Unraveling the evidence about violence among very early humans

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As I've asked [Has Life Gotten Better?](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/), I've run into some intense debates about how violent early humans were.

* [The Better Angels of Our Nature](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) argues that our **distant past looks incredibly violent** compared to today (and the relevant page from [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths) gives a similar impression).

* But I've also seen pointed criticisms of this conclusion from sources such as [Hunter-Gatherers and Human Evolution](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/richard-b-lee-hunter-gatherers-and-human-evolution.pdf) and [War, Peace and Human Nature](https://smile.amazon.com/War-Peace-Human-Nature-Evolutionary-ebook/dp/B00EJ34SWA/). These works tend to imply that **early humans were relatively non-violent** (or at least didn't war much).

Trying to unravel and understand the points of disagreement has been confusing, but necessary to get a decent picture of [trends in quality of life](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/) over very long time periods. The rate of violent deaths is one of the few [systematic](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-the-post-industrial-era/#the-basic-approach), meaningful-seeming metrics for assessing quality of life before a couple hundred years ago, and strong claims are made on both sides.

As of now, I believe a different story than either "violent death rates have consistently gone down over time" or "early societies were remarkably peaceful." Here's my current impression:

|  |  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Hypothesis** | **Advanced by** | **Time period** | **My take** |
| (A) There was a **rise in violent death rates** sometime around (or before) 10,000 BCE, as people moved from a nomadic lifestyle (moving from place to place) to a sedentary one (staying in one place indefinitely).
  | Some anthropologists, including critics of *[Better Angels of our Nature](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/)* | Varies by region, but first transition would be sometime around (or perhaps before) 10,000 BCE
  | I'd guess this is **true**, with low confidence.
  |
| (B) There was a **fall in violent death rates** during the initial transition from non-state to state societies.
  | *[Better Angels of our Nature](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/)* | Varies by region, but first development of major states was around 5,000 BCE.
  | I am **unconvinced** / don't find this particularly likely.
  |
| (C) Today's society (especially the developed world) has **lower violent death rates** than prehistoric societies, both nomadic and sedentary.
  | *[Better Angels of our Nature](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/)* | 10,000 BCE and earlier vs. today
  | I'd guess this is **true**, with moderate confidence.
  |
| (C) There was a **fall in violent death rates** in Europe starting around 1300, and the US around 1600.
  | *[Better Angels of our Nature](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/)* | 1300 CE and later
  | Seems **true** based on homicide data, though large-scale atrocities could complicate the picture (future post).
  |
| (D) It's **unclear what happened to violent death rates** in between the initial transition to sedentary societies and 1300 CE.
  | (Additional observation I'm making)
  | Period between 10,000 BCE and 1300-1600 CE
  | Seems **true** |

Simplified visual timeline version:

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/11/violence-timeline-graphic.png)

Below, I will:

* Lay out the best data I know of (from [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths)) for violent death rates in pre-state societies. I'll briefly discuss the interpretation ("B" above) that early societies were very violent, and became less so as powerful states arose.

* Examine the main criticism I’ve seen of this data. The criticism is that one needs to distinguish between “sedentary” pre-state societies (which stay indefinitely in one area, and tend to be relatively hierarchical) and “nomadic” societies (which move from place to place, tend to be more egalitarian, and are hypothesized to be more representative of the distant past).

* Try to pull apart and compare (1) “sedentary” societies; (2) “nomadic” societies; (3) today’s world. I think that **"sedentary" societies look more violent than "nomadic" ones, implying that violence rose at some point in the past** (lending support to (A) in the chart above), while **both look more violent than today's world** (lending support to part of (C) in the chart above).

* Discuss the state of the evidence on what happened to violent death rates in between prehistory and today (which will cover (D) and part of (C) in the chart above).

Data on violent death rates from pre-state societies
----------------------------------------------------

Chapter 2 of [Better Angels of Our Nature](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) makes comparisons between violent death statistics in non-state societies vs. state societies. Since (it seems) there were no "states" from the beginning of our species until the emergence of the first states around ~5,000 BCE,[1](#fn1) the presumption is that these statistics are a decent way to get at the prevalence of violence in the distant pre-state past, compared to the prevalence of violence in later periods with states.

For a summary, I'll lay out these graphics from [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths), which are essentially the same as those from Better Angels, with some updates and corrections.

One immediate observation: **I don't think this data provides much evidence about the argument that the early transitions from non-state to state societies led to a decline in violence ("B" in the [chart above](#VisualTimeline)).**[2](#fn2)This is because:

* The **state societies presented are all from 1600 CE and later**, other than "Central Mexico, 1419-1519 CE" (whose violent death rate fits right in with the non-state rates).

* 1600 CE is a very long time after the appearance of the first states. So this is a comparison between non-state societies and *recent or modern* state societies - not between non-state societies and the state societies that closely followed them.[3](#fn3)

What this data may (and, as I'll argue below, does) show is that *today's* societies appear to have low violent death rates compared to the distant past.

Nomadic vs. sedentary societies
-------------------------------

I've looked for criticisms of the arguments about early violence given in *Better Angels.* One of the major ones is that **the earliest societies weren't just non-state societies - they were specifically *nomadic foraging* societies, which were more egalitarian than other types of non-state societies. And the high violent death rates above mostly don't come from *nomadic foraging* societies.**

For an example of this criticism, see quote in footnote from [Hunter-Gatherer and Human Evolution](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/richard-b-lee-hunter-gatherers-and-human-evolution.pdf) by Richard B. Lee.[4](#fn4) (For some other criticisms and my responses, see [Appendix 1](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-supplement/#appendix-1-criticisms-of-the-case-that-very-early-societies-had-high-violent-death-rates).)

In a sense, this critique isn't directly contradicting *Better Angels*, which has explicitly chosen to take a "state vs. non-state societies" lens rather than an "earlier humans vs. later humans" lens.[5](#fn5) But if nomadic foragers were less violent than other societies *and* most early societies were nomadic foragers, **this would mean that there was at least one historical case of violent death rates going *up* (even if they later went back down).**

From what I can tell, the distinction between nomadic foraging societies and sedentary societies is widely recognized as real and important, though much about it is disputable and disputed. I have seen a lot of casual references to this distinction; the most thorough discussion I've found is in Chapter 9 of [The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers](https://smile.amazon.com/Lifeways-Hunter-Gatherers-Foraging-Spectrum/dp/1107607612/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2WZSJ3SYX902C&dchild=1&keywords=lifeways+of+hunter+gatherers&qid=1630304890&sprefix=lifeways+of+%2Caps%2C201&sr=8-1) (abbreviated for the rest of this piece as **"Lifeways";** more [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-supplement/#some-key-sources-i've-used) on why I consider this source especially helpful/credible). Here's a quote giving the basic idea:

> If I asked the average anthropology student to imagine a group of hunter-gatherers, it is most likely that the Ju/’hoansi would come to mind: small, peaceful, nomadic bands composed of men and women with few possessions and who are equal in wealth, opportunity, and status. Yet ... the average student is also aware of cases that easily overturn that image: large, sedentary, warring, possession-laden Northwest Coast societies, where men boasted of their exploits, status, and power ...
>

[the latter] are nonegalitarian societies, whose elites possess slaves, fight wars, and overtly seek prestige. Although anthropologists have long considered [these societies] to be exceptions, products of resource-rich environments, archaeologists continue to discover evidence of nonegalitarian foraging societies in many environments ...

It's important to note that when Lifeways uses the term "egalitarian," it's only in a relative sense - for example, it specifically states that even "egalitarian" societies have [inegalitarian gender relations](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/#systematic-evidence-on-pre-agriculture-gender-relations).[6](#fn6) "Egalitarian" in this context seems to refer to (a) general norms against *explicit* hierarchy and boasting of status;[7](#fn7) (b) perhaps a lack of permanent power hierarchy.[8](#fn8)

The remainder of that chapter implies that nonegalitarian societies are more likely to be *sedentary* (occupying a single area indefinitely) as opposed to *nomadic* (needing to periodically move in order to get to an area with more resources). One rough intuition I've seen is that it's hard to accumulate wealth in a society that periodically relocates entirely (and that lacks currency, banking, etc.) At the same time, this chapter emphasizes that this association (and the idea of "egalitarian" societies) can be oversimplified (quotes in footnote).[9](#fn9)

**The reason this might matter is the claim that - to quote Lee again - "nomadic foragers ... reflect most closely the characteristics of ancient foragers."** The idea being that for most of human history (hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years), most humans were mobile and "egalitarian," and it was relatively recent (perhaps somewhat, but not long, before the [Neolithic Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution) of ~10,000 BCE) that sedentary societies started popping up.

This is a view that many seem to hold, including Lee as quoted above, as well as Robert Kelly (the author of Lifeways)[10](#fn10) - though I have also seen it disputed by those who believe that early humans could have been largely nonegalitarian. (*Better Angels* is one of the sources that argues the latter - quotes in footnote).[11](#fn11)

To recap this section:

* There is a common association between societies' being *nomadic* and *egalitarian*, though I haven't seen a systematic examination of the association, and believe that this idea is at least somewhat oversimplified.

