flâneur

Justice from Inanna

northeastbranch.net · 813 words · saved by 1 readers

This poem was inspired by reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. The early portion of the book discusses in some detail a thing I’d known about for a while, but apparently isn’t commonly known: that the Agricultural Revolution resulted in a significant decrease in the standard of living for the vast majority of humans. It turns out that hunter-gatherers on relatively productive land—unlike those living in the borderline environments where they still exist today, because the land isn’t worthwhile for agricultural societies to expropriate—tend to be healthier and live longer than peasants did in most agricultural societies. The median level of well-being in agricultural societies may not have reached what it was in hunter-gatherer bands until a century or two ago. On the other hand, the elites: the people who could read and write, who owned the land (and the slaves), and whose names history remembers were much better off: their social roles couldn’t even exis

This poem was inspired by reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. The early portion of the book discusses in some detail a thing I’d known about for a while, but apparently isn’t commonly known: that the Agricultural Revolution resulted in a significant decrease in the standard of living for the vast majority of humans. It turns out that hunter-gatherers on relatively productive land—unlike those living in the borderline environments where they still exist today, because the land isn’t worthwhile for agricultural societies to expropriate—tend to be healthier and…

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