them. It's like that man that asked Ford "If you don't give money to your workers, who's gonna buy your cars?"

> Countries with growing economies tend to be more stable and peaceful Revolutions occur when people get poorer and lose hope for a better future.

Wait, what about Brazil and Turkey? Aren't they growing economies? Why are their in state of unrest?

Notice the "tend to" != "are". Obviously there are other factors at work. But statistically speaking, or as a rule of thumb, growing economies are clearly leading to more stable countries.

Notice I said a similar thing. Gini coefficient correlates with lower life expectancy, more tensions, etc. I think it is a better predictor of peace and overall quality value, than growing economies.

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html

> thousands of years of war, famine, plague, slavery, and endless grinding inequality (still haven't quite fixed that one it seems) to get where we are now?

Are you trying to tell me that these "noble savages" didn't have war, didn't have famine or inequality?

Tribal warfare was usually a matter of establishing boundaries. If I remember my history correctly, this was pretty clearly demonstrated in battles between Native Americans and European colonists in the 16 and 1700s. Tribal attacks were closer to raids - warriors would fight, some people would die, but damage on a lasting scale was minimal. Colonist attacks, on the other hand, were going to war in the civilized measure of the term; burning down villages/towns, significantly more death, etc.

And as technology has advanced and civilizations have grown in size and strength, our conception of war has grown ever more brutal. Its been shown, for example, that troops at the time of the revolutionary war that fired on each other by and large missed - troops would load gunpowder but not the bullet; they would aim over the heads of the opposing troop at the last second; and so on. Something like 20 or 30 percent of the troops would actually be shooting at their opponents.

When this was discovered (I think in the early 1900s, but I don't really remember - could be as late as the 40s?) armies changed training methods; they would use targets closer to the shape of humans and so on, and there was a massive increase in the accuracy of soldiers using guns. There was also the advent of "total war" during the American Civil War, with the previously unheard-of scale of destruction that brought (which we now consider typical).

In short, "war" is a wildly different thing for two tribes of a few hundred people that have several hundred sq. miles of territory each (and no strong reason to invade the other), and two civilizations deploying thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of troops, with vastly more lethal weapons, to fight each other.

Famine is also less of an issue for a hunter/gatherer tribe; the large expanse of territory means that if one area is temporarily exhausted, you move somewhere else, or you follow the herds, etc.

Lastly, inequality doesn't seem to exist as a problem for most tribal societies. I mean, imagine living with a few hundred other people that are all you know - and are all you will ever know? People will go to great lengths to help their friends and family in our society; is it so strange to think that in a group where everyone knows each other and everyone works, lives and plays together, that the group will naturally enforce some sort of equilibrium between its members? That people will share and help each other based more on their capabilities and the expectations of others?

Further, we can see that stratification and inequality are endless problems for civilized societies - war, rebellion and revolts are constant themes throughout civilized history, often between the "haves" and the "have nots". These problems exist because civilization is an attempt to create human societies at scale - except humans aren't built for social structures beyond a few hundred people, and we have yet to find a way to replace that default social construct with something that works for tens of thousands or millions or billions of people.

"War" is also a wildly different prospect for a society in which a person cannot be considered a man until he has ambushed and killed a random stranger from another tribe and fashioned their body parts into a trophy, to a society so accustomed to peace it requires ever-more-complex rationalizations to breach it, having invented Geneva conventions, treaties and the concept of being "humane" along the way. At the end, you're just as dead whether killed by the ruthless efficiency of an atomic bomb or a Holocaust in a protracted as you are if ambushed by a lone member of another tribe that's just moved into your area.

Let's put things into perspective: a tribe lives in total isolation from the rest of the world for 65000 years, eating an abundance of fish, and the most advanced technology they develop over that time is weapons, which they default to brandishing at the first sign of any outsiders or unexplained phenomenon. That's hardly a great advertisement for the ability of their simpler social structures and lack of external threats to yield peace and harmony.

They may well have good reasons for being hostile to outsiders. Imagine 400 years ago they were friendly and approachable, but after a succession of whalers, slavers, British kidnappers and who knows what else, quickly came to the rational conclusion that outsiders are hostile and must be fought off.

It would be more accurate to say that it is not a great advertisement for our more complex social structures to yield harmony.

You are depicting war among tribes as being a lesser evil than the ones carried among nations. It would be better to compare the tribes' war with clashes among Eurasian ancient cities and later among medieval houses, in which "warriors would fight, some people would die, but damage on a lasting scale was minimal" would be valid for both. That kind of war was carried for thousands of year, and comparatively only little time-span holds the "total war" style.

You are also speculating about tribal social environment. For the most part of human history, the main factor for establishing relations was power enforced through violence. The size of the community didn't matter much, we have domestic violence even now. That "sort of equilibrium between its members" was/is assured most likely by brute force or its projection.