* There is a common view that nomadic, egalitarian societies are most representative of the distant past, though this too is disputed.

With this in mind, I think it makes sense to **try to distinguish between nomadic/egalitarian and sedentary/nonegalitarian societies in the data provided [above](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/54b3457a-e728-4db3-9b61-5bde8f2e5283/#data-on-violent-death-rates-from-pre-state-societies).** I'll do that next.

Violent death rates in nomadic societies, sedentary societies, and today's societies
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Unfortunately, it **is not at all straightforward to determine whether a given society is "nomadic/egalitarian" or "sedentary/inegalitarian."**

* These distinctions are only sometimes flagged in the papers that discuss violence stats.

* They don't appear to be clear-cut or undisputed.

* I've often been unable to get confident about what category a given society belongs in via searching, sometimes because societies gradually transition from nomadic to sedentary over time (so the timing of when the violence stats were assessed becomes crucial).

* Both *Better Angels* and [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths) rely primarily on three "aggregator" sources that pull many estimates of violent death rates from previous papers. But when I examined these, I felt that none gave reliable classifications.
	+ [Keeley 1996](https://smile.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savage/dp/0195119126/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=keeley+war+before+civilization&qid=1630310141&sr=8-1) provides the largest number of estimates. Unfortunately, it says little about its methods for deciding what to include, and doesn't distinguish between nomadic and sedentary societies. Additionally, commentary from a later paper ([Bowles 2009](http://science.umd.edu/faculty/wilkinson/BIOL608W/BowlesScience2009.pdf), noted below) made me concerned about its reliability.[12](#fn12)+ [Bowles 2009](http://science.umd.edu/faculty/wilkinson/BIOL608W/BowlesScience2009.pdf) distinguishes explicitly between sedentary and nomadic societies in one of its tables.[13](#fn13) However, this table seems to contain 4 meaningful errors in its 8 rows (see [appendix](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-supplement/#appendix-3-errors-in-one-of-the-most-cited-sources-for-violence-among-foragers)). (BTW, I think this topic is cursed. Lifeways contains a table that should be a collection of homicide rates among foraging societies, but is an erroneous reprint of the previous table; and one of [Our World in Data's](https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths#rate-of-violent-deaths-in-non-state-societies) key tables is also an erroneous reprint of the previous table, which they haven't fixed even though I emailed them about it, though in that case I was able to find the right table by guessing the URL. At least this blog post is perfect.)

	+ [Gat 2006](https://smile.amazon.com/War-Human-Civilization-Azar-Gat-ebook/dp/B006QV81C6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=4BXCGEQ1DY1P&dchild=1&keywords=war+in+human+civilization+by+azar+gat&qid=1630310362&sprefix=azar+gat+%2Caps%2C207&sr=8-1) mostly doesn't distinguish between sedentary and nomadic.[14](#fn14)

To try to get at the distinction, I tried to identify "nomadic forager" societies using Lifeways, [Youngberg and Hanson 2010](http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/forager.pdf), and the Bowles 2009 classifications, in the set of societies that Our World in Data lists [violent death rates for](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/rate-of-violent-deaths-non-state-societies).[15](#fn15)

I was only able to identify three:

|  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Society** | **Violent deaths per 100,000 people per year** | **Why I think they count as nomadic foragers** |
| Murngin
  | 330
  | [Bowles 2009](http://science.umd.edu/faculty/wilkinson/BIOL608W/BowlesScience2009.pdf) classifies them this way
  |
| Tiwi
  | 160
  | [Youngberg and Hanson 2010](http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/forager.pdf) names them as one of five societies that best meet the criteria for "societies that most resemble the social environment where most human psychology seems to have evolved: small bands of nomadic foragers." Lifeways also labels the Tiwi "egalitarian" in Table 7-9.
  |
| !Kung (aka Ju/'hoansi)
  | 42
  | Very commonly cited as an example of a nomadic, egalitarian society, e.g. they are the example given when Lifeways explains the distinction
  |

Next, I'll discuss what this tells us about (a) violent death rates in nomadic vs. sedentary societies; (b) violent death rates in early societies vs. today's.

### Violent death rates in nomadic vs. sedentary societies

The violent death rates above **seem significantly lower than what you'd get if you weren't separating out nomadic foragers.**

* In context of the [full Our World in Data set](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/rate-of-violent-deaths-non-state-societies), these societies rank as the 17th, 25th and 28th most violent out of 30.

* The median violent death rate (per 100k people per year) for that set is 420, compared to 160 for the median of this set.

* I believe that most of the other, generally more violent societies are probably sedentary, based on their locations[16](#fn16)) and a few confirmed cases.

* A couple other data points show a similar pattern of sedentary populations having notably (but not astronomically - something like 2x) higher violent death rates.[17](#fn17)

This implies - if we accept the (non-consensus, but widely held) point that the earliest humans were mostly nomadic - that **violent death rates likely rose** as people transitioned from nomadic to sedentary societies.

### Violent death rates in nomadic societies vs. today's world

It's not totally straightforward to compare the above figures to figures from today's societies, because we need clarity on what exactly "deaths from violence" are - do they include homicides? Battle deaths? Suicides? Poisonings? Deaths from violent accidents and encounters with animals?

* My current impression is that the violent death figures cited above are inclusive of battle deaths and homicides (which I'd guess can be a fuzzy line for small bands of people),[18](#fn18) while it's ambiguous whether they include other sorts of violent deaths.[19](#fn19)* I haven't found a ready-made analogous statistic for today's societies (something combining homicides, battle deaths, and potentially more), so I tabulated the figures myself [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z1C1xPE2CXrwEPAwjOJRvis1DV9S6dTtj0V7LOwylDs/edit#gid=142977462) (based on this [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-deaths-by-cause?country=~OWID_WRL) source, as well as [this population data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population)), creating both a "high" and "low" violent death rate estimate.
	+ The "low" estimate is just deaths from terrorism, interpersonal violence, and "conflict and terrorism".

	+ The high estimate adds in executions, poisonings, self-harm deaths, and road injuries (a big one).

Here's my summary:

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Society** | **Violent deaths per 100,000 people per year** |
| Murngin
  | 330
  |
| Tiwi
  | 160
  |
| !Kung (aka Ju/'hoansi)
  | 42
  |
| World (today) - high estimate
  | 35.4
  |
| USA (today) - high estimate
  | 35.2
  |
| World (today) - low estimate
  | 7.4
  |
| Western Europe (today) - high estimate
  | 6.6
  |
|  USA (today) - low estimate
  | 6.2
  |
| Western Europe (today) - low estimate
  | 0.3
  |

The upshot - **today's world looks nowhere near as violent as the few foraging societies we have figures for.**

A couple of additional notes on these comparisons in a footnote.[20](#fn20)

Note that there are significant [caveats to the data on foraging societies](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-supplement/#appendix-1-criticisms-of-the-case-that-very-early-societies-had-high-violent-death-rates), and I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out upon further investigation that - when accounting for large-scale wars and atrocities - today's world looks at least as violent as nomadic foraging societies. (I wouldn't be shocked, but it's not what I currently expect.)

Comparison to societies in between then and now
-----------------------------------------------

As discussed above, it looks like the societies most likely to be representative of our most distant past have high violent death rates compared to today. It also looks like violent death rates went up at some point in the distant past (around or prior to 10,000 BCE).[21](#fn21)

What about in between ~10,000 BCE and today?

There isn't a huge amount we can say about this period. Interestingly, **all of the data we have on violent death rates seems to be either (interpreted as) being about the very distant past (many thousands of years ago) or about the relatively recent past (1300 CE and later).**

My rough understanding of why this is:

* To make guesses about the distant past, we can look at currently-existing societies that seem to have "never modernized" in the sense of adopting agriculture or becoming part of large-scale states.[22](#fn22)* Starting in 1300 CE, we start to have (in a small number of European countries) systematic written records of things like court cases that make it possible to estimate homicide rates.

* But for the in-between period, we have neither.[23](#fn23)

Still, we can look at the data we do have on 1300 CE and later, and draw some clues from that. My current overall guess:

* Violent death rates fell at some point in between ~10,000 BCE and the kind of modernization that came with court records and made homicide rate estimates possible (around 1300 CE in Europe, later elsewhere).

* After that sort of modernization, they fell fairly steadily.

I'll explain these points next.

The earliest systematic data I've seen from actual past homicide reports (as opposed to inference from [ethnography or archaeology](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-supplement/#ethnographic-and-archaeological-data)) is from [this chart](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-across-western-europe?time=1300..2016) (there is a similar one in Better Angels):

The starting homicide rate is 25-55 per 100k people per year, which looks low compared to the figures above (especially the figures that don't distinguish between nomadic and sedentary societies!) This implies that there was some decline in violence even before 1300 (in addition to the big decline afterward, shown).

However:

**The chart is only of homicides, and other sources of violent deaths could complicate the picture.** For example, eyeballing [this chart](https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace#england-over-the-long-run) suggests that we might want to add something like 50 to the figure for the UK just to account for battle deaths; and we don't know how much more we'd have to add if we wanted to include suicides, executions and violent accidents.

