Oh yeah? Industrial farming gives less food per hour of work than collecting wild nuts? Are you sure about that?
Please do show me the data that 8 billion people can survive on hunting and gathering.
With modern farming, 10% of the people can now produce enough food for everyone. And if everyone had equal income instead of the top 1% syphoning off half the wealth, we could globally support a middle class lifestyle by everyone working 20 hours a week, the same amount that hunters and gatherers “worked”.
10% of the people, first of all, is around 800 million people. And secondly, that’s a lot of really hard work that can’t be done just 20 hours a week. I’m in Indiana. I know farmers. It’s not even a 40-hour-a-week job. It’s a sunup to sundown job.
So sure, everyone gets a break. Except farmers. Who earn the same amount as everyone else but have to work a lot harder.
Source? Everything we do is more an more complex. A TV show requires hundreds of people. A smartphone, millions if we include supply chains. Same for a car. A modern house requires dozens of highly specialized workers for weeks at a time, plus materials. People live much longer with better health, that’s a lot of labor in research, machines, drugs and raw manpower (nurses, surgeons, etc).
Maybe you meant a pre-industrial middle class?
They didn’t say we could.
They said industrial farming is more effective per manhour at food production.
And it is. There are obviously further complexities to have everything else in a modern society, but that doesn’t change the fact that even modern productivity increases aren’t decreasing work loads for some reason
It was in response to my saying that you cannot support a large population via hunting and gathering. You need to work harder than that. It is only more food per hour of work if you are talking about a small population. There is a point of diminishing returns and then it gets harder and harder to feed a growing population via hunting and gathering.