“The destruction of capital—temples, palaces, manors, monuments, bathhouses, and wealthy properties—all disproportionately hurt the rich.” Though calamities such as disease and famine tend to bring greater harm to the poor, those who manage to survive the wipeout event, Kemp suggests, are left with “more bargaining power with bosses and landlords” because there are fewer people with whom to compete.
Ominous, given the current push for AI among the rich and powerful.
One of Kemp’s central arguments—that some early societies were relatively democratic, and that hierarchical rule is not humanity’s default setting—closely echoes the theory advanced by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. That book, published in 2021, generated heated debate about the origins of inequality and the reliability of the archaeological record, and it was ultimately admired more for the force of its argument than for its account of the earliest societies.
Is that really the consensus opinion on Dawn of Everything?
My guess is people cannot get over this book trashing Harari’s Sapiens.
Communist Manifesto II