📇 Index
- Source: Lessons from the foragers
Highlights
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When considering time out of camp as well as in-camp food processing and housekeeping tasks, the average across all well-studied hunter-gatherer societies is 40-45 hours per week, similar to the standard eight-hour working day in industrialised societies.
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Indeed, hunter-gatherers commonly see the world as a giving environment. Accumulation makes little sense in such a world because there will always be more.
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About 70,000 years ago, our ancestors experienced a population bottleneck that almost plunged our species into extinction. In other words, early humans were limited by energy and time. Their economic problem was very real, and it was severe.
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hunting and gathering literally transformed how our cells and organs process energy
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In his essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), the British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that forthcoming technological advances and economic growth would be so great that, by 2030, people would have to work only 15 hours per week, leaving the rest of their time for leisure and noble pursuits such as art, music and philosophy.
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It turns out that the ‘necessary cycle of extreme activity and total idleness’ – in the words of the French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet in 1795 – are really two sides of the same coin.
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The congruence between Lee’s and Keynes’s numbers seems to confirm that we are living in an evolutionary mismatch of work, telling us that, at best, we are caught in work limbo, wedged between an idyllic hunter-gatherer past and techno-Utopian future. Original affluence makes for a tidy story.
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Rest allows the very things that make us special as a species: the capacity to listen and think and daydream.
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It is a delusion to think that work is a Neolithic or capitalist invention.
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work has always been with us, just one part of an intricate web of interdependent relations connecting humans to other humans, and humans to their local landscapes → We work to share. Working is a shared task, both in the activities themselves as well as the outcomes.
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Today, many of us are doing the wrong kind of work, one that rejects sociality, craft and meaning, turning people into machines.
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The Jevons Paradox → Economic theory, 1865 by William Stanley Jevons. He observed that the introduction of the steam engine still lead to higher production of coal. Unexpectedly, sunk costs lead to a surge in demand which drove coal production back up.
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[I]t is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being,’ wrote John Stuart Mill in Principles of Political Economy (1848).