The Story of Humans

We authors, Lenore Monello Schloming and Skip Schloming, are trained sociologists. This work, a joint and lifelong endeavor, began with our doctoral dissertations in sociology, written over 45 years ago as graduate students at Brandeis University. We met, married, and began to research and develop our ideas, which continues to this day, summarized here in the latest form. 

    Homesteading  Our life experiences include homesteading for 12 years on 60 acres in rural Maine where we built a large home using timber from our land and operated a small elementary school in our home. Our students tested two years ahead of grade, and each year they performed an original one-act musical in the local community.

   Rental housing   We returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to manage rental housing in the family. We also became leaders for 25 years of the Small Property Owners Association, a group of small landlords who had defeated rent control in Massachusetts in a 1994 statewide referendum.

   Subsequently, as the group's leaders, we defeated four separate efforts to bring rent control back in Boston and Cambridge. All we had to do was tell all residential owners how rent control would reduce property values on a substantial sector of housing -- and reduce a city's property tax revenues and services. In Cambridge, a city that once loved rent control, rent control's return was presented in a 2003 citywide referendum. Once informed, the city defeated it in a 61%-to-39% vote. Similarly in Boston, the City Council defeated rent control three times in a row, in 8-to-5 votes. Tenant activists have so far not made further efforts to bring rent control back.

    Subsequent research showed that rent control had devalued not just the rent-controlled housing stock, but all the non-controlled multifamily housing in neighborhoods as well. In fact, in Cambridge, 55% of all devaluation from rent control occurred on non-controlled housing. It's the "broken window" effect. Poorly kept housing, an inevitable consequence of restricting rents, damages the value of surrounding non-controlled housing.

    The story of humans    Our longtime focus as scholars has been on the major change in the social and economic lives of humans, from prehistoric to modern times. For a million years and longer, we lived in the African subcontinent as small nomadic packs of vegetarian gatherers, eating wild plant food growing naturally in our environment . We ate it raw, perhaps the healthiest diet we ever had. Eventually we developed hunting and added meat to our diet. We also tamed fire and began to cook our food.

     When we lived in these small nomadic groups of around 30 members, our sociability as humans reached a long-lasting peak for a million years and longer -- and it still exists in a few surviving hunter-gatherer tribes in isolated areas, who steadfastly keep away from "civilized" society. Getting our food as hunter-gatherers took only a few hours a day, which left plenty of time for leisure and fun around the campfire.

     Then we took up farming. Our nomadic life came to an end. Farming tied us to plots of land, to property, and to the need to exclude other humans who might take over our croplands and threaten our survival. Farming, moreover, was hard work, a day's-long, almost year-round activity. The farmers needed help to protect their croplands, and help was nearby. Wherever the farmers planted were hunting-and-gathering bands whose hunting spears and arrows could be easily turned against humans. Warfare began with farming. As these bands became warriors, they no longer got their own food. The warriors and farmers became interdependent: food in exchange for protection. The burden on the farmers, however, grew. They needed to plant and tend more cropland to produce food for themselves AND for the protecting warriors. The warriors, moreover, were in a position to decide and compel the farmers' activities. It was the beginning of warfare and feudalism, the first form of government, which became widespread.

    As farming techniques improved and more land was set to farming, the population of non-food-producing specialists grew: craftsmen in many varieties, religious leaders, and government officials of all sorts: kings, emperors, czars, and their supporting officials: surveyors, tax collectors, scribes -- and, of course, a strong military to keep government officials in power and enforce the laws. Other than the growing size of populations and governments, little has changed since farming began.