Community post

Capitalism Didn't Create Poverty: It Reduced It

Even the keenest hunter knows survival depends on understanding the system, not just chasing abundance.

Previously I made a bold claim that poverty has always been the natural baseline for humanity and that wealth has been the anomaly. This is a new idea for me as well but one that doesn't come without careful analysis and self educational research from my own observations of historical events and data, as well as real time observational study of our current world. What I said then I didn't say lightly. I really am leaning towards this as an interesting matter of fact.

From my own research hue|mans were poor before cap|it|all|ism, therefore capitalism did not cause poverty. And I know that may be hard to grasp at first but this is something I really believe. And maybe growing up poor plays a large role in this perspective, but I have found that wealth is something that is built up rather than inherently foundational.

That's hard to argue against if you consider that even before "money" was a thing, living poor is the natural starting point. One is simply not born into richness but some do get rich because their parents or predecessors give it to them. Are we not born without wealth? Does a new born babe have wealth? Are we not born naked and fragile?

Now I was met with a fair argument by Valued-Customer and one point that caught my attention the most was his argument over hunter gatherers. After careful thought and a bit more research I only have more questions.

I'm thinking, if hunter-gatherer life was truly wealthy and superior, wouldn't humanity have abandoned agriculture and returned to it thousands of years ago?

When it comes to large population survival, food reliability, long-term stability, agriculture or even horticulture for that matter, has exceedingly outcompeted hunter gathering. Granted they both have pros and cons but the results, historically speaking, have been more beneficial.

Valued-Customer pointed out that a single mammoth kill could feed an entire village for a month. I think it could be more if they rationed it out more carefully and had methods of preserving food for long periods of times. I am not sure if at those times such methods were even made aware of, but nonetheless possible. However given the circumstances, I want to highlight this as an example of occasional abundance, and not systemic wealth.

This is because I think that our ancestors were incredibly lucky for the moment. Once megafauna disappeared, humans had to invent agriculture. Not to mention that hunting wasn't always successful and many perished due to starvation as a result.

Even in their richest moments, hunter-gatherers relied on fragile abundance that could vanish overnight. True wealth is persistent, and not temporary.

Now, agriculture did caused more labor, hierarchy, and malnutrition to develop but it also produced consistent surplus, supported larger populations, and laid the foundation for lasting wealth. This is proof that wealth is a system rather than a natural default condition.

All of this ties directly to my core argument that poverty is the baseline and wealth is the exception that requires systems to persist. I indeed agree, centralization can allow a few to capture the wealth generated by society, but the underlying systems still produces wealth that never existed before.

In other words, as the title to this post says, despite poor and imperfect distribution practices, capitalism and markets didn’t create poverty but rather they created the possibility for systemic wealth.

Any apparent “wealth” in history is either temporary or controlled. The point being, that the natural baseline is subsistence. Systems like agriculture, trade, and markets are what allow consistent surplus and innovation to emerge. Without them, even brief abundance disappears.

The same principles very much apply today, without systems that protect innovation and our surplus, wealth still remains the anomaly, and not the baseline.

Like the fox, our ancestors had to be vigilant and not rely on temporary abundance.

Image sources are from pixebay and free to use.

Replies (2)

I recommend giving this a lot more thought, and digging into the research that provides nominal detail to understand our circumstances throughout the presence of people on Earth.

"...hunting wasn't always successful and many perished due to starvation as a result."

If by 'many', you mean a significant percentage of people, this is not only a false statement, it is completely contradictory to reality. First, the Holocene is a tiny fraction of our duration on Earth. If people have been around for ~2M years, the Holocene is ~.0065% of our duration. The truth is that almost everybody that has ever starved to death has starved to death during the Holocene. Relatively speaking, virtually everyone that has ever starved to death has starved to death during the Holocene.

The reason for this is our relative poverty throughout the Holocene compared to all prehistoric times. The environment we live in is horrifically impoverished after the Younger Dryas, when 77 genera of megafauna were extinguished, than before it, when those incredibly valuable species to mankind were abundant.

"Are we not born without wealth? Does a new born babe have wealth?"

We are not born without wealth. Our environment is our wealth, far more meaningfully than our personal property. You will understand that a baby born to a Rothschild scion is not born poor, without wealth. Far more meaningfully, people born before the Younger Dryas were all born into an environment that was wealth of relatively far greater value than even that of Rothschilds today.

It is difficult to even conceive of the wealth Earth's ecosystems were prior to the Younger Dryas, but one metric, the amount of work necessary to live, might enable grasping our poverty today. In societies considered more wealthy today, it is the norm for people to work professionally 40 hours per week, and then to spend significant time working at home to do essential things, such as maintain property, cook, shop, clean, and many other sundry tasks, like accounting, managing our relationships, and raise our kids. A conservative estimate of time spent working today is ~60 hours/week, or ~260 hours/month.

