Hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society

[Lou Gold]

This will surely stir some controversy, good controversy I believe.

"Why Do We Work So Damn Much?"

The metaphysical meaning is the bottom-line assertion that it is the cultural belief rather than the material condition that is the crucial difference making the difference.

Podcast with Ezra Klein and James Suzman...

So one of the truly great essays in the history of economic thought is this 1930 essay by John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” And it’s a weird essay. It’s done in the depth of the Great Depression, so everything is terrible, and people are really poor. But Keynes steps back and just imagines the future.

And he makes his now famous prediction that by 2030, which was a 100 years hence, human beings would be so much richer, so much more technologically advanced, that the problem of scarcity — that the problem that had defined economics, and arguably, human civilization, until then — would have been solved. And now we’d only work 15 hours a week. And the whole problem would be what to do with all this time.

And the reason this essay still gets talked about and debated and written about today is that Keynes was interestingly right and wrong. The part of this that seems hard and probably seemed very out there when he did it, the calculations for how much richer we’d get in 100 years, that was not just right. If anything, it was conservative. We passed his predictions for income growth decades ago. And then we got even richer than that.

But you may notice we don’t work 15 hours a week. In fact, in an inversion of past history, the more money you make now, the more hours you generally work. It used to be the point of being rich was to not work. And now we’ve built a social value system. So the reward for making a lot of money at work is, you get to do even more work. And so people all up and down the income scale with levels of plenty that would have been shocking to anyone in Keynes’s time are harried, burnt out, always wanting more, feeling there’s not enough.

So what went wrong? What did Keynes get wrong? My guest today is the anthropologist James Suzman. And he flips this whole conversation on its head. Suzman has spent the last 30 years living with and studying one of the oldest enduring hunter-gatherer societies. For most of the history of civilization, the prevailing belief was that life before what we now think of as civilization was, as Thomas Hobbes said, nasty, brutish, and short.

But modern anthropology has turned that around. Hunter-gatherers were usually healthy. They were usually well nourished. Even in very unforgiving climates, they tended to have diverse diets. And they did it while only spending about 15 hours a week on hunting and gathering.

Suzman’s new book is called “Work, A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots.” And the overarching argument is that the way we work today isn’t driven by what we need. It’s driven by what we want. It’s also driven by how, socially, we regulate or encourage wants, which is part of where his research on hunter-gatherers and how they approach this comes in. But the big thing here is that Keynes had it backwards. Humanity solved the problem of scarcity and achieved a 15-hour workweek long before modernity. But as we’ve gotten richer and built more technology, we’ve developed a machine not for ending our wants, not for fulfilling them, but for generating new ones, new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition.

You can’t solve the problem of scarcity with our current system because our current system is designed to generate endlessly the feeling of more scarcity within us. It needs that. And so we keep working harder and harder and feeling like we have less and less, even amidst quite a bit of plenty, at least, for many of us.

Suggestions for getting around the paywall.

[SanteriSatama]

Purpose from 'want' vs purpose from abundance.

[DandelionSoul]

Yes! Also, several hunter-gatherer societies would reshape the land through the controlled use of fire so it would grow food better. In Australia, for instance, European settlers were amazed at how lush the landscape was because they thought it got that way without any human intervention, because the natives were "lazy" and they didn't have any sophisticated technology that the Europeans would've recognized as such. Rather than struggling against the land, the Indigenous people drew out its natural potentials so that life as a whole could thrive there.

[Jim Cross]

Yes! Also, several hunter-gatherer societies would reshape the land through the controlled use of fire so it would grow food better. In Australia, for instance, European settlers were amazed at how lush the landscape was because they thought it got that way without any human intervention, because the natives were "lazy" and they didn't have any sophisticated technology that the Europeans would've recognized as such. Rather than struggling against the land, the Indigenous people drew out its natural potentials so that life as a whole could thrive there.

I don't know that burning out a region is exactly drawing out the land's natural potential. And one of the reasons was to make hunting easier. Some think it may have had a role in the extinction of megafauna by changing the types of plants.

[Jim Cross]

Might also want to take a look at Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers. When resources get low, things can get violent.

[Ben Iscatus]

Also, Australia is hotter. Things grow lusher, quicker. I remember reading how someone who moved to Borneo was amazed when his carrots germinated almost overnight.

[SanteriSatama]

Might also want to take a look at Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers. When resources get low, things can get violent.

Yes, there has been and is motivation for social science and experimentation of social forms to liberate from war and to create peace. We can agree that bringing peace on Earth and good will among men is deeply and widely shared common goal of social, spiritual etc. evolution. In this sense, the historical continuum called "Europe" can have much to learn from "indegenous" social sciences, and I hope and trust that in this respect David Graeber's posthumous book will bring much new light to learn from.

[DandelionSoul]

Might also want to take a look at Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers. When resources get low, things can get violent.

Oh absolutely, and that's also worth a mention. I'm not arguing things were perfect and they were living the perfect Edenic life. My suggestion is a lot less ambitious: that there was an unjustified prejudice toward what was, in fact, a fairly sophisticated society and the creative solutions it had developed because that sophistication didn't fit into preconceived notions of what a sophisticated society ought to look like, and that laying that prejudice aside might offer valuable insights to us. I'm not naive enough to think there was ever any society free of violence and warfare. I got myself a copy of that book and I'm reading the chapters on Australia now. Thanks for the recommendation.

[Lou Gold]

Might also want to take a look at Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers. When resources get low, things can get violent.

Yes! And James Suzman surely does. Of course, this whole topic is still a raging debate among anthropologists. And, as Suzman notes in the interview, it even makes some quite violent.

[Jim Cross]

Might also want to take a look at Violence and Warfare among Hunter-Gatherers. When resources get low, things can get violent.

Yes! And James Suzman surely does. Of course, this whole topic is still a raging debate among anthropologists. And, as Suzman notes in the interview, it even makes some quite violent.

What I find interesting is the link to scarcity and violence. Part of what may be driving us to work more than we need is some innate fear of scarcity. We over-compensate. I've often heard it said that so many people who came through the Depression end up overly frugal and working probably far more than they need. To a lesser extent the same may be in all of us.