A few weeks ago, I listened to a very interesting podcast, Why Do We Work So Damn Much?, where podcast host, NY Times columnist Ezra Klein, interviewed anthropologist James Suzman. Suzman has devoted almost thirty years to studying and writing about the Ju’hoansi and other bushmen from the Kalahari Basin, who are among the world’s few remaining hunter-gatherer societies. He recently published Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, a book about his research.
Modern humans emerged in Africa between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. Our homo sapiens ancestors were hunter-gatherers for most of those years, collecting wild plants and hunting wild animals. Starting around 12,000 years ago, the agricultural revolution introduced the domestication of plants and animals, leading many hunter-gatherer groups to establish agricultural communities and villages.
The vast majority of hunter-gatherers disappeared a long time ago, but a few groups remain in isolated sections of Africa, Australia, the Amazon rainforest and the Arctic. Anthropologists have been studying these remaining hunter-gatherers to learn how they’ve been able to survive so much longer than other human groups, as well as to understand the behaviors and cultures that modern humans may have inherited from our closest ancestors.
The podcast opened with a discussion of the famous 1930 essay, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, where English economist John Maynard Keynes wrote about the onset of technological unemployment, that is, “unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” Keynes predicted that, assuming no catastrophic events, the standard of living in advanced economies would be so much higher in 100 years that “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure.” Most people would then be working a 15-hour week, which would satisfy their need to work in order to feel useful and contended.
As we approach 2030, how did Keynes do? Keynes’ predictions about capital growth, technology advancement and productivity were clearly wrong. “He massively underestimated the speed of advances in those areas,” said Suzman. We passed the thresholds of capital growth and productivity that he said would be necessary to usher a 15-hour week economic utopia in the 1980s. “Yet, here we are. And we’re working pretty much as long hours as people did in the 1930s when Keynes wrote the essay in the first place.”
Why is that? According to Suzman work is no longer driven by what we need. Instead, it’s driven by what we want and how society regulates or encourages these wants. We’ve long been able to satisfy our needs and wants with a 15-hour workweek. “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.”
Keynes was right that once humanity solved the problem of scarcity, a 15-hour workweek would be sufficient to satisfy our material needs. “And where this becomes most clear is when we look at things like hunter-gatherer populations like the Ju/’hoansi. … In a material sense, they were deeply impoverished by modern standards. And yet they consider themselves affluent and enjoyed a degree of affluence as a result of that.”
This was the subject of Suzman’s first book, Affluence Without Abundance: What We Can Learn From the World’s Most Successful Civilization, published in July of 2017. As he explained in a NY Times essay written around the time the book was published, “in 1930, the idea that ‘primitive’ people with no interest in labor productivity or capital accumulation and with only simple technologies at their disposal had already solved the ‘economic problem’ would have seemed preposterous.”
Rather than constantly struggling against the elements, the possibility that our hunter-gatherer ancestors might consider themselves affluent first came to public attention in the 1960s with the studies of anthropologists like Richard Borsay Lee and Marshall Sahlins. To their surprise, they learned that the Ju/’hoansi and similar hunger-gathering people spent only 15 hours a week securing their basic nutritional requirements. “Given that in 1966 the 40-hour week had only recently been introduced for federal workers in the United States, these figures appeared extraordinary.”
“Subsequent research produced a more nuanced picture of the Ju/’haonsi’s affluence,” wrote Suzman in the 2017 essay. “It showed that they had an unyielding confidence in the providence of their environments and the knowledge of how to exploit this. As a result, they only ever procured enough food to meet their immediate needs confident that there was always more available, much like busy urbanites with empty refrigerators who get food on the go when they are hungry. This research also revealed that even though Ju/’hoansi did not have to work particularly hard, they were neither indolent nor bereft of purpose. They found profound satisfaction from the work they did and used of their free time to make music, create art, make jewelry, tell stories, play games, relax and socialize.”
Anthropologists who’ve been studying other surviving hunter-gatherer communities around the world have reached similar conclusions. These communities are surprisingly well nourished while only devoting about 15 hours a week to their hunting-gathering activities. They tended to have diverse diets, they were usually healthy, they enjoyed quite a bit of leisure time, and they all had similar social organizations. Based on their ability to have endured over 10s to 100s of thousand years, we can conclude that hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansis have been highly successful.
The evolutionary importance of these findings have only recently become clear. The research suggests that the economic problem that Keynes wrote about in 1930 “was neither universal nor the primary problem of the human race from the beginnings of time. For where the economic problem holds that we have unlimited wants and limited means, Ju/’hoansi hunter-gatherers had few wants that were easily met.”
As Klein points out in the podcast, there’s wide variation in how people act and work depending on the cultures they grew up in. “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.” But now, “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.” Is there such a thing as human nature, or is most of what we consider to be human nature cultural imposition?, asked Klein.
“I think what we are is we’re a host of contradictions because human nature is to be, one, cultural, two, adaptive and, three, intransigent, all at the same time,” said Suzman. “So we’re this incredibly adaptable creature because we have these very plastic brains. And our experience imprints itself on those brains, and we become habituated to things. We become creatures of habit. Certain things are normal and acceptable and doable. … And anything beyond that I think is to impose some kind of universality on what is ultimately a cultural norm… which feels natural because that is culture’s extraordinary power over us.”
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