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Comment by clarkmoody | Hacker News Reader

Crushing poverty and starvation is the natural state of humanity. Without capital accumulation, investment, and technological progress, that's where we would be. Fostering those things requires private property protection and enforcement of contract.

Capitalism's "race to the bottom" has made us rich beyond the wildest imagination of the people of the past. Our children do not have to work. Most jobs are indoors, in climate-controlled buildings. The rich may drive nice cars, but many of the poor have cars too. In the past, the rich rode in carriages and the poor trudged through the muck with no shoes.

Automation is what allowed us to go from the vast majority of Americans working in the fields to agricultural employment being 2% of the labor force -- and we produce more food than ever.

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Automation and IT in the US has little to do with free markets and a whole lot to do with enormous government expenditure, often war related. The internet is the obvious one. But if you go to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, you can see the first integrated circuit, which so happened to be built by Fairchild for the USAF, and the first computers, which were built in Silicon Valley for the Army. The same story is everywhere: About all the tech we take for granted owes its existence to state funding.

Simply because something was invented to satisfy a government contract does not mean that it would never have been invented otherwise. Government spending simply shifts the preferences of goods arbitrarily away from what would have arisen through market processes.

The government has been hiring the bulk of PhD-level researchers for the purposes of war (and surveillance). Imagine what those minds would have done with their ingenuity and initiative in the private sector the last 70 years.

One of the few things that probably would never have been created by the private sector is nuclear weapons, since there is no profitable use of such devices.

Now that the cold war is over, it seems that everyone is working to make people click on ads. I'm not sure it's much of an improvement.

Single data point: in my field of aerospace engineering, many of my colleagues are going to government labs and aerospace contractors.

Sure, that's fine. But that's not those folks being unleashed and creating things even more amazing than the space program and such. Which is what clarkmoody was suggesting would have happened had the big bad government not sucked up all the smart people and set them to work on bombs, etc.

"...probably would never have been created by the private sector is nuclear weapons, since there is no profitable use of such devices."

As of now, maybe. They're going to be quite useful once we get around to asteroid mining.

The whole idea of a state of nature being "nasty, brutish and short" has long been debunked by many anthropologists. The original affluence theory derived from ethnographic studies of the !kung bushmen in the 50's and 60's (the guy in the gods must be crazy) asserts that early man worked like 15-20 hrs a week.

"asserts that early man worked like 15-20 hrs a week."

I'm pretty sure you could afford a bare subsistence level diet today, with no heat, running water, electricity, modern medical care, etc. (i.e, a !Kung-level lifestyle) by working less than 15 hours per week.

And you wouldn't have to put up with Guinea worms, either.

Let's see... rice costs about $1.00/pound, and has about 600 calories per pound. Let's be really generous and say 3,000 calories per day. So $5/day for raw calories. Add in $0.89/head for iceberg lettuce (for fiber), $3.00 for a chicken breast (protein) and a few cents for a multivitamin pill and you're looking at around $9.00/day. Maybe an hour and a half at minimum wage, or roughly 10 hours per week.

Would this be a healthy diet? No. Would it be an enjoyable diet? No. But you could survive on it for quite a long time.

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