**Western Europe may not be representative.** Some of the only other homicide data I've seen from around this period is in the following charts from *Better Angels:*

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/11/homicide-rates-1.png)

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/11/homicide-rates-2.png)

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/11/homicide-rates-3.png)

The **starting rates here don't look clearly lower than the figures for nomadic forager societies**.[24](#fn24)

My current overall guess: after violent death rates ~doubled with the transition from nomadic to sedentary societies (discussed [above](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/54b3457a-e728-4db3-9b61-5bde8f2e5283/#nomadic-vs-sedentary-societies)), they then fell back to the original rates (but not necessarily much below) at some point in between then and the kind of modernization that came with court records and made homicide rate estimates possible. After that sort of modernization, they fell fairly steadily, as shown in the above charts.

I've now covered each of (A)-(D) discussed [in the intro](#SummaryTable). Here's the graphical summary again:

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/11/violence-timeline-graphic.png)

Whew! I hope you found that at least somewhat less confusing to read than I did to write. Having gotten something resembling clarity on violent death rates over the long run, I can use this for the broader question of whether life has gotten better.

The story for "overall quality of life" looks broadly similar to the story for violent death rates: things look like they got worse around 10,000 BCE (when agriculture was developed), then we have a big mystery between then and the early 2nd millennium, and since then there was some improvement (which accelerated in the Industrial Revolution a couple hundred years ago). This is a different picture from either "Life has gotten steadily better throughout our history" or "Life was best in the state of nature," both of which I think are more common memes.

---

Footnotes
---------

1. I haven't tracked down a satisfying source for this, though I also haven't seen much controversy over it ([not that that gives too much comfort](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/#the-afaict-poorly-cited-and-unconvincing-case-that-pre-agriculture-gender-relations-were-egalitarian)). The [Wikipedia page on states](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)) makes this claim, as does [Better Angels](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) ("It took around five thousand years after the origin of agriculture for true states to appear on the scene," from chapter 2, citing four sources). [↩](#fnref1)- Better Angels also makes an additional argument that the transition to state societies brought a reduction in violence: ""The major cleft in the graph, then, separates the anarchical bands and tribes from the governed states. But we have been comparing a motley collection of archaeological digs, ethnographic tallies, and modern estimates, some of them calculated on the proverbial back of an envelope. Is there some way to juxtapose two datasets directly, one from hunter-gatherers, the other from settled civilizations, matching the people, era, and methods as closely as possible? The economists Richard Steckel and John Wallis recently looked at data on nine hundred skeletons of Native Americans, distributed from southern Canada to South America, all of whom died before the arrival of Columbus.59 They divided the skeletons into hunter-gatherers and city dwellers, the latter from the civilizations in the Andes and Mesoamerica such as the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans. The proportion of hunter-gatherers that showed signs of violent trauma was 13.4 percent, which is close to the average for the hunter-gatherers in figure 2–2. The proportion of city dwellers that showed signs of violent trauma was 2.7 percent, which is close to the figures for state societies before the present century. So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold." I haven't dug into this study but I have a number of reservations, including generic skepticism of any one study, and the observation that <10% of people worldwide lived in cities at ~every point before 1800 (this is based on a calculation I did off of [HYDE data](https://dataportaal.pbl.nl/downloads/HYDE/HYDE3.2/)). [↩](#fnref2)- While some of the non-state data is also recent, I believe it is intended as evidence about the very distant past, when the vast majority of people lived in non-state societies (as opposed to today, when almost none do). [↩](#fnref3)- "Historically nomadic foragers (HNFs), small in scale, mobile, and egalitarian, reflect most closely the characteristics of ancient foragers, a point emphasized by Fry (2006, 2013). But the bellicose school loads their sampling procedures with groups that depart sharply from this pattern.

 "Mounted foragers of the American Great Plains (De Maillie 2000) and sedentary nonegalitarian foragers of California (Heizer 1978) and the north west coast of North America (Suttles 1990; Flannery & Marcus 2012, pp. 66-87; Daly 2014) all demonstrated significant levels of war-like behaviors. Yet, horse transport on the plains and stockaded settled villages on the west coast are completely absent from the archaeological record of pre-Neolithic foragers. But at least these are examples of hunter-gatherers ...

 "In his 2011 book, Pinker does address the differences between foragers and farmers, but he still loads his sample with cases that are not representative of HNFs [Historically Nomadic Foragers]. For example, in his table 'Rate of Death in Warfare in Nonstate and State Societies' (Pinker 2011, figures 2– 3, p. 53), the 27 nonstate cases are heavily loaded with New Guinean and nearby farming societies (12 of 27) and Californian and Plains Indians (5 of 27); only 5 of 27 of the cases remotely qualify as HNFs.

 (Lee doesn't say which 5.) [↩](#fnref4)- "For all these reasons, it makes no sense to test for historical changes in violence by plotting deaths against a time line from the calendar. If we discover that violence has declined in a given people, it is because their mode of social organization has changed, not because the historical clock has struck a certain hour, and that change can happen at different times, if it happens at all. Nor should we expect a smooth reduction in violence along the continuum from simple, nomadic hunter-gatherers to complex, sedentary hunter-gatherers to farming tribes and chiefdoms to petty states to large states. The major transition we should expect is at the appearance of the first form of social organization that shows signs of design for reducing violence within its borders. That would be the centralized state, the Leviathan ... What happens, then, when we use the emergence of states as the dividing line and put hunter-gatherers, hunter-horticulturalists, and other tribal peoples (from any era) on one side, and settled states (also from any era) on the other?" From [Better Angels of our Nature](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1), Chapter 2.  [↩](#fnref5)- "Even the most egalitarian of foraging societies are not truly egalitarian because men, without the need to bear and breastfeed children, are in a better position than women to give away highly desired food and hence acquire prestige. The potential for status inequalities between men and women in foraging societies (see Chapter 9) is rooted in the division of labor (vCollier and Rosaldo 1981: 282; Bliege Bird, Codding, and Bird 2009)." [↩](#fnref6)- Lifeways: "There are people in every society who will try to lord it over others, but egalitarian cultures contain ways to level individuals, to 'cool their hearts' as the Ju/’hoansi say. Humor is used to belittle the successful but boastful Ju/’hoan hunter; if that fails, he will be shamed with the label !xka ≠xan, 'far-hearted,' meaning mean or stingy (Lee 1988: 267). The Martu berate such people with warnings that they are 'like rocks,' with no compassion (Bird and Bliege Bird 2009: 44). Wives use sexual humor to keep a husband in line; and gambling, accusations of stinginess, or demand-sharing maintain a constant circulation of goods and prevent hoarding." [↩](#fnref7)- "Group leaders are common in egalitarian societies – Shoshone 'rabbit bosses' for example – but they are temporary and have their position only because they have demonstrated skill at a particular task. Their leadership does not carry over into other realms of life, nor is it permanent." [↩](#fnref8)- "Rather than attributing nonegalitarian foragers simply to 'resource abundance,' as many have done in the past, we will see that sedentism, the resource base, geographic circumscription, storage, population pressure, group formation, and enculturative processes all play a role ... The term 'egalitarian' does not mean that all members have the same of everything – goods, food, prestige, or authority. Not everyone is equal in egalitarian societies, but everyone has (or is alleged to have) equal access to food, to the technology needed to acquire resources, and to the paths leading to status and prestige ... Even in this regard, the inheritance of material wealth (especially productive land) and relational wealth (political connections) give some individuals a head start in life ... Egalitarianism can mask hierarchy. Australian Aboriginal men acquire authority and power in religious affairs by disengaging from property, by giving away meat, for example. But one can only disengage from property if, at some level, one claims a right to it (see Bird and Bliege Bird 2009). Appeals to autonomy and equality by informants in egalitarian societies often contradict an ethnographic reality in which some members have higher status and greater access to resources than others. We have already seen that people are well aware of, give greater prestige to, and may lose some of their autonomy to men who are good hunters. Differences in autonomy are perhaps especially pronounced between men and women." [↩](#fnref9)- "On the strength of archaeological data, it is reasonable to assume that nonegalitarian society developmentally followed egalitarian society. On the northwest coast, for example, slavery appears about 1500 BC, warfare by AD 1000, and nonegalitarian societies by at least AD 200 (Donald 1997; Ames and Maschner 1999; Ames, 2001, 2008; Grier 2006; see also reviews of global prehistory by R. C. Kelly [2000] and Keeley [1996], and Kennett [2005] on California’s Channel Islands). Egalitarian behaviors and an egalitarian ethos were adaptive for quite a long time in human history before the selective balance tipped in favor of nonegalitarian behaviors and a nonegalitarian ethos (Cohen 1985)." [↩](#fnref10)- From *Better Angels of our Nature*, chapter 2: "The nonstate peoples we are most familiar with are the hunters and gatherers living in small bands ... But these people have survived as hunter-gatherers only because they inhabit remote parts of the globe that no one else wants. As such they are not a representative sample of our anarchic ancestors, who may have enjoyed flusher environments. Until recently other foragers parked themselves in valleys and rivers that were teeming with fish and game and that supported a more affluent, complex, and sedentary lifestyle. The Indians of the Pacific Northwest, known for their totem poles and potlatches, are a familiar example."

