You might want to be careful about anachronism when stating facts.
It is true that very few today farm, but take into account that, within the past century alone, the yield of farmers has increased by an order of magnitude, not to mention the millennia of domestication and invention before it. For most of agricultural history, the percentage of farmers was much higher than 3%.
For example, from Wikipedia's article on Roman Agriculture:
>In the Roman Empire, a typical family of 3.25 persons would need between 7-8 iugera of land to meet minimum food requirements (without animals). If a family owned animals to help cultivate land, then 20 iugera is needed. There would not be a surplus production on this farm.
Well, all right, so agriculture sucked for a long time. It's still the case that the precursors to many of the good things we have today (e.g. computers) come from concentrating people in cities, which comes from farming.
That is true, but my point was merely countering the assertion that ancient farming cultures had more average free time than ancient hunter-gatherer cultures. I don't dispute that agriculture allowed technology to eventually flourish in the slightest; hundreds of millenia of slow-progress pre-agricultural prehistory are strong evidence of that.
Well, okay, but the point of the normal free time argument is that agricultural people have more time, and are therefore able to do more stuff. My point is, it may not be the case that agricultural people have more time on average, but it is the case that agricultural societies give enough people free time to do many more interesting things, and especially, enough free time to concentrate in cities and do things they couldn't do while not in cities. Which more or less negates the whole agriculture-is-a-mistake argument; once you show that agriculture lets you do lots of amazing things in cities, you can argue that those things are worth the various bugs in agriculture (most of which eventually get fixed anyway).
It is true that very few today farm, but take into account that, within the past century alone, the yield of farmers has increased by an order of magnitude, not to mention the millennia of domestication and invention before it. For most of agricultural history, the percentage of farmers was much higher than 3%.
For example, from Wikipedia's article on Roman Agriculture:
>In the Roman Empire, a typical family of 3.25 persons would need between 7-8 iugera of land to meet minimum food requirements (without animals). If a family owned animals to help cultivate land, then 20 iugera is needed. There would not be a surplus production on this farm.