Why Do We Work So Damn Much? Hunter-gatherers worked 15-hour weeks. Why don’t we?
I immediately answered:
Because we’ve forgotten how to play? We’re stuck in work mode and can’t get out.
Is that the article is about? The article is an interview that Ezra Klein (NYTimes) conducts with anthropologist James Suzman, who has done research among hunter-gatherers and has recently published a book, Work, A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Here’s how Klein sets it up:
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.
Here’s where Suzman comes in:
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.
That’s heading where I think we need to go. Just how far Suzman gets us, that’s not clear.
So, hunter-gatherer egalitarianism:
JAMES SUZMAN: One of the most distinctive features about the Ju/’hoansi and, indeed, many of the other hunter-gatherer societies, similar ones, was that they were, to use the words of Richard Lee, fiercely egalitarian. And they had various mechanisms to manage this egalitarianism. Now one of the most interesting mechanisms was a system called demand sharing. One anthropologist who didn’t like it much called it tolerated theft.
And it is a system which is, in many ways, the complete inversion of our rules of giving, sharing, and taking. When we ask somebody for something, we say please. It’s an offer of a debt. When somebody gives us something, we say thank you. I’m in your debt. There’s a kind of sense of an exchange going on. And it is in the right of the giver. And generally, I was always brought up, wait for somebody to offer you something. And always say thank you and be in their debt. And it’s effectively in the rights of the giver to deny somebody something that they asked for.
In Ju/’hoan cultures and, indeed, many other hunting and gathering cultures, that relationship is inverted. Basically, in an idealized form, demand sharing means that pretty much anybody in a society can go to anybody else. And remember, these are relatively small social groupings. Can go to anybody else and demand something from them. So if, for example, I have a bag of tobacco, somebody else is perfectly entitled to come and demand some of that tobacco from me.
And it would be considered extremely rude — in fact, it would be considered offensive — if I don’t give him some of that tobacco. At the same time, it’s not considered at all rude to make that kind of demand. So what you have is a society where, in effect, everybody can spontaneously tax everybody else. The net result of this is that nobody bothers acquiring services because you’re just going to share it and give it away anyway. And people end up spontaneously sharing everything.
And they see a certain virtue. It’s not a completely unconscious thing. I mean, culture is habitual. It becomes unconscious. But people are aware of the virtues of it. And in hunter-gatherer life, there was a real sense that if anybody tries to accumulate resources or dominate the distribution and flow of resources, it is socially unhealthy. It produces tensions. It produces anxieties. It produces a hierarchy or an attempted hierarchy. It adds a whole level of risk and cost to the social life of the group.
What about violence?
JAMES SUZMAN: My perspective on demand sharing was that it certainly made anthropologists feel violent until they got a bit used to it. But amongst everybody else, it was actually something very peaceable. Now, yeah, there’s been this pretty much endless debate. And it really is a debate about modernity, whether we’re on this great path of progress or not. To make the case of progress, it helps to say that actually our lives in the past were much more miserable and much more violent.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that in hunter-gatherer societies throughout history, there was, of course, violence. Certainly with Ju/’hoansi oral histories, there’s definitely memories and stories of people, groups living, someone in [INAUDIBLE] getting in a fight with the people from [INAUDIBLE] or — it happens. People are violent. And often, they’re violent. In the Ju/’hoansi case, as they say, usually, there’s a fight over matters of the heart, and then sometimes occasionally some revenge. Of course, there’s violence.
But as a general rule, hanging out with hunter-gatherers and hanging out with societies like this actually is extraordinarily harmonious. So statistically, it’s difficult to say whether it’s more peaceful now or more peaceful then. But what’s certainly absolutely right to say is that hunter-gatherers did not live in this state of kind of Hobbesian constant war, that actually, like our lives, there were moments where violence erupted. And it shook people when it happened. People were traumatized by it. They found it difficult. They did not like it. It was not part of the norm.
But on the whole, I think life was pretty placid. And this is, again, the sort of overwhelming sense, certainly from anthropologists who preceded me, who spent more time in these societies when they were still more free to hunt and gather — of course, the area I’ve worked in has been one of constant difficult change. And the overwhelming sense from all of them, again, is just the general serenity of life in these circumstances. And I think it’s fair to say that we are, as a species, relatively peace loving. And I think that applies to most of our history. But within that, of course, there are instances where things would have been tough and brutal and violent, too.
Hunting is satisfying:
JAMES SUZMAN: This is one of the wonderful things about sort of looking at the idea of work as we go into our deep history, and actually, even beyond the Ju/’hoansi, into evolutionary history. It’s pretty clear that we have evolved to love work, in a very basic sense. We have evolved, become these extremely purposeful focused species with this extraordinary array of skills and flexible devices, from our hands to our incredibly plastic brains, that, in a sense, need to be fed. There’s a reason why when we are stuck in solitary confinement in prison for something, that boredom eats us up. It’s because we can’t basically apply these extraordinary skills we’ve evolved to have.