[Bowles 2009](http://science.umd.edu/faculty/wilkinson/BIOL608W/BowlesScience2009.pdf), one of the main sources of violence data, seems to take a similar view: "Because hunter-gatherer populations occupying resource-rich areas in the Late Pleistocene [[starting over 100,000 years ago](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene)] and early Holocene were probably sedentary (at least seasonally), I have included wars involving settled as well as purely mobile populations." [↩](#fnref11)- "I studied all available archaeological and ethnographic sources that present (or are cited as presenting) relevant data. Of these 34 sources, 14 were found to present data that were unrepresentative (for example, when warfare was primarily with modern agricultural populations), unreliable, or inadequate ... prehistoric warfare was frequent and lethal, but somewhat less so than estimates based on data in the standard source for these estimates (6)." (6) is a reference to Keeley 1996. I also note that Bowles 2009 is later, examined Keeley 1996, and contains far fewer data points than Keeley 1996, implying that it chose to discard a lot of what Keeley 1996 lists. [↩](#fnref12)- The one using ethnographic data, i.e., studies of today's foraging societies; it does not do this in the table using archaeological data [↩](#fnref13)- It does specify that some of its figures come from agricultural societies, which implies that they are sedentary or at least have the ability to be sedentary (see previous [characterization](https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#the-pre-agriculture-eden-hypothesis) of the significance of agriculture). [↩](#fnref14)- I skipped two other tables that list violent death shares instead of rates, because shares are much harder to use for the comparisons I want to make later in this post. The "violent death share" is the number of deaths from violence divided by the total number of deaths; the "violent death rate" is the number of deaths from violence divided by the population. [↩](#fnref15)- I've generally seen New Guinea and the American Northwest identified with sedentary populations. From Lifeways: "We have less ethnographic information on nonegalitarian than on egalitarian foraging societies; these include Florida’s Calusa (Widmer 1988; Marquardt 2001; although the Calusa probably cultivated some plants such as gourds and chili peppers); various California foragers, with the Chumash of southern California the most heavily studied (e.g., Bean 1978; Arnold 2001a,b; 2004; Kennett 2005; Gamble 2008); the Northwest Coast (Ames 1995; Ames and Maschner 1999; Grier 2006); the Plateau region of the northwestern United States (Hayden 1992; Prentiss and Kuijt 2004); some New Guinean peoples (Roscoe 2006); and Japan’s Ainu (Watanabe 1968, 1972a,b)."  [↩](#fnref16)- * When comparing the [violent death shares for verified nomadic hunter-gatherers](#violent-death-rates-in-nomadic-societies-vs-todays-world) to the [full set of Our World in Data figures](https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths#share-of-violent-deaths-for-non-state-societies): the former has a median violent death share of 7.2%, compared to about 15% for Our World in Data.)

	* Table 2.1 of [Keeley 1996](https://www.amazon.com/War-Before-Civilization-Peaceful-Savage/dp/0195119126/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=war+before+civilization&qid=1630345458&sr=8-1) for example, estimates frequency of war by level of organization; it has "band" (the smallest group) the lowest. [↩](#fnref17)- The Tiwi figure cited above comes from the following quote in [this book](https://smile.amazon.com/Man-Hunter-Richard-Borshay-Lee-ebook/dp/B0747SDBYJ/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=man+the+hunter&qid=1630364748&sr=8-1): "In one decade (1893-1903), at least sixteen males in the 25-10-45 age group were killed in feuding; either during sneak attacks or in arranged pitch battles. Those killed represented over 10 per cent of all males in that age category, which was the age group of the young fathers." No indication is given of how this was converted to a "violent deaths per 100k people per year" rate, and I'm also concerned that this might be someone noting a particularly violent (rather than representative) decade (although it might also understate violence if it is focused specifically on feuding). This has increased my interest in a more thorough examination of where all these figures are coming from. I haven't yet been able to track down a primary source for either of the two other figures cited above, as both come from out-of-print books. [↩](#fnref18)- For the archaeological studies specifically - which I am not focusing on for reasons noted above - it looks like they are generally looking for the sorts of injuries that would've been inflicted by other humans, such as [parry fractures](https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100307929#:~:text=A%20fracture%2C%20usually%20of%20a,Subjects%3A%20Law). [↩](#fnref19)- * There are of course *some* countries today with higher violence rates than are in the table above. But only one (Syria) has a rate higher than the Tiwi, and only about 20% of the listed countries have rates higher than the Ju/'hoansi - and this is using the more inclusive violence definitions that include e.g. road injuries.

	* The 20th century had much bigger, bloodier wars than are going on today, and those sorts of events can significantly increase total deaths from violence: I [estimated](https://blog.givewell.org/2015/07/08/has-violence-declined-when-large-scale-atrocities-are-systematically-included/) that 20th-century atrocities (including e.g. estimated deaths from human-caused famines), spread out over the whole 20th century, accounted for about 81 violent deaths per 100k people per year. (The 20th century was unusually bad in this regard.) Even adding that figure in, though, would leave the modern world looking considerably less violent than 2 of the 3 nomadic foraging societies. [↩](#fnref20)- This is when the [Neolithic Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution) caused a transition to agricultural - and therefore sedentary - societies. Though it's possible that there was a transition to sedentary societies *before* the transition to agricultural societies.

 I assume that most people were living in agricultural societies not too long after ~10,000 BCE, because of my impression (which I don't have a clean citation for) that the agricultural societies experienced much faster population growth than other societies.  [↩](#fnref21)- And as I stated [above](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/54b3457a-e728-4db3-9b61-5bde8f2e5283/#data-on-violent-death-rates-from-pre-state-societies), I don't think we actually have a clean comparison between early non-state societies and early state societies - we only have early non-state societies vs. state societies after 1600 or so. [↩](#fnref22)- In theory, we can look at archaeological remains as well, though I am generally skeptical of this sort of evidence (more [in appendix](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-supplement/#appendix-2-a-note-on-archaeological-data)), and I haven't been able to find systematic examinations of this data for the "in-between period." [↩](#fnref23)- Though with the exception of Maryland and Virginia before 1650, they do look lower than the figures that include both nomadic and sedentary societies, and probably would be even if we added deaths from battles, accidents and executions. [↩](#fnref24)


Cold Links: nonfiction yarns

These are longreads that I recommend because they're just good yarns. There's usually not a broader lesson. I don't read tons of these so you probably have better ones ([send them in](https://www.guidedtrack.com/programs/4kal2ue/run?posttitle=Cold%20Links%3A%20nonfiction%20yarns)!) but these are good.

A few in the "insane stories about long cons" genre:

* [This](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/08/11/the-chameleon-annals-of-crime-david-grann) is my favorite thing I've read in the New Yorker. I won't spoil it (beyond the category above).

* [Emma Perrier was deceived by an older man on the internet—a hoax that turned into an unbelievable love story.](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/hook-line-and-sinker/542748/) I spent the entire article wondering whether she was going to end up with the man who had romanced her with a fake photo and dialogue, or ... with the random model whose photo it was! And it was the latter! I guess this is just the exact plot of Cyrano de Bergerac.

* [‘I was a teacher for 17 years, but I couldn’t read or write’](http://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43700153)

Pretty incredible [political murder mystery](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/04/a-murder-foretold), If you want the quick version check out the first paragraph of this [bonkers Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Rosenberg_Marzano) (but it will "spoil" the article). I think the article doesn't add much except the pleasure of consuming a crazy story slowly. Which is something.

Great [yarn from Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/8rz316/what_really_happened_in_real_life_that_if_you_saw/e0w12o3/) that I won't spoil (might not be true, but good either way).

2-hour [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwno5iettvU) on a former Christian explaining his conversion to atheism. I recommend [converting it to an mp3 and listening to it like a podcast](http://www.vidtomp3.com/), since the visuals add ~nothing. I found this really fascinating and moving, just a very honest and thorough account of how someone changed their mind.

For email filter: florpschmop


Weak point in “most important century”: full automation

I thought it would be good to write a couple of posts covering what I see as the weakest points in the [“most important century” series](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/), now that I’ve gotten some reactions and criticisms.

I currently think the weakest point in the series runs something like this:

* It’s true that if AI could *literally* automate *everything* needed to [cause scientific and technological advancement](https://www.cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai/), the consequences outlined in the series (a dramatic acceleration in scientific and technological advancement, leading to a radically unfamiliar future) would follow.

