Building a hut with a tiled roof, underfloor heating and mud and stone walls
I've enjoyed this guy's videos a great deal.  I haven't watched this one yet, but the blog post is excellent.<p>It might make you wonder why people have historically been so poor.  So here are a few points to think about:<p>1. This hut took a highly skilled polymath 102 workdays to build, using a little capital he'd previously built up (the celt.).  The opportunity cost in the modern economy is about US$60 000.  How long does it take you to save up US$60 000?  Now, consider what kind of house you could build with US$60 000 by means of the economy, or with 102 days building with robots.<p>2. The vast majority of people in human history have been systematically excluded from access to both the knowledge and the material resources needed to carry out this project.  If you had the knowledge, you could always build a hut like this — but the neighbors, who are organized into an effective violent force with a hierarchy of coercion, would be likely to raid you and take it away, even though most of them are low in the hierarchy and are therefore not allowed to live in a luxury house like this themselves.  <i>Most people still live like that</i>.  Now we call the people who do most of the raiding "police", and they have bulldozers.<p>3. And yeah, food is expensive when you have to plant it, and historically speaking, groups that have planted food can support denser populations with greater productive capital (mills, houses, tools) and more stratified social orders, all three of which make them militarily stronger, so they gradually pushed the groups that just gather it into the poorest and least fertile territories.<p>This seems like a terrible situation.  How can we fix it?