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   Rasmus Fleischer (rasmusfleischer@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Friday, 08-Sep-2023 15:50:13 JST Rasmus Fleischer

   Historian Ian Morris claimed that hunters-gatherers lived by 1,10 US dollars per day. What the fuck does that supposed to mean? He was sharply criticized by Graeber/Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything. Now Morris has reviewed the same book in American Journal of Archaeology, and defends himself by saying he simply uses "the commonest metric in the social sciences". However he still has a lot of praise for The Dawn of Everything.
   https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/720603

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     Jonas (adoranten@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Friday, 08-Sep-2023 16:18:10 JST Jonas

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     @rasmusfleischer A perhaps more interesting metric comes from earth system studies: According to my own rough estimates, extrapolating from readily available energy metrics, excess energy added into the global system – from oil alone – amounts to around 36,000 times the available energy from human bodily capacity of living humans. A drastic (yet logical) conclusion would be that without this excess energy from oil, the average person would be 36,000 times less well off. 🤷♂️

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     Rasmus Fleischer (rasmusfleischer@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Friday, 08-Sep-2023 16:25:55 JST Rasmus Fleischer

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     • Jonas

     @adoranten i do think the biophysical approach is more relevant than the monetary. However, I'm not sure if energy use can be used as a proxy for being "well off" as that would assume some kind of 100 % energy efficiency (the latter defined in a strictly anthropocentric manner).

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     Jonas (adoranten@tldr.nettime.org)'s status on Friday, 08-Sep-2023 16:27:00 JST Jonas

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     @rasmusfleischer True!
     Makes for a fun thought experiment though.