Join 📚 Hadar's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Hadar's read, .
In reality, only for today’s affluent First World citizens, who don’t actually do the work of raising food themselves, does food production (by remote agribusinesses) mean less physical work, more comfort, freedom from starvation, and a longer expected lifetime. Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world’s actual food producers, aren’t necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do. Archaeologists have demonstrated that the first farmers in many areas were smaller and less well nourished, suffered from more serious diseases, and died on the average at a younger age than the hunter-gatherers they replaced. If those first farmers could have foreseen the consequences of adopting food production, they might not have opted to do so. Why, unable to foresee the result, did they nevertheless make that choice?
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
“Losers have goals. Winners have systems.”
Tools of Titans
Timothy Ferriss
In a manufacturing laggard such as the United Kingdom, the real value of manufacturing output is currently two and a half times what it was at the end of the Second World War. This expanded output is produced by less than one-tenth of the British workforce, compared with the one-third of employees who worked in manufacturing as recently as 1960.4 None the less, the productivity gains do not mean it is easy for a country like Britain to further expand its manufacturing sector. This is because many machine-based tasks are most efficiently undertaken by the kind of low-skilled, cheap workers that rich countries are short of. And that is precisely where the opportunities lie for emerging nations. Their manufacturing is nothing like as efficient as it is in advanced economies, but nor does it need to be because poor countries can throw highly motivated, cut-price, fresh-off-the-farm labour at the task.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise