Foragers and Farmers

Knowledge accumulates throughout generations. It travels through time as long as there is always someone at the other end of the arrow of time to absorb it, assimilate it and apply it. Language helped it transcend --first in oral traditions, then in written form. Sure, there were some instances of miscommunication between some generations and knowledge stalled at times, but generally speaking, knowledge compounds itself. It exhibits the same exponential behavior as wealth. For early forager humans, the knowledge to conquer our environment (learning about medicine plants, edible roots, game migrating patters) was as valuable then as it is today to learn what's the next meme stock being hyped on reddit. 

At the beginning the band forager culture fomented cooperation. To share what early foragers gathered/hunted was the rational thing to do. After all, the volatility of your returns (one day you'd have a good kill, but then days would go by without a catch) pushed you to share with your band your own bounty when the going was good in exchange for reciprocity from others when their hunt was good. Like what poker players do when they stake each other. In other words, early foragers hedged their own hunt "volatility" by inviting hunters/gatherers whose hunt yield was negatively correlated to theirs. Funny to realize how the minimum variance principle was discovered hundreds of thousands of years before Markwoitz "came up" with his (not so) Modern Portfolio Theory. Stigler's law (itself another example of knowledge compounding) is alive and well, I suppose. All this created a culture that spawned equality, and fostered (maybe?) the ability to appreciate what (little) you had with wonder, community and solidarity.  

But then with farming and food storage there was a regime change. Food surplus entailed power, which brought economic (and soft) power, the need for property rights, barter, specialization, and the formation of a proto Elite. But with surplus also came the weakening of the communal bonds present in the former culture. The interdependence between band members was de-emphasized. The staking among hunter/gatherers was not really needed if a sedentary family was able to sustain itself on a good harvest for several years. It also fragilized the collective wellbeing of the newly adopted sedentary economy. The crop yields of all the farmers behaved more of less the same. Good weather meant all had surplus, but a bad one also meant times went down for all. Yield homogenization planted the seeds (pun very much intended) of creative destruction, whereby only those with the best farm/storage techniques (knowledge!) survived the "purge", solidifying their position as proto-Elite, setting the stage for an aspirational underclass, and perhaps most important of all, starting society's drift towards inequality.

Inequality is inherently unstable. If a portion of a system that's comprised of interdependent parts grows disproportionately beyond the rest and the trend cannot be arrested, the end result can be the collapse of the system in question. You see it in ecosystems, where the success of a species is so overwhelming that the entire system collapses. As in hunter/gatherer societies, knowledge also can (and does) trigger inequality in a modern society. Which is why parents nowadays devote their parenthood years not only to building wealth to bequeath their children, but to build human capital in their kids, in order to generationally perpetuate their social status. Just like knowledge accrues as generations pass, inequality accumulates and compounds itself as well. But the accrual process is not done magically by itself. It's actual hard work. Daniel Markovitz posits it actually traps and shackles the professional class  of today to a hamster wheel of mindless, unending toil whose only reward is not to fall to the hellish bottom quartile. Thus, the bequeathal of knowledge through the generations has transformed itself from passing down an epic poem that talks about the seasons to the embodiment the tiger mom's ethos of ruthless, regimented discipline, inflicted upon today's offspring.        

Of course this mindset brings about its own curse. The perpetual wanting need to grow incessantly breeds by definition perpetual dissatisfaction. To extricate yourself from this vicious cycle takes monk-like mental discipline in order to tame and calibrate the goalposts of your wants, especially if you live in a society/economy whose very functioning depends on the ever increasing artificial expansion of your wants. "Live to aspire" supersedes "aspire to live". Two antagonistic concepts that clash and coexist in human nature --even at the individual level. And each one has refined its own quasi-religious narrative, lodging themselves neatly into opposing bodies of ideology that toggle back and forth in the halls of power of societies: the forager ideology vs. the farmer ideology.

There's a time to aspire, because without aspiration you can't really live (life would be really boring), and there's a time to live, because to always aspire robs of you the ability to look at what's in front of you. To marry one ideology or the other is a mistake. The key lies in the ability to toggle back and forth between them.

There's a time to be a forager, and a time to be a farmer.