Cities were historically unhealthy, etc, etc, as well. Yet people kept moving to them. So "most people can't afford to [leave civiliation]" is far from new. Perhaps the life everyone has been fleeing to get to cities was never what you think it is for most.
The movement to cities was more likely the result of an arms race rather than preference. Most anthropological evidence points to deterioration in quality of life (e.g. diet, height, disease, teeth, inequality) when comparing hunter-gatherers and city dwellers.
Larger populations, specialization of labor, and fortifications made city-states militarily superior to small bands of hunter-gatherers and allowed cities to dominate a surrounding region (at least until the modern horse). When a region was depleted of wild game then cities and their croplands were the most reliable source of food. Armies from city states would not infrequently raid and capture smaller groups of humans and bring them back to cities as slaves.
So cities were likely a forced choice, as smaller nomadic groups were forceably absorbed into the domains of city-states or repelled toward less hospitable lands.
"People moved to cities for economic opportunities" and "people can't financially afford to leave the cities" seem like just the glass half full / glass half empty versions of the same thing.
Put it one way it's bad, put it one way its good. It's a choice with tradeoffs - I'm just pointing out that those tradeoffs aren't some uniquely new "collapse of our society" thing.
The difference is that when people "move to city", it means the village where they are from offers them even poorer conditions. Less food, less work, lower pay.
"People can't afford leaving city" suggest there is active price to be paid for ability to be somewhere - transport, house elsewhere being too expensive or some such. It does not even suggets opportunity cost.
Otherwise said, first sentence means people move to city because it is better for them economically. Second does not say anything about whether it is good for you, just that moving away would cost too much. Also, some people stayed in economicaly bad places, because they could not afford to move to the better place. Transport and initial housing pay was too much.
This is an interesting revelation. Thanks for framing it this way.
Riffing:
I think there’s a middle phrasing similar to “cities are the most efficient allocation of resources we have yet invented.”
Similar to the “democracy is the least bad system of government yet invented.”
There’s some corollary to survivorship bias at play here as well. Cities are an apparently natural consequence of human civilization so we know a lot about their flaws. But civilizations that didn’t migrate toward cities either failed or records of their existence was lost.
> Whats scary is that we have more and more civilization diseases and we have no idea whats causing them beside guesses.
We do have some good mechanistic hypotheses, but most reviews fail to describe them because a lot of research is hand wavy. However, things are slowly reaching mainstream.
Let's consider type 1 diabetes (T1D), which is a common autoimmune disorder where beta cells in the pancreas get destroyed by your own immune system. T1D was rare a century ago, and we know from patient records that incidence increases rapidly whenever a society becomes industrialized. For example, take the Karelia region split between Finland and Russia. People on both sides of the border have the same genetic background. However, children on the Finish side have 10x more incidence of insulin autoantibodies [1]. Microbiomes on both sides are actually very different, with Russian children resembling ancient non-industrialized ones.
The immune system is essentially a huge distributed memory where individual cells recognize small protein or lipid fragments as self or foreign, and then collectively decide whether there is an infection in the particular microenvironment they are exploring. We know T1D typically begins because the immune system recognizes a particular insulin chunk, the amino acid sequence SHLVEALYLVCGERGFF, as foreign. In other more complex autoimmune disorders this part is less clear.
It turns out that many gut bacteria mimic that particular insulin chunk [2]. That probably gives these commensal bacteria the ability to survive and avoid immune responses, and it is a flag of the symbiotic relationship these bacteria have developed with higher organisms in the last 100 million years. Now, the bacterial ecosystem of a modern gut has a lot less diversity than it should and therefore it is very fragile. We don't know exactly what happens before T1D, but one possibility is that these bacteria grow too much in abundance and therefore initiate autoimmunity as T cells found in the pancreas of T1D patients can't distinguish between one protein chunk from these bacteria and insulin.
There are similar patterns in other autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis. This patent aims to edit bacterial mimics that cause autoimmunity using a CRISPR system in a pill [3].
My understanding is that, in healthy humans, gut bacteria are not presented in huge numbers to the immune system because the intestinal barrier (tight junctions) prevent most of them from migrating into the blood stream.
Are then not antibodies against gut bacteria a clear sign of a damaged gut barrier?
(FWIW there seem to be suspicions that Ankylosing Spondylitis is also caused by a certain type of bacteria being present _and_ getting into places such that antibodies against them are formed.)
There is a lot of literature that supports the role of gut bacteria inducing Tregs, and now there is also some evidence of epitope transport from the gut into the thymus.
Hence, I think these events might matter even if they are not very frequent.
But you could be right, and perhaps there's not really a relevant mutualistic relationship between host and commensals in terms of epitope crossreactivity.
Diseases of civilization usually refers to things like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer. I'm not 100% sure but I think the common threads are metabolic and inflammatory.
> it was already recorded way before we had modern and industrial societies
This doesn't falsify the claim at all. Diabetes was first recorded 3500 years ago, and none of the other diseases on the list were literally invented by industrialization. Diseases of civilization refers (essentially) to diseases whose casualty rates dominate in societies of abundance and industrialization, by contrast to the predominance of (eg) infectious diseases in pre-industrial societies.
I do agree that it stands slightly apart from the rest of the examples, in that (eg) a contemporary hunter-gatherer still has a fair chance of getting cancer while they have a very low chance of diabetes/obesity. But it's pedantry to claim flatly that it doesn't qualify, especially given plenty of scientific usage[1][2][3] that contradicts the claim.
Worsening of the environment we live in impacts us in ways we cannot even imagine.
Scary is that we cannot go back, coz its financially impossible for most.