* But what if AI could only automate *99%* of what’s needed for scientific and technological advancement? What if AI systems could propose experiments but not run them? What if they could propose experiments and run them, but not get regulatory clearance for them? **In this case, it’s plausible that the 1% of things AIs couldn’t do quickly and automatically would “bottleneck” progress, leading to dramatically less growth.*** The series [cites expert opinion on when transformative AI will be developed](https://www.cold-takes.com/are-we-trending-toward-transformative-ai-how-would-we-know/#surveying-experts). *Technically speaking*, the type of situation that the respondents are forecasting - “unaided machines can accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers" - should be enough for a productivity explosion. But the people surveyed might be thinking of a *slightly* less powerful type of AI than is literally implied by that statement - which could lead to dramatically smaller impacts. Or they could be imagining that even AIs with *intellectual capability* to match humans still might lack the in-practice ability to do key tasks because (for example) they aren’t instinctively trusted by humans. Either way, they (the survey respondents) could be imagining something almost as capable - but not nearly as impactful - as the type of AI I discuss.

* Furthermore, even if AIs could do everything that *humans* do to automate scientific and technological advancement, their scientific and technological progress might have to wait on the results of real-world experiments, which could slow them down a lot.

In brief: **a small gap in what AI can automate could lead to a lot less impact than the series implies**. Automating “almost everything” could be very different from automating everything.

This is important context for the attempts to [forecast transformative AI](https://www.cold-takes.com/where-ai-forecasting-stands-today/): they are really forecasting something pretty extreme.

My response
-----------

I think all of the above is about right as stated: we would indeed need extreme levels of automation to produce the consequences I envision. (There could be a few tasks that need to be done by humans, but they’d have to be quite a small and limited set in order to avoid slowing things down a lot via bottleneck.)

It’s also true that I haven’t spelled out how such extreme automation could be achieved - how each activity needed to advance scientific and technological advancement (including running experiments and waiting for them to finish) could be done in a quick and/or automated way, without human or other bottlenecks slowing things down much.

With that acknowledged, it’s also worth noting that the extreme levels of automation **need not apply to the whole economy: extreme automation for a relatively small set of activities could be sufficient to reach the conclusions in the series.**

For example, it might be sufficient for AI systems to develop increasingly efficient (a) computers; (b) solar panels (for energy); (c) mining and manufacturing robots; (d) space probes (to build more computers in space, where energy and metal are abundant). That could be sufficient (via [feedback loop](https://www.cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai/#explosive-scientific-and-technological-advancement)) for explosive growth in available energy, materials and computing power, and there are many ways that such growth could be transformative.

For example and in particular, it could lead to:

* [Misaligned AI](https://www.cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai/#misaligned-ai-mysterious-potentially-dangerous-objectives) with access to dangerous amounts of materials and energy.

* [Digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/), if AI systems also had some way of (a) “virtualizing” neuroscience (via virtual experiments or simply dramatically increasing the rate of learning from real-world experiments); or (b) otherwise having insight about how to create something we would properly regard as “digital descendants.”

Bottom line
-----------

I don’t think I’ve thoroughly (or, for readers with strong initial skepticism on this point, convincingly) demonstrated that advanced AI could cause explosive acceleration in scientific and technological advancement, without hitting human-dependent or other “bottlenecks.” I think I have given a good sense of the intuition for why they could, but this is certainly a topic that I haven’t poked as hard as I could; I hope and expect that someone will eventually.

I do think such poking will ultimately support the picture I’ve given in the [“most important century” series](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/). This is partly based on the reasoning above: the relatively limited scope of what would need to be fully automated in order to support my broad conclusions. It's also partly based a similar reasoning process to what I’ve used in the past to [guess at some key conclusions before we’d done all the homework](https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/some-background-our-views-regarding-advanced-artificial-intelligence): engaging in a lot of conversations and forming views on how informed different parties are and how much sense they’re making. But I acknowledge that this is not as satisfying or reliable as it would be if I gave a highly detailed description of what precise activities can be automated.

For email filter: florpschmop


Was life better in hunter-gatherer times?

*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*

For the last 200 years or so, [life has been getting better](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-the-post-industrial-era/) for the average human in the world.

What about for the 300,000+ years before that?

In order to answer this, one of the hardest things we need to do is get some sense of **pre-agriculture quality of life**.

* Agriculture is estimated to have started drastically changing lifestyles, and leading to what we tend to think of as "civilization," [around 10,000 BCE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution). Agriculture roughly means living off of *domesticated plants and livestock*, allowing a large population to live in one area indefinitely rather than needing to move as it runs low on resources.

* So most years of human history were pre-agriculture (and thus pre-"civilization").

* The terms **"hunter-gatherer" and "forager"** are commonly used to refer to societies that came before (or simply never took up) agriculture.

This appears to be a topic where there is a lot of room for controversy and confusion.

* Many people seem to endorse a **"pre-agriculture Eden" hypothesis: that the pre-agriculture world was a sort of paradise, or at least better than life in rich countries today.** There are logical reasons that this might be the case;[below](#the-pre-agriculture-eden-hypothesis), I'll lay some of those out and give some quotes from Wikipedia that convey the "pre-agriculture Eden" vibe.

* But there's also a case to be made that the world before agriculture was a world of starvation, disease and violence - that the human story is one of continuous, consistent beneficial progress, and that the pre-agriculture world was the lowest (because the earliest) point on it.

My tentative position is that neither of these is quite right. I think the pre-agriculture world was noticeably worse than today's world (at least in developed countries), but probably some amount better than the world that immediately followed agriculture.

This post will focus on the former: the comparison between the pre-agriculture world and today's world, or whether the "pre-agriculture Eden" hypothesis is right. I'll argue that today's best evidence suggests that **today's developed world has significantly better quality of life than the pre-agriculture world.** By doing so, I'll also lay the groundwork for a future post about what happened to quality of life in between the pre-agriculture world and today.

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2022/01/HLGB-300k---period-1-highlighted.png)This image illustrates how this post fits into the [full "Has Life Gotten Better?" series](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better/).

Below, I'll:

* Give more detail on the basic [pre-agriculture Eden hypothesis](#the-pre-agriculture-eden-hypothesis).

* Go through each of the dimensions on which I tried to compare pre-agriculture and current quality of life. These are summarized by the table below, which uses the same structure as for my [previous post](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-the-post-industrial-era/):

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Property** | **Pre-agriculture vs. today's developed world** |
| **Poverty** | Mostly assessed via hunger and health - see below.
  |
| **[Hunger](#hunger)** | Pre-agriculture height looks very low by today's standards, suggesting malnutrition.
  |
| **[Health](#health) (physical)** | Pre-agriculture infant and child mortality look extremely high by today's standards (20%+ before age 1, 35%+ before age 10 (today's high-income countries are under 1% before age 10). Post-childhood life expectancy also looks a lot worse than today's.
  |
| **[Violence](#violence)** | Pre-agriculture deaths from violence look more common, compared to today's developed world.
  |
| **[Mental health](#mental-health-and-wellbeing)** | Unknown - while there are some claims floating around about strong mental health for hunter-gatherers/foragers, I haven't seen anything that looks like solid evidence about this, and similar claims re: gender relations [don't hold up to scrutiny](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/).
  |
| **Substance abuse and addiction** | Presumably not an issue pre-agriculture (though this isn't 100% clear).
  |
| **[Discrimination](#gender-relations)**  | Hard to compare, but [pre-agriculture gender relations seem bad](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/).
  |
| **Treatment of children** | Unknown
  |
| **[Time usage](#leisure-and-equality)** | Unknown/disputed
  |
| **Self-assessed well-being** | Unknown
  |
| **Education and literacy** | Literacy would be higher in today's world (though it isn't clear whether this matters for quality of life)
  |
| **Friendship and community** | Unknown
  |
| **Freedom** | Unknown
  |
| **Romantic relationship quality** | Unknown
  |
| **Job satisfaction** | Unknown
  |
| **Meaning and fulfillment** | Unknown
  |

The pre-agriculture Eden hypothesis
-----------------------------------

[Wikipedia's entry for "hunter-gatherer"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer) (quote in footnote[1](#fn1)) gives a "pre-agriculture Eden" vibe, and specifically claims that:

* Hunter-gatherers are not "poor," or at least, they "are mostly well-fed, rather than starving," and have more leisure time than most people today.

* Hunter-gatherers "tend to have an egalitarian social ethos," without permanent leaders ("hunter-gatherers do not have permanent leaders; instead, the person taking the initiative at any one time depends on the task being performed").

* (Covered [previously](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/)) Hunter-gatherers have egalitarian gender relations specifically, "with women roughly as influential and powerful as men."

In addition:

* I've seen it [claimed that](https://www.dovepress.com/the-western-diet-and-lifestyle-and-diseases-of-civilization-peer-reviewed-article-RRCC) "coronary heart disease, obesity, [and a number of other diseases] ... are rare or virtually absent in hunter–gatherers and other non-westernized populations." This is usually given as an argument that hunter-gatherers have excellent diets that we should emulate.

* I've seen more occasional (and as far as I can tell, very thinly cited) [claims that](https://web.archive.org/web/20211026201740/https://www.google.com/search?q=hunter-gatherer+mental+illness) "Hunter-gatherers seem to possess exceptional mental health" / "depression is a 'disease of modernity.'"

Why might all of this be? The basic idea would be that:

* For most of human history, humans lived in small, "nomadic" bands (more on this in a future post): constantly moving from one location to another, since any given location had limited food supply. People who did well in this setting reproduced and people who did poorly did not, so we (the descendants of many people who did well) are well adapted to this lifestyle.

