On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

Until I began researching this book, I’d always assumed Wanda’s world was kind of apocalyptic. Like many people, I just took the Hobbesian “nasty, brutish, and short” view of prehistory as fact. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins begins his famous 1966 essay “The Original Affluent Society” by outlining the common view at the time: “Mere subsistence economy,” “limited leisure save in exceptional circumstances,” “incessant quest for food,” “meagre and relatively unreliable” natural resources, “absence of an economic surplus,” “maximum energy from a maximum number of people”—so runs the fair average anthropological opinion of hunting and gathering. Sahlins had a new theory—that Wanda’s world was actually one where “all the people’s wants are easily satisfied.” A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.… The food quest is so successful that half the time the people do not seem to know what to do with themselves.