This is the type of insight that I come to HN for. As someone who is drinking whiskey now and will be drinking coffee in 12 hours, I couldn't agree more.
Got to herd cattle for that, got to travel alot to feed that cattle, got to fight other tribes to keep the cattle, got to have Kalashnikov and arrows to keep the cattle, got to trade those techs in with somebody who melts down iron and digs, got to trade them with food, got to make a long logic chain, to escape admitting you got a point, frozenport.
It was a nice explanation for a otherwise disadvantages behavior, while it was blasted by he historians that lasted.
No, the Mongols were nomadic, not agrarian, and the fermentation of alcohol does not require an agrarian society to produce. In point of fact, it is so easy to make alcohol that we can hardly keep people from doing so in prisons. Generally, people make and consume alcohol, whether or not they are interested in settling anywhere in particular. So, while you are generally correct that there are a number of factors that make the combination of agrarianism and alcohol production particularly successful, it's not a causal relationship.
Eh, to substain a prison - you need a agrarian society.
And yes, its easy to make- but is it also easy to keep up the supply during winter times? When the cows stop giving milk, the alcoholics have the civilization monkey on there back.
As a Marxist who works for a social service agency, I have become convinced that the two original sins of civilization are (1) forced labor and (2) the controlled fermentation of alcohol. At some point, a local entrepeneur figured out that he could get serfs to stay on the land and give him a cut of their produce if he bashed a few heads in. Probably at the same time, he figured out they would less effective at leading a revolution, and a little more content with their lot in life, if he let them get wasted when the work was done. Hell, said entrepeneur probably sold them the beer itself... Add a spectacle like a gladiator fight, and voila! Fast forward to Coors Light, working at a Target warehouse, and the SF Niners on TV. Plus ca change, plus la meme chose....
(I think of poor people as the originary arbitrage... Yes, I know what micro economics says about the existence of arbitrages, that's the point.)
Also interesting that I don't think they mentioned cider (paywall preventing me from re-reading), which was a huge thing in America at least until prohibition.
And what are you going to do if you get rid of capitalism and serfdom and make everything equal, but in your utopia people still want to get drunk sometimes?
Are you going to bash in heads to keep them from getting drunk?
Interesting how the graphics in this article are created. It looks like they use http://ai2html.org/ which renders everything but text to a background image, and then places the text in front. It seems the only benefit vs. just rendering the illustrator file to a png is that you can select and copy the text. Perhaps it also allows a future editor to change figures without needing the source Illustrator file.