* But about 10,000 years ago, [much of the world transitioned to agriculture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution), which meant that instead of moving from place to place, we were able to consistently produce large amounts of food by staying put. This led to an explosion in population, and a division of labor: farmers could produce enough food for everyone, while other people specialized in other things such as religion, politics, and war.

* 10,000 years isn't a ton of time from the standpoint of natural selection, so we're still adapted to the original environment, and we're "out of place" in a more modern lifestyle.

To put some of my cards on the table early, I think this reasoning could be right when it comes to some problems in the modern world, but I don't tend to believe it strongly by default.

* I don't think that "adapting to" an environment should be associated with "thriving" in it - especially not if "thriving" is supposed to include things like egalitarianism. In my view, "adapting to" an environment simply means becoming good at competing with others to reproduce in that environment - you could be fully "adapted" to your environment and still frequently be hungry, diseased, violent, hierarchical, sexist, and many other nasty things that we regularly see from animals in their natural environments.

* Additionally, there are many diverse lifestyles in the modern world. So any problem that seems to exist ~everywhere in modern civilization seems to me like it's most likely (by default) to be "a risk of being human."

That said, I don't think either of these points is absolute. There are *some* ways in which nearly all modern societies differ from forager/hunter-gatherer societies, and some of these might be causing novel problems that didn't exist in our ancestral environment. So I consider the "pre-agriculture Eden" hypothesis plausible enough to be interesting and important, and I'd like to know whether the facts support it.

Evidence on different dimensions of quality of life
---------------------------------------------------

Below, I'll go through the best evidence I've found on the dimensions of quality of life from the table [above](#SummaryTable).

For more complex topics, I mostly rely on previous more detailed posts I've made. Otherwise, I tend to rely by default on [The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers](https://smile.amazon.com/Lifeways-Hunter-Gatherers-Robert-L-Kelly-ebook/dp/B00BM4TKMW/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=the+lifeways+of+hunter-gatherers&qid=1616972609&sr=8-2) (which I abbreviate as "Lifeways"), for reasons outlined [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-supplement/#some-key-sources-i've-used).

Gender relations
----------------

I discussed pre-agriculture gender relations at some length in a [previous post](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/). In brief:

* According to the best/most systematic available evidence (from observing modern non-agricultural societies), **pre-agriculture gender relations seem bad**. For example, most societies seem to have no possibility for female leaders, and limited or no female voice in intra-band affairs.

* There are a **lot of claims to the contrary floating around, but (IMO) without good evidence.** For example, the Wikipedia entry for "hunter-gatherer" gives the strong impression that nonagricultural societies have strong gender equality, as does a Google search for "hunter-gatherer gender relations." But the sources cited seem very thin and often only tangentially related to the claims; furthermore, they often seem to acknowledge significant inequality, while seemingly trying to explain it away with strange statements like "women know how to deal with physical aggression, unlike their Western counterparts." (Verbatim quote.)

I think it's somewhat common to find rosy pictures of pre-agriculture society, with thin and even contradictory citations. I think this is worth keeping in mind for the below sections (where I won't go into as much depth as I [did](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/) for gender relations).

Violence
--------

Pre-agriculture violence seems to be a hotly debated topic among anthropologists and archaeologists; the debates can get quite intricate and confusing, and I've spent more time than I hoped to trying to understand both sides and where they disagree.

My take as of now is that **overall pre-agriculture violence was likely quite high by the standards of today's developed countries**.

This was complex enough that I devoted a [separate post entirely to my research and reasoning on this point](https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-violence-among-very-early-humans/). Here's the summary on "nomadic forager" societies (which are [thought](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-supplement/#ethnographic-and-archaeological-data) to be our best clue at what life was like in the very distant past) vs. today's world:

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Society** | **Violent deaths per 100,000 people per year** |
| Murngin (nomadic foragers)
  | 330
  |
| Tiwi (nomadic foragers)
  | 160
  |
| !Kung (aka Ju/'hoansi) (nomadic foragers)
  | 42
  |
| World (today) - high estimate
  | 35.4
  |
| USA (today) - high estimate
  | 35.2
  |
| World (today) - low estimate
  | 7.4
  |
| Western Europe (today) - high estimate
  | 6.6
  |
|  USA (today) - low estimate
  | 6.2
  |
| Western Europe (today) - low estimate
  | 0.3
  |

Hunger
------

I'm going to examine both hunger and health, since both seem among the easiest ways to get at the question of whether pre-agriculture society had meaningfully higher "poverty" than today's in some sense.

The most relevant-seeming part of *Lifeways* is Table 3-5, which gives information on height, weight, and calorie consumption for 8 forager societies. My main observation (and see footnote for some other notes[2](#fn2)) is that the **height figures are strikingly low:** 6 of the 7 listed averages for males are under 5'3", and 6 of the 7 listed averages for females are under 5'0". ([Compare to](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm) 5'9" for US males and 5'3.5" for US females.)

The height figure seems important because height is often used as an indicator for early-childhood nutritional status,[3](#fn3) and seems to quite reliably increase with wealth at the aggregate societal level (see [Our World in Data's page on height](https://ourworldindata.org/human-height)). Height seems particularly helpful here because it is relatively easy to measure in a culture-agnostic way and can even be estimated from archaeological remains.

What I've been able to find of other evidence (including archaeological evidence) about height suggests that the pre-agriculture period had average heights a bit taller than the figures above, but still short by modern standards, though this evidence seems quite limited (details in footnote).[4](#fn4)

My bottom line is: **the evidence suggests that pre-agriculture people had noticeably shorter heights than modern people, which suggests to me that their early-childhood nutrition was worse.**

As for Wikipedia's claim that "Contrary to common misconception, hunter-gatherers are mostly well-fed," those who have read my [previous piece on Wikipedia and hunter-gatherers](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/) might be able to guess what's coming next.

* The citation for that statement appears to be an entire textbook (no page number given), which I found a copy of [here](https://vk.com/wall296108908_2310)(the link unfortunately seems to have broken since then).

* The vast majority of the textbook doesn't seem to be relevant to this topic at all.

* From skimming the table of contents, my best guess at the part being cited is on page 328: "The notion that hunters and gatherers live on the brink of starvation is a popular misconception; numerous studies have shown that hunters and gatherers are generally well nourished." No citations are given.

Health
------

It seems to me that the best proxy for health, in terms of having very-long-run data, is early-in-life mortality (before age 1, before age 5, before age 15). I've found a number of collections of data on this, and nothing else detailed regarding health for prehistoric or foraging populations (other than one analysis that looks at full life expectancy; I will discuss this later on).

Table 7-7 in Lifeways lists a number of figures for deaths before ages 1 and 15, based on modern foraging societies. Taking a crude average yields 20% mortality before the age of 1, 35% before the age of 15.

Other sources I've consulted (including archaeological sources) give an even grimmer picture, in some cases 50%+ mortality before the age of 15 (details in footnote).[5](#fn5)

These are **enormous early-in-life mortality rates compared to the modern world,** where no country has a before-age-15 mortality rate over 15%, and high-income countries appear to be universally below 1% ([source](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/youth-mortality-rate)).

### What about life expectancy after reaching age 10?

What I've found also suggests that pre-agriculture life expectancy was lower than today's at other ages, too - it isn't just a matter of early-in-life mortality.

[Gurven and Kaplan 2007](https://gurven.anth.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.anth.d7_gurven/files/sitefiles/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf) (the only paper I've found that estimates pre-agriculture life expectancy, as opposed to early-in-life mortality) observes that its modeled life-expectancy-by-age curves are **similar for modern foraging societies and 1751-1759 Sweden** (Figure 3):

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/10/gurven-kaplan-chart.png)

(Note also how much worse the estimate of prehistoric life expectancy looks at every age, although Gurven and Kaplan question this data.[6](#fn6))

As noted at [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#it-is-not-only-about-child-mortality-life-expectancy-by-age), it appears that **life expectancy *conditional on surviving to age 10* has improved greatly in Sweden and other countries since ~1800** (before which point it appears to have been pretty flat).

Also see [these charts](https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy#it-is-not-only-about-child-mortality-life-expectancy-by-age), showing life expectancy at every age improving significantly in England and Wales since ~1800.

See footnote for one more data source with a similar bottom line.[7](#fn7)

**Bottom line: life expectancy looks to have been a *lot* worse pre-agriculture than today.** I don't think violent deaths account for enough death (see previous section) to play a big role in this; disease and other health factors seem most likely.

### What about diseases of affluence?

From [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_of_affluence):

> **Diseases of affluence** ... is a term sometimes given to selected diseases and other health conditions which are commonly thought to be a result of increasing wealth in a society ... Examples of diseases of affluence include mostly chronic non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and other physical health conditions for which personal lifestyles and societal conditions associated with economic development are believed to be an important risk factor — such as type 2 diabetes, asthma, coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, peripheral vascular disease, obesity, hypertension, cancer, alcoholism, gout, and some types of allergy.

