Annoyed to see the false "original affluent society" hypothesis continuing to spread, this time on Hacker News:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1

Richard Lee's numbers explicitly counted only the initial foraging, i.e. none of the food processing, firewood gathering, or tool maintenance. After adjusting for these, the average !Kung work week is at least 50 hours and probably more.

This is not to mention the terrible disease burden and massive violence (perhaps 1 in 10 murder rate).

One measure they beat Agrarians on was political oppression; if some asshole tried to start something you could just nomad on down the road. Is this the only one?

Note that just *two* weak case studies (on the !Kung and the Hadza) constituted and "justified" this branch of social science, a branch with terrible implications for people's understanding of history and technology.

: Inferential statistics is a clumsy and tricky tool, but without it we are doomed.

A Mastodon instance for maths people. The kind of people who make $\pi z^2 \times a$ jokes.

Use $ and $ for inline LaTeX, and $ and $ for display mode.