India's rice revolution

[the_lyniezian]

It always bugs me why anyone talks about us possibly going "back to the Stone Age" after some possible collapse. Presumably the only knowledge we need for that not to happen is the ability to work metals into usable tools, something we have known about for several thousand years in one form or another. This is surely basic enough not to be lost (presuming there are enough people with some knowledge of metallurgy and smithery).

I think it depends how far into the future you look. A lot of knowledge and technology gets lost in only a few generations when civilisations collapse. You only have to look at the UK in the 4th century. Romans had writing, advanced machinery, grand architecture, literature, mass production, highly structured society. In little more than a century we were back to living in wattle and daub houses and crude pottery, illiterate and subsistence farming and very little even by the way or iron tools. They were one technology away from the stone age.

Given how much more fragile our current level of technology is, I think you will be shocked how fast and how much is lost once the energy and food shortfall starts to bite. I strongly suspect that most of the world will go through massive depopulation and return to subsistence farming in little more than a century. It only takes a generation to go from high technology to illiteracy if the schools shut down.

If so I guess it would be down to the lack of traditional skills. When all your tools are made in a factory with the aid of machines, you probably don't need a blacksmith, say. Should that system break down, demand will exceed supply for such vocations.

[RenewableCandy]

Interestingly, the old-fashioned Russians stranded in their forest managed to keep a hold of Literacy for at least 2 generations. Dmitri Orlov reckons that would be far harder to do in English, though: with our erratic spelling it actually takes us much longer to learn to read.

On the Long March, the Red Army helped its illiterate soldiers learn the even-more-difficult Chinese characters by painting them on large squares which they wore on their backs as they marched (or worked in a line). That way, you'd be looking at one character all day (they swapped at the end of the day) and would hopefully have learned enough to read a basic paper (about 300 characters) by the end of the year.