I think it's plausible that the pre-agriculture world had less of these "diseases of affluence" than the modern world (especially obesity and conditions connected to obesity, due to the seemingly much [greater access to food](#hunger)).

I *don't* think it's slam-dunk clear for some of these, such as cancer and heart disease. I've dug into primary sources a little bit, and not-too-surprisingly, data quality and rigor seems to often be low. In particular, I quite distrust claims like "Someone spent \_\_ years in \_\_\_ society and observed no cases of \_\_\_\_." Modern foraging societies seem to be quite small, and diagnosis could be far from straightforward.

I haven't dug in heavily on this (though I may in the future), because:

* My initial scans have made it look like it would be a lot of work to follow often-circuitous trails of references to often-hard-to-find sources.

* Even if it did turn out that "diseases of affluence" were extremely rare pre-agriculture, this wouldn't tip me into thinking health was better overall, pre-agriculture. When wondering whether undernutrition and "diseases of poverty" are worse than obesity and "diseases of affluence," I think a good default is to prefer the condition with less premature death.

Mental health and wellbeing
---------------------------

I haven't found anything that looks like systematic data on pre-agriculture mental health or subjective wellbeing. There are some [suggestive Google results](https://web.archive.org/web/20211026201740/https://www.google.com/search?q=hunter-gatherer+mental+illness), but as in [other cases](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/), these don't seem well-cited. For example, as of this writing, Google's "answer box" reads:

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/10/google-results---hunter-gatherer-mental-health.png)

But Thomas 2006 is [this not-very-systematic-looking source](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0374225524?sa-no-redirect=1).

I won't go into this topic more, because having gone through the above topics, I don't find the basic plausibility of "reliable data shows better-than-modern mental health among foraging societies" high enough to be worth a deep dive.

**Update:** a commenter linked to a study reporting high happiness for one hunter-gatherer society (the Hadza). My thoughts [here](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-happiness/).
Leisure and equality
--------------------

I haven't gone into depth on claims that pre-agriculture societies had more leisure, and lower inequality, compared to today's.

Reasons for this:

**The claims seem disputed.** For example, here are excerpts on both topics from the first chapter of Lifeways:

> How much do hunter-gatherers work, and why? Reexaminations of Ju/’hoansi and Australian work effort do not support Sahlins’s claim [of very low work hours] . Kristen Hawkes and James O’Connell (1981) found a major discrepancy between the Paraguayan Ache’s nearly seventy-hour work week and the Ju/’hoansi’s reportedly twelve- to nineteen-hour week. The discrepancy, they discovered, lay in Lee’s definition of work. Lee counted as work only the time spent in the bush searching for and procuring food, not the labor needed to process food resources in camp. Add in the time it takes to manufacture and maintain tools, carry water, care for children, process nuts and game, gather firewood, and clean habitations, and the Ju/’hoansi work well over a forty-hour week (Lee 1984; Isaac 1990; Kaplan 2000). In addition, one of Sahlins’s Australian datasets was generated from a foraging experiment of only a few days’ duration, performed by nine adults with no dependents. There was little incentive for these adults to forage much (and apparently they were none too keen on participating – see Altman [1984, 1987]; Bird-David [1992b]) ...
>
>
>
>
> Others have found that the alleged egalitarian relations of hunter-gatherers are pervaded by inequality, if only between the young and the old and between men and women (Woodburn 1980; Hayden et al. 1986; Leacock 1978; see Chapters 8 and 9). Food is not shared equally, and women may eat less meat than do men (Speth 1990, 2010; Walker and Hewlett 1990). Archaeologists find more and more evidence of nonegalitarian hunter-gatherers in a variety of different environments (Price and Brown 1985b; Arnold 1996a; Ames 2001), most of whom lived under high population densities and stored food on a large scale. Put simply, we cannot equate foraging with egalitarianism.
>
>

**I'm skeptical that anthropologists can get highly reliable reads on the degree to which foraging societies have high leisure, or low inequality, in a deep sense.** I imagine that if an anthropologist (from e.g. another planet) visited *modern* society, they might conclude that we have high leisure, or low inequality, based on things like:

* Having a tough time disentangling "work" from "leisure." For example, a lot of modern jobs are office jobs, and a lot of on-the-job hours are spent doing what might look like pleasant socializing. (Similarly, foragers "socializing" may be internally conceiving this as necessary work rather than fun - it seems like it could be quite hard to draw this line.)

* Being confused by social norms encouraging people to downplay real inequalities. For example, I've seen a fair number of references to the fact that people in foraging societies will sometimes mock a successful hunter to "cut them down to size" and enforce equality. But if this were strong evidence of low inequality, I think we'd have similar evidence from modern society from things like the [Law of Jante](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante); "humblebragging"; the fact that many powerful, wealthy people in modern times tend to dress simply and signal "authenticity"; etc.

**Even if I were convinced that pre-agriculture societies had large amounts of leisure and low amounts of inequality, this wouldn't move me much toward believing they were an "Eden," given above observations about violence, hunger and health.** It would be one thing if foragers were healthy, well-fed, well-resourced, *and* lived in conditions of high leisure and low inequality. But high leisure and low inequality seem much less appealing in the context of what looks to me best described as "poverty" with respect to health and nutrition.

**Having vetted other "Eden"-like claims about pre-agriculture societies, I've developed a prior that these claims are likely to be both time-consuming to investigate and greatly exaggerated.** See previous sections.

With all of that said, as I'll discuss in future posts, **I *do* think there are signs that at least some foraging societies were noticeably more egalitarian than the societies that came after them - just not more so than today's developed world.**

**Next in series:** [Did life get better during the pre-industrial era? (Ehhhh)](https://www.cold-takes.com/did-life-get-better-during-the-pre-industrial-era-ehhhh/)

---

Footnotes
---------

1. "Contrary to common misconception, hunter-gatherers are mostly well-fed, rather than starving ...

 "Hunter-gatherers tend to have an egalitarian social ethos, although settled hunter-gatherers (for example, those inhabiting the Northwest Coast of North America) are an exception to this rule. Nearly all African hunter-gatherers are egalitarian, with women roughly as influential and powerful as men. For example, the San people or 'Bushmen' of southern Africa have social customs that strongly discourage hoarding and displays of authority, and encourage economic equality via sharing of food and material goods ...

 "Anthropologists maintain that hunter-gatherers do not have permanent leaders; instead, the person taking the initiative at any one time depends on the task being performed. In addition to social and economic equality in hunter-gatherer societies, there is often, though not always, sexual parity as well ...

 "At the 1966 'Man the Hunter' conference, anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore suggested that egalitarianism was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population. Therefore, no surplus of resources can be accumulated by any single member ...

 "At the same conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, 'Notes on the Original Affluent Society' ... According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their 'affluence' came from the idea that they were satisfied with very little in the material sense. Later, in 1996, Ross Sackett performed two distinct meta-analyses to empirically test Sahlin's view. The first of these studies looked at 102 time-allocation studies, and the second one analyzed 207 energy-expenditure studies. Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies work, on average, about 6.5 hours a day, whereas people in agricultural and industrial societies work on average 8.8 hours a day. [↩](#fnref1)- I've spot-checked the primary sources a bit: I looked up the first three rows and the last row, and found the methodology sections. I confirmed that these are all adults. I didn't check the others. I put the table in Google Sheets and added some of my own derived figures [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19fQ0wHcZzuxaja48N67vHrjpWt_MJzeat-yvzAeJYL0/edit#gid=0). In addition to the observations about height, I note:

	* I don't think we can make much of raw calorie consumption estimates, since more active lifestyles could require more calories.

	* The BMI figures would [qualify as "underweight"](https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/assessing/bmi/adult_bmi/english_bmi_calculator/bmi_calculator.html) for Ju/'hoansi and Anbarra females; others seem to be generally on the low side of the normal range. (These are averages, and could be consistent with having a significant percentage of individuals outside the normal range.

	* Note that calculating a BMI from average height and average weight is not the same as looking at average BMI. But I [played with some numbers](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19fQ0wHcZzuxaja48N67vHrjpWt_MJzeat-yvzAeJYL0/edit#gid=153799806) here and it seems unlikely to be a big difference. I'd guess my BMI calculations would lead to slight overstatement of average BMI (and a slightly larger overstatement if well-fed people were both taller and higher-BMI). [↩](#fnref2)- For example, see [here](https://web.archive.org/web/20210423203732/https://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/globaltargets_stunting_policybrief.pdf), [here](https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment#too-little-height-for-age-stunting) (Our World in Data), [here](https://www.globalhungerindex.org/about.html). [↩](#fnref3)- Our World In Data [cites](https://ourworldindata.org/human-height#mesolithic-times-middle-ages-subsistence-societies-and-modern-foragers) a figure for the Mesolithic era (shortly before the dawn of agriculture) of 1.68m, or about 5'6". This figure comes from [A Farewell to Alms](https://smile.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princeton-ebook/dp/B001EQ4OLA/), which in turn cites a study I was unable to find anywhere. It isn't explicitly stated which sexes the height figure refers to, but [this chart](https://ourworldindata.org/human-height#the-last-two-millennia) implies to me that Our World in Data (at least) is interpreting it as a quite low height by modern standards.

