The Needs of the Many

If you want to feed, house, and clothe 8 billion people, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Or rather, we’ve had our work cut out for us this whole time. We’ve been trying to figure out how to accommodate more and more humans ever since we’ve been human.

Today, I just want to call attention to how we’ve managed to do it.

Let’s start with food. A hundred thousand years ago, we were survivors and scavengers. We could thrive on a huge variety of food, and our diets changed based on what was available.

Little bands of humans stuck together and shared food, and this made a lot of sense: a small community or tribe could have some small economies of scale, with some division of labor allowing some specialization. You ended up with a few expert hunters in each tribe, and maybe one or two expert butchers, capable of efficiently carving any corpse with sharp stone tools, then feeding everyone with the nutrient-rich meat.

You’d also have amazing gatherers who knew which plants, nuts, and fung…