“Wants may be easily satisfied,” Sahlins noted, “either by producing much or desiring little.”12 Hunter-gatherers, he argued, achieved this by desiring little and so, in their own way, were more affluent than a Wall Street banker who, despite owning more properties, boats, cars, and watches than they know what to do with, constantly strives to acquire even more. Sahlins concluded that in many hunter-gatherer societies, and potentially for most of human history, scarcity was not the organizing feature of human economic life and hence that “the fundamental economic problem,” at least as it was
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