As to the specific thrust of your argument:

First of, it’s interesting that you’re still conflating complexity with good and that the complex life is better and that complex people are better. This is very ideological. Simpler can be better. Complex does not mean interesting or valuable. Is it good to go through some pointless though complex process to achieve an equivalent end? Especially when it does not appear to endow you with any other valuable of interesting qualities? Can you lionize this because it satisfies your arrogant notion of how human beings should be? Division of labour may be smart, rather than dumb. Your response is very normative to a macho Western rugged Individualist ideology (which is ultimately built off ideas of noble savages and such).

You’re also remarkably ungracious and disdainful to people who just push buttons and do other repetitive labour, even though they undoubtably make contributions that you are unable to quantify to letting you live your life as you do. You’re also simultaneously being hugely disdainful of the efforts of the people who let others live who might not be able to under a HG economy. It’s good to know that you value cruelty and callousness so much. Your seem to subscribe to a typical ideology that dehumanises the unskilled laborours of Capitalism. Your arrogance and Privilege is showing Greg! You could’ve used yourself as an example, but then, that would require genuine humility (as opposed than “Duh! I can’t perform socially low ranked manual labor such as taking the trash out. lol@myself.”) and would make simultaneously make apparent the fundamental disingenuousness of your argument.

You’re also an idiot for suggesting a simple model describing Western and Hunter Gatherer (all grouped together) societies as opposed points on a linear correlation (which you know is how the morons who read your blog will read this). They aren’t.

You’re also making a straw man. Do hunter-gatherers seriously not simplify societies they aren’t part of? Do they not simplify the behaviour of people who aren’t part of their society? Are humans not often chauvinistic and uncaring about foreign societies? I assume your response will be that it’s okay to racially abuse one and caricature iit and not the other because one has “POWER!” and that abuse is a good way to “Speak truth to power!” and all the other creepy and socially retarded muscular liberalism bullshit that justifies them to behave like sadistic little bullies with social sanction.

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I think it’s appropriate to avoid having a normative value judgement here. In some ways it’s good that Australian Aborgines for example, wander around, farting down tubes and learning much more than we would ever generally need know about and collecting bits of plants and animals they find. That’s an interesting, original way to be human. In other ways it’s good that people in civilizations do the variety of things that they do.

Ultimately, it’s more true to say that agricultural societies are more diverse, and that we do indeed have people in them who effectively approach the level of fairly simplified machines who only perform a very narrow subset of the tasks humans have generally evolved to do well. We also have people who greatly exceed HGs on terms which overlap very strongly with their own.

It is not all profit. It is also power, other things, including coercion. The opting is what happens in theory when some people are trying to convince other people to go along with them (because it is the right thing to do) and it is what happens later as part of the post hoc self serving description of what happens.

In between, whan actually opting in would be actually happening, my assumption is that it is not really happening most of the time . Probably some times.

By opt in I mean the people of a society make a more-or-less conscious decision to make such a change. The reason I cal lit opt in is because it involves moving an area of life that was managed informally via custom (like childhood education largely was) to something that is administered through a system–like the government, or some similar kind of institution.

Through many of these opt-ins–in favor of a large public highway system, a national currency, banking regulation, a uniform criminal code, etc., etc–over a long period of time, the institutional framework that allows society as we know it today, with all its differentiation and specialization–is created.

So I can largely ignore what goes into food provision and get on with my writing because I can feel assured that someone else is taking care of most of the food provision business.

The individual motives of those people “taking care of it” is profit, but profit did not drive every step of the creation of the framework–at some point crucial parts of the framework had to be opted for. That is, a “developed economy” is not just an inevitable outgrowth of the profit motive–it has to be opted for.