My favourite economist is Thorstein Veblen, whose idea of “conspicuous consumption” I have always found highly intriguing. Conspicuous consumption is the main driver of economic growth in a world in which there is hardly any population growth (third world). Why do we need ever more stuff to consider ourselves happy? Even below-average earning people have much better lives than the kings and queens of the past, materialistically speaking.
It is well known that happiness does not depend on absolute wealth, but on relative wealth, as people tend to compare themselves to their “neighbours”. The name of the game is, therefore “keeping up with your neighbours” (or rather to one-up them). This seems almost like human nature. Let’s be honest, who wouldn’t like to sport a flashy Ferrari in their driveway? However, it hasn’t been like that until fairly recently in human existence. Hunter-gatherers do not produce surplus goods, they only produce as much food as they can consume before the food spoils. Private possessions are alien to them as everything is shared.
This all changed with the advent of agriculture. Early farmers showed off their reproductive potential not by being good hunters, but by being able to produce surplus foods. On the one hand, those surplus foods were necessary for times when there was less food available, on the other hand, surplus food also guaranteed a farmer a more desirable mate or even more than one mate, which is impossible in most hunter-gatherer societies.
It is therefore not surprising that we see displays of status symbols with the spread of farming. Megalithic culture spread into Europe with early farmers and usually demarcated the border between farmers and hunter-gatherers and there is ample evidence that early farmers and hunter-gatherers tended not to mix. However, innovation and productivity only really started to skyrocket once hunter-gatherer types were incorporated into farmer societies, probably through slavery and interbreeding. Hunter-gatherer types often became innovative out of necessity because they couldn’t compete with farmers when it came to doing rote work. Modern hunter-gatherers have often been offered farmland by governments, however, they keep refusing because they find farming too much trouble.
Hunter-gatherer type people are not only responsible for the vast majority of technological innovations but are also highly represented among economists, from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to almost all Nobel Prize winners in economics. Even though most of these economists are interested in the optimization of economic processes, many of them do have hunter-gatherer instincts. Universal basic income is something a lot of economists favour. Milton Friedman, Peter Diamond, Angus Deaton and Yanis Varoufakis are only some of them. Likewise, the number of hunter-gatherer type entrepreneur (most often in tech) who are proponents of universal basic income almost seems endless:
- Bill Gates
- Elon Musk
- Tim Berners-Lee
- Pierre Omidyar
- Mark Zuckerberg
- Ray Kurzweil
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Another area in which modern hunter-gatherer types are very active: sustainability. A lot of hunter-gatherer types are advocates for the environment, CO2 reductions and invest in sustainable technologies, Elon Musk is perhaps one of the most prominent examples. It seems that he never stops working, and all of his efforts point to increasing sustainability, whether it's rethinking transportation, prioritising solar power, or even taking human civilization past Earth and colonising Mars.
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