Did they have explanatory journalists back then? Hmmmm....the Quaternary overlapped with the end of the Stone Age...so...maybe not formalized explanatory journalism.
Sort of what I imagine a newsroom to look like.
As Forbes put it back in 2014:
Vox is an explanatory journalism website started by former Washington Post columnist and blogger Ezra Klein. What's explanatory journalism?
Good question. It's journalism that tries to explain things readers don't understand. Some explanatory journalism consists mostly of words, organized into simple declarative sentences. Some explanatory journalism consists of photographs, or charts, or videos, or animated GIFs. Animated GIFs are halfway between videos and photographs.....
"Grok, dude, everything big is dying."
"Ghur, why would that be, pray tell?"
"Here's what I think is going on...."
From Andrew Kemendo, January 15, 2023:
The Quaternary Megafauna Extinction caused humans to develop an existential scarcity myth that serves as a founding cultural assumption, biasing all Historical, Economic and Political thought. This myth, based on a temporary reality of pervasive scarcity from 10,000 BC - 2000 AD, became embedded in prehistoric storytelling so thoroughly that humanity favors recent social structures of hierarchy, competition & hoarding over traditional human social structures of community, cooperation & sharing. This claim is composed of five propositions:1. Until the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction, humans had never faced pervasive resource pressure for necessity goods.
2. Competition and resource hoarding is a beneficial in-group adaptation over cooperation in populations experiencing resource pressures.
3. Economic, Social and Political thought since the Quaternary Megafauna Extinction, assumes inescapable scarcity as a fundamental truth, and assumes in-group resource hoarding behaviors are perpetually adaptive.
4. Humanity has been post-scarcity of necessity goods at a global production level since at least the year 2000.
5. In the current post-scarcity environment, competition and resource hoarding become existentially detrimental to all populations, accelerating the destruction of social and community trustThe First Proposition:
Groundbreaking Anthropological work since the 1950s has unambiguously demonstrated that Anatomically Modern humans have continuously inhabited earth as far back as 200,000 BC. By 50,000 BC, fewer than 2 million humans, living in small, close-knit, egalitarian communities, roamed the planet incautiously consuming the abundant fauna and flora. The Quaternary Megafauna Extinction (QME) was the well documented, extremely rapid crash in available calories, beginning around 50,000 BC, and accelerating into the Neolithic around 11,000 BC. This crash resulted in widespread resource pressures representing a net-loss in total available calories. Areas of genuine resource scarcity, once a transient phenomena, became frequent and pervasive, driving humans to hunt progressively smaller game, forage more intensively and increased the pervasiveness of hoarding behaviors. In practical terms this meant groups of humans were increasingly pressured to spend more energy or take more risk to earn the same amount of calories. By the year 10,000 BC, for the first time ever, humanity needed to learn how to survive in a persistently resource scarce environment. This pressure induced a Kuhnian paradigm shift in humanity’s behavior from one of nomadic resource sharing to sedentary hoarding.
The Second Proposition:
Through 90% of human history (200,000BC - 1,000BC), and within surviving hunter gatherer groups, resource hoarding behavior was extremely rare, as it was unnecessary and considered wasteful. Post QME, hoarding behavior became a beneficial in-group adaptation, as it allowed for the acquisition, retention and management of scarce resources by an in-group population for exclusive consumption within the in-group. Founded on the novel social technology of “rival and excludable real property”, the domestication of cattle, the invention of modern agriculture, and the resultant socio/political structures we call “modernity” proliferated in communities as humans spread across the earth. Through late prehistory into modernity, large regionally focused populations with common cultural practices, separated classes and hierarchical structures become more frequent in the written and archeological record. Varied cultural structures for competition and hoarding form based on regional ecological availability, and global trade develops in earnest. By 500 BC the Achaemenid Empire had established a robust and advanced multi-region system of trade, signaling a point of no return from humans being cooperative nomads, to competitive property holders....
....MUCH MORE (8 page PDF)
As was discussed in "Storage: Very Important For Roman Emperors and Commodities Market Manipulators":
The only way to combat abundance is with artificial scarcity, i.e. manipulation....
"The Effect of Futures Markets and Corners on Storage and Spot Price Variability".
To Create A "1%" In A Social Hierarchy You Don't Need An Economic Surplus, Just A Storable Form Of Wealth
The Golden Age of Commodities Market Manipulation: Corners, Storage and Squeezes
These days however, to purloin that wealth, you don't even need to be dealing with storables:
How to Manipulate Non-storable Commodities Markets
Remember, the spectrum runs from storage to hoarding to market corners.
And corners in commodities refers to physical, you can't corner a commod
by simply buying futures or forwards, you also have to take up the
physical supply.
Conversely, squeezes are accomplished in the futures..
A couple decent papers on this aspect of the abundance theory are:
"Large Investors, Price Manipulation, and Limits to Arbitrage: An Anatomy of Market Corners" and
"Market Manipulation, Bubbles, Corners and Short Squeezes"
