Hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society
Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2021 1:03 am
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.
"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.