 Searching for recent papers on height estimates from archaeological remains, I found a [2019 paper claiming](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/690545v1.full) that "The earliest anatomically modern humans in Europe, present by 42-45,000 BP (5, 6), were relatively tall (mean adult male height in the Early Upper Paleolithic was ∼174 cm [about 5'8.5"]). Mean male stature then declined from the Paleolithic to the Mesolithic (∼164 cm [about 5'4.5"]) before increasing to ∼167 cm [about 5'6"] by the Bronze Age (4, 7). Subsequent changes, including the 20th century secular trend increased height to ∼170-180 cm [about 5'7" to 5'11"] (1, 4)." Its main two sources are [this paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-019-00850-3), noting a relative scarcity of data and trying to fill in gaps using mathematical analysis, and [this book that looks interesting but costs $121](https://smile.amazon.com/Skeletal-Variation-Adaptation-Europeans-Paleolithic-ebook/dp/B078WWB8X6/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=skeletal+variation+and+adaptation+in+europeans&qid=1624243127&sr=8-1). I haven't found many other recent analyses of this topic (and nothing contradicting these claims in any case).

 Table 3.9 of A Farewell to Alms also collects height data on modern foraging societies, and the median figure in the table is about 1.65m, or about 5'5". [↩](#fnref4)- Table 1 in [Volk and Atkinson 2012](https://www.gwern.net/docs/history/2013-volk.pdf) (the source used by [Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality#mortality-in-the-past-around-half-died-as-children)) reports a mean of 26.8% mortality before the age of 1 ("infant mortality rate") and 48.8% mortality before the age of 15 ("child mortality rate"), again based on modern foraging societies.

 The only sources I've been able to find pulling together estimates from *archaeological* data are:

	* [Trinkaus 1995](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440395801707), on Neanderthals. In Table 4 (based on a small number of sources), it gives an average of 40.5% mortality before age 1, 13.2% mortality between ages 1-5, 6.6% mortality between ages 5-10, and 7.9% mortality between ages 10-20 (which would cumulatively imply 68.2% mortality before the age of 15).

	* [Trinkaus 2011](https://www.pnas.org/content/108/4/1267.short), which does not give mortality estimates but argues for a conclusion of "low life expectancy and demographic instability across these Late Pleistocene human groups ... [the data] provide no support for a life history advantage among early modern humans." [↩](#fnref5)- "Estimated mortality rates then increase dramatically for prehistoric populations, so that by age 45 they are over seven times greater than those for traditional foragers, even worse than the ratio of captive chimpanzees to foragers. Because these prehistoric populations cannot be very different genetically from the populations surveyed here, there must be systematic biases in the samples and/or in the estimation procedures at older ages where presumably endogenous senescence should dominate as primary cause of death. While excessive warfare could explain the shape of one or more of these typical prehistoric forager mortality profiles, it is improbable that these profiles represent the long-term prehistoric forager mortality profile. Such rapid mortality increase late in life would have severe consequences for our human life history evolution, particularly for senescence in humans." [↩](#fnref6)- [Trinkaus 1995](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305440395801707) has a more detailed breakdown of mortality rates by age range for both a few modern forager societies (Table 3) and for archaeological remains (Table 4):
 ![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/10/trinkaus-1.png)

![](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/10/trinkaus-2.png)

 Here "Neonate" means "before 1 year," "Child" Is age 1-5, "Juvenile" is age 5-10, "Adolescent" is age 10-20, "Young adult" Is age 20-40, and "Old adult" is age 40+. These numbers seem **extremely high for all ages under 40 by today's standards;** for a comparison point see this [detailed life expectancy table for the US](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html), which implies (based on calculations I'm not showing here but that are straightforward to do) "Juvenile" mortality of 0.06%, "Adolescent" mortality of 0.6%, and "Young adult" mortality of 3.7%. (All figures are for males; female figures would be lower still.) [↩](#fnref7)


Reading books vs. engaging with them

Let’s say you’re interested in a 500-page serious nonfiction book, and you’re trying to decide whether to read it. I think most people imagine their choice something like this:

|  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Option** | **Time cost** | **% that I understand and retain** |
| Just read the title
  | Seconds
  |  1%
  |
| Skim the book
  | 3 hours
  |  33%
  |
| Read the book quickly
  | 8 hours
  |  67%
  |
| Read the book slowly
  | 16 hours
  |  90% |

I see things more like this:

|  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Option** | **Time cost** | **% that I understand and retain** |
| Just read the title (and the 1-2 sentences people usually say to introduce the book)
  | Seconds
  |  10%
  |
| Skim the book
  | 3 hours
  |  12%
  |
| Read the book quickly
  | 8 hours
  |  13%
  |
| Read the book slowly
  | 16 hours
  |  15%
  |
| Read reviews/discussions of the book (ideally including author replies), but not the book
  | 2 hours
  |  25%
  |
| Read the book slowly 3 times, with 3 years in between each time
  | 48 hours
  |  33%
  |
| Read reviews/discussions of the book; locate the parts of the book they’re referencing, and read those parts carefully, independently checking footnotes, and referring back to other parts of the book for any unfamiliar terms. Write down who I think is being more fair; lay out the exact quotes that give the best evidence that my judgment is right. (But never read the whole book)
  | 16 hours
  |  33%
  |
| Write my own summary of each of the book’s key points, what the best counterargument is, where I ultimately come down and why. (Will often involve reading key parts of the book 5-10 times)
  | 50-100 hours
  |  50% |

I’m guessing these numbers are pretty weird-seeming, so here are some explanations:

* **Just read the title (and the 1-2 sentences people usually say to introduce the book): "seconds" of time investment, 10% understanding/retention.** 10% probably sounds like a lot for a few seconds of thought! I think this works because the author has really sweated over how to make the title and elevator pitch capture as much as possible of what they’re saying. So if all I want is the "general gist," I don't think I need to read the book at all.
 * **Skimming or reading the book: hours of time investment, only 12-15% understanding/retention.** This is based on my own sense of how much I retain when I "simply read" the book (and don't engage much with critiques of it, don't write about it, etc.) - and my perhaps unfair impressions of how much others seem to retain when they do this. If person A says they've read a book and person B says they haven't but they've heard people talking about it, I often don't find that person A seems to know any more about the book than person B.
 * **Read reviews/discussions of the book (ideally including author replies), but not the book: 2 hours of time investment, 25% understanding/retention.** Good reviewers know the context/field for the book better than I do, and probably read the book more carefully than I did. Hopefully they picked out the really key good and bad parts, and if those are the only parts I retain, that’s probably more than I could hope for with just a slow reading.
 * **Read the book slowly 3 times, with 3 years in between each time: 48 hours of time investment, 33% understanding/retention.** This implies that the 2nd and 3rd readings are actually more educational than the 1st: the first only gets me from 10% (which I got from reading the title) to 15%, the next two bring me to 33%. I think that’s right - it’s hard to notice the important parts before I have the whole arc of the argument and have sat with it. Hearing other people talk about it and seeing some random observations related to it also help.
* **Write my own thorough review of a particular debate between the book's critics and its author: 16 hours of time investment, 33% understanding/retention.** (The table has more detail on what this involves.) This is the same time investment as reading the book slowly, and I'm saying that is worth something like 5x as much (since once I've read the title, reading the book slowly only takes me from 10% to 15% understanding/comprehension, whereas this activity takes me from 10% to 33% understanding/comprehension).
* **Write my own summary of each of the book’s key points, what the best counterargument is, where I ultimately come down and why: 50-100 hours of time investment, 50% understanding/comprehension.** I know hugely more about the books I've done this with than the books I haven't. But even here I'm only estimating 50% understanding/comprehension. I don’t think it is really possible to understand more than 50% of a serious book without e.g. spending a lot of independent time in the field.

TLDR - I think the **value of reading a book once (without active engagement) is awkwardly small, and the value of big time investments like reading a book several times - or actively engaging with even part of it - is awkwardly large compared to that.**

Also, the maximum amount of understanding you can get is awkwardly small.

And a lot of the best options get you a “raw deal” on sounding educated:

* If you read reviews and not the book, someone else can say they read the book and you can’t, even though you spent just as much time and retained more of the book.

* If you digest the heck out of the book, you still can’t say anything in casual conversation except “I read the book,” which is also what someone can say who spent way less time and retained WAY less.

Ultimately, if you live in the headspace I’m laying out, you’re going to read a lot fewer books than you would otherwise, and you’ll probably be embarrassed of how few books you read. (But if more people [described their engagement with a book in detail instead of using the binary “I read X,”](https://www.cold-takes.com/honesty-about-reading/) maybe that would change.)

**Edited to add clarification:** this piece is about trying to casually inform oneself in areas one isn't an expert in, via reading books (and often other pieces) directed at a general audience. A reader pointed out that when you have a lot of existing expertise, the situation looks quite different, and often skimming or reading is the best thing to do. (Although in this case I would add that one is probably mostly reading reports, academic papers, notes from colleagues, etc. rather than books).

For email filter: florpschmop