And people get extraordinary pleasure out of doing work. And it can often be different kinds of pleasure. Now in the Ju/’hoansi case, let’s take the example of hunting. Hunting is extraordinarily fulfilling work. It is very satisfying. It engages your mind. It engages your intellect. It engages years of acquired and accumulated skill. It engages your intuition. It engages your physical strength. It engages your stamina. And it engages you emotionally because you have this huge empathetic connection with the animals that you’re pursuing. It is deeply and profoundly satisfying. And in the end, it turns into meat in your belly. It fulfills you quite physically at the end as well.
As one Ju/’hoan hunter put it to me, he was like — he said at the end, “Hunting makes my heart happy, my legs heavy, and my belly full.” It is profoundly satisfying work. And it’s obviously part of our evolutionary heritage, this ability to work efficiently and to apply our skills to acquiring the food, first of all, that we need. Because that is the primary job of life — to get the food and energy into our bodies in order to grow and reproduce.
And then when we have surplus energy, we clearly use those same skills that have empowered us to be such versatile, flexible hunters, foragers, understanders of an environment. We apply those skills to many other things, like creating music, creating art, telling stories, and so on and so on. And work is very much part of who we are. And when we are deprived of the ability to work, we are miserable.
The transition to agriculture [this is very important]:
JAMES SUZMAN: And I certainly think that the kind of capitalized culture that we’ve had is an organic consequence of the transition to agriculture. And it is very much part of what’s brought us to where we are now. But I don’t think it’s what’s part of what’s needed in order for us to take the next step on. And in fact, I actually think, in many ways, that the kind of innovation and the productivity and the growth mindset that came out of agriculture has brought us out of the miseries of the agricultural era, which was quite long and quite difficult, and into a brave new era. But that very same medicine that brought us this great prosperity that we enjoy now might now well be making the patient sick.
EZRA KLEIN: One of the fascinating threads of the book is the way the transition to farming transforms the way we experience labor, of course, but also the way we experience and understand time. And you really emphasize the human relationship to time, essential to our relationship to work. So can you tell me about that, the difference between how foragers and farmers related to time?
JAMES SUZMAN: It is an extraordinary phenomenon. And it’s one that I was very attuned to right from the beginning of my first ever fieldwork. Because I was working with some Ju/’hoansi who’d lost their land already. This was in the early 1990s. And my determination was to actually get a Ju/’hoan oral history of what had happened. We had all these colonial histories dominating the story of Africa. I wanted to get their version of events, in a sense. And that, on the whole, I really struggled. People didn’t have history. They didn’t talk in historical terms. They didn’t think in particularly temporal terms.
And at the same time, you had lots of the farmers who were trying to employ them, saying, ah, the Ju/’hoansi, they don’t think beyond today. They don’t have a concept of tomorrow and so on and so forth. And it turned out that this was what the Ju/’hoansi largely agreed with. And part of the reason was they had what’s called historically an immediate return economy. In other words, pretty much all economic effort went into simply meeting their needs for that day.
And that was based on this idea that they had few needs easily met. So they were competent foragers. They knew that within a few hours of spontaneous effort, they could fill their bellies and so on in most circumstances. And as a result, they didn’t really spend a great deal of time planning into the future or, indeed, thinking about the past.
Now the transition to farming was very, very different. Where hunter-gatherers viewed their environments as inherently provident, as almost generous, as something which gave them, farming, you have to view your environment as only potentially provident. For it to be provident, you have to invest your labor into it.
But investing your labor into land in order for it to provide you with something to eat involves a time scale. If we use, for example, the early wheats that were grown in the first populations to embrace agriculture in the Levant, you have a seasonal cycle. You plant the seeds in the spring. You then have to nurture and look after the crop and water it and so on and so forth, nurture it over several months, then process it, and eventually, maybe by New Year’s Eve, you might have a loaf of bread out of it. Everything is focused on future rewards.
Now the problem with not being able to meet your immediate needs is those future rewards are rewards that are then stored and used to sustain you over the next agricultural cycle. So farmers found themselves locked into this kind of circular time, this process where they invested their labor into the land. And the land, in effect, gave them a return at some point in the future. And this, of course, changed not only the relationship with land because the land became something — if you worked that land, you had some kind of claim of ownership. So it change their notions of territoriality and ownership.
But at the same time it transformed the perception of time. Everything became future focused, much like it is for us today. Most of the work we do involves accruing some kind of return in the future. In fact, there are only a handful of activities that we routinely do, such as, for example, cooking is an immediate return economic activity, if you’re going to eat that meal immediately afterwards.
But most of the economic work we do is for the immediate future or the distant future. And in farming societies, often, the aim was, if you worked hard enough for long enough, you might be able to secure a sufficiently grand surplus that’s stored away in your silos that you might be able to, in a sense, enjoy some kind of retirement, some kind of time off. You might be able to purchase your liberation from labor. And all of this came with the fact that, actually, farming involved a great deal more effort and work than hunting and gathering did.
This is definitely headed in the right direction. We’ll have to see just how far Suzman gets. There’s much more at the link.
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