Individual risk of not finding food is higher, but because the risk is spread across the clan, tribe, or village the overall risk is abated. The high reward when part of the group is successful is plenty for everyone when shared. They just made an argument for cooperative living on a small, local scale.
> They just made an argument for cooperative living on a small, local scale.
That depends on your individual capabilities. What you're capable of producing and the value of that production.
If you're around the median or below, there may be an argument for that cooperative style of existence. In a modern, industrial civilization where people in the top tiers of competency are highly rewarded (and sometimes very far beyond that), it makes no sense to stick yourself in a cooperative small scale living context if you're in the top 1/3 to 1/4 or so of competency (you'd become a net charity entity, which is fine, however you'd just be better off donating a share of your surplus output in a manner of your choosing instead (which we've turned into taxation); or alternatively you'd be dragged down to the median output level or below by the cooperative tribe, in the style of crab mentality, they would not long tolerate your exceptionalism unless they get to ride you far beyond their fair share).
You're aggregating capabilities pretty broadly. While it might be true that a short person might be able to walk farther and get some special thing, or a small person might be able to get into a nook and get some special thing, or a big person might be more able to carry a bunch of things back in a similar amount of time, these are complementary capabilities and no one of them is more valuable than the others independently.
Even if you accept your premise that there is one dimension of capability, what is the metric, more tubers than you can eat?
Nobody builds Amazon or Google alone. VC-backed or publicly traded companies are putting some of the risk on others and giving them some of the rewards. Sure, what specific role you play and how much risk you take on is reflected in the level of reward when things go well. Let's not pretend Bezos pulled a retail behemoth and AWS out of his back pocket and delivered it to a waiting world. Even a corporation is a type of cooperative endeavor.
We need to not confuse "cooperative" as an adjective describing people working together with "cooperative" as an ownership model. Really, though, some cooperatively owned organizations are very successful. Yes, even in the US. REI is a customer cooperative. Hy-Vee food stores are a workers' cooperative. Many rural areas have telephone, electric, gas, or other cooperatives. My parents belong to an LP gas cooperative for example. They live along a road where their side is served by a commercial electric company and across the road is served by the local electric cooperative. These specific-purpose cooperatives work well.
You could, as a high earning tech person, build a fully cooperative neighborhood with other people who earn similar money. You could form an insurance pool for healthcare, unemployment, accidents, and such. Since you'd be choosing who's in your cohort, so you don't need to worry about substantial differences in earning power. Or you could do what many high-skilled people do - start a new company with a handful of equal partners, where your income and success are equalized across an entirely different organization of willing equals.
Having the cooperation of the tribe is the reward. A single individual has their own strength and labor, but with the cooperation of others they can accomplish much more.
Earning a person's full labor means paying for their necessities - and some extra for loyalty. Without it they will always be distracted by survival.
I am this | | close to starting a co-op just for the heck of it. We need more of them, if only just to make them seem more approachable and have people ask for them more.
I've lived in a few co-ops while living in Berkeley, and now own my own home. I have to say that I prefer the co-op model, as you can spread the luxuries and responsibilities amongst a number of people. When a problem comes up the folks that deal with it are those that are effected, with the resources of the whole house behind them, instead of a property management company or one sole individual. The burden and pleasure of a huge tv room, hot tub and guest bedrooms all become something that other's can utilize instead of something that you feel guilty about having and not using.
"When a problem comes up the folks that deal with it are those that are effected, with the resources of the whole house behind them, instead of a property management company or one sole individual."
You don't have friends or family? They drive the model you describe - and have for millennia - without fancy constructs like co ops. Or sacrificing personal space/privacy.
I think the journalist got it backwards. The lead sentence of the Science article is Efficiency leads to leisure. And the word inefficient doesn't even appear.
Gambling by putting more energy in, for the change of quicker and larger payout is definitely not inefficiency.
They're using efficiency in a different (and certainly confusing) sense.
Their gas guzzling car example explains their thought process: humans, whilst hunting, are running hot. They're inefficient at the task of maintaining themselves between meals.
That's made irrelevant by the fact that they're collecting more food on average, so they're actually more efficient overall, but that only becomes true once you factor in food intake.
Sort of like saying that a lorry is a less efficient way to travel than a car. True until you mention that the lorry has many tons of cargo which must make the journey with you (or in subsequent trips), _then_ the reverse holds.
I believe they meant to argue that it is high-risk because it is inefficient in the sense that you expend a lot of energy which may or may not pay off. But since it is both high-risk and high-reward, I was also wondering why they used the word inefficient there.
I think that the implication is that if each individual hunts individually, they mostly get nothing, and every so often get an entire animal which is too large for one person/family to eat, so the expected value of this strategy is low.
By pooling high risk strategies with big payoffs, the expected value of the whole is greater.