Prior to the Younger Dryas I doubt men had to work 20 hours a month. Most of the time men spent daily was on leisure. Because of the abundance of very large game animals, which were in great herds at every quarter, hunting them took very little time. It was extraordinarily difficult work, comparable to competing in the Olympics, but it didn't require a lot of time. Poking a massive animal with a pointy stick in a vital spot takes only a few - terrifying - seconds. Walking to where they were and back again was most of the work necessary, in terms of time.

Almost no one could starve in such abundance of wealth. If the hunt failed (and research into predation shows that ~90% of attempts to take game fail) you just tried again. Maybe you had to bury Og's squished remains, but that's about an hour of a day, and then you can try again. Even if you're out of food completely before you set out to replenish your supply, you can easily succeed before being even significantly hungry. If it takes an hour to take prey successfully, and it takes an hour to try and fail too, you will almost certainly succeed on the first day, even if you only succeed after 10 failures.

Even hunting megafauna isn't very dangerous to predators. It is extremely rare for predators of game much larger than themselves, such as cougars that take adult Elk alone, to be significantly injured in a failed attempt. It does happen, but it's rare.

This environmental fecundity is wealth every human being is born into, and 99.99% of humanity that have ever lived were born into such wealth that required almost no work to maintain. Only since the Younger Dryas has humanity significantly been threatened with starvation, and faced long hours of work to survive.

"...hunter-gatherers relied on fragile abundance that could vanish overnight."

That wealth was persistent for ~2M years. They did not depend on Mammoths alone, but on dozens of other massive prey species, from giant ground sloths to rhinoceros, all of which weighed tons, and most of that tonnage was delicious red meat. Herds migrate, but solitary species do not, so only if they preferred to follow herds around, or had to because there weren't enough rhinos and ground sloths to feed a massive village, did they have to spend much time chasing prey. I persistence hunt elk, and when I cut a track early enough in the day I can always catch up to the herd before nightfall. Predators eating high quality nutrition can always outpace herbivores eating low quality plant foods.

The idea that wealth is fragile and impermanent has only been true since we lost megafauna. An elk does not even weigh one ton, usually less than half a ton, but I can easily live all year on one successful hunt. The fecundity of our environment is almost inconceivably reduced today. We are truly impoverished compared to our ancestors, and our complex society is most of the wealth we today have, and we must almost constantly work to stay alive today. That was simply not true before the Younger Dryas.

Capitalism did not cause poverty, and is indeed a means of mitigating it - for those that can do the work necessary to sustain life. Poverty never existed prior to agriculture. Everyone on Earth enjoyed inconceivable wealth every day of their lives that was entirely free for the taking, that they had to do no work to maintain. The only work they had to do was to reach out and take whatever they needed. That leisurely existence is almost unimaginable today, something we can only achieve after decades of hard work becoming a billionaire, or have the good luck to inherit being born into the right family.

"...methods of preserving food for long periods of times."

Most of us are completely unaware of it, but salting and smoking meat has been available to humanity since they learned of it, which could have been 2M years ago. We don't know when it started because it leaves no artifacts. However, it requires nothing but salt and fire, both of which have been available to people since people have existed, and preserves meat for >18 months at room temperature.

"...poverty is the baseline and wealth is the exception that requires systems to persist."

This has only been true since the Younger Dryas, and it is hugely mitigated by centralization that enables overlords to out compete almost everyone for wealth, by parasitizing our production through mechanisms they wield by controlling society. Centralization creates dependence, and wealth is only possible to those that are able to independently produce wealth, because that wealth is not able to be parasitized by overlords.

"...rely on temporary abundance."

Centralization imposes temporal restrictions. Centralization creates poverty. 'The best definition of wealth is independent means.'--anonymous Today decentralization of the means of production enable breaking the dependence on overlords for wealth. Decentralization is a paradigm shift of inconceivable import we do not realize mostly because we have been indoctrinated from birth to be dependent on overlords and centralization. All of history is of centralization and dependence. We have to think completely outside the box we have been packaged in to even realize it's possible to not be a slave today.

However, the laws of physics determine what technology is possible, and today decentralization of the means of production is the cutting edge of technological advance in every field of industry. 3D printers, laser cutters, plasma cutters, vinyl cutters, desktop CNC, aquaponics, yada yada yada, and AI - which is extremely important because it potentiates automating every one of these means of production, so that all we have to do once we have such a system is to reach out and take the wealth that appears - will completely and utterly transform society, by ending centralization and slavery.

Thanks!