Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

by James Suzman

Woodburn was not especially interested in trying to understand how some societies transformed from having immediate-return economies to delayed-return ones, or how this transition may have shaped our attitudes to work. But he was intrigued by the fact that all immediate-return societies also spurned hierarchy, did not have chiefs, leaders, or institutional authority figures, and were intolerant of any meaningful material wealth differentials between individuals. He concluded that foragers’ attitudes to work were not purely a function of their confidence in the providence of their environment, but were also sustained by social norms and customs that ensured food and other material resources were evenly distributed. In other words, that no one was able to lord it over anyone else. And among them, one of the most important was “demand sharing.”