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

by James Suzman

The “pressing problem” Keynes had in mind was what classical economists refer to as the “economic problem” and sometimes also as the “problem of scarcity.” It holds that we are rational creatures cursed with insatiable appetites and that because there are simply not enough resources to satisfy everybody’s wants, everything is scarce. The idea that we have infinite wants but that all resources are limited sits at the beating heart of the definition of economics as the study of how people allocate scarce resources to meet their needs and desires. It also anchors our markets, financial, employment, and monetary systems. To economists, then, scarcity is what drives us to work, for it is only by working—by making, producing, and trading scarce resources—that we can ever begin to bridge the gap between our apparently infinite desires and our limited means.

But we now know that hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi did not live constantly on the edge of starvation. Rather, they were usually well nourished; lived longer than people in most farming societies; rarely worked more than fifteen hours a week; and spent the bulk of their time at rest and leisure. We also know that they could do this because they did not routinely store food, cared little for accumulating wealth or status, and worked almost exclusively to meet only their short-term material needs.

Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so, there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and our attitudes to work have their roots in farming.

When economists define work as the time and effort we spend meeting our needs and wants, they dodge two obvious problems. The first is that often the only thing that differentiates work from leisure is context and whether we are being paid to do something or are paying to do it.

The second problem is that beyond the energy we expend to secure our most basic needs—food, water, air, warmth, companionship, and safety—there is very little that is universal about what constitutes a necessity. More than this, necessity often merges so imperceptibly with desire that it can be impossible to separate them. Thus some will insist that a breakfast of a croissant served alongside good coffee is a necessity while for others it is a luxury.

The closest thing to a universal definition of “work”—one that hunter-gatherers, pinstriped derivatives traders, calloused subsistence farmers, and anyone else would agree on—is that it involves purposefully expending energy or effort on a task to achieve a goal or end.

Why do we now afford work so much more importance than our hunting and gathering ancestors did? Why, in an era of unprecedented abundance, do we remain so preoccupied with scarcity?

The first maps the story of our relationship with energy. At its most fundamental, work is always an energy transaction and the capacity to do certain kinds of work is what distinguishes living organisms from dead, inanimate matter.

The emergence of large villages, then towns, and finally cities also played a vital role in reshaping the dynamics of the economic problem and scarcity. Because most urban people’s material needs were met by farmers who produced food in the countryside, they focused their restless energy in pursuit of status, wealth, pleasure, leisure, and power.

Cities quickly became crucibles of inequality, a process that was accelerated by the fact that within cities people were not bound together by the same intimate kinship and social ties that were characteristic of small rural communities. As a result, people living in cities increasingly began to bind their social identity ever more tightly to the work they did and find community among others who pursued the same trade as them.

“Work” is now used to describe all transfers of energy, from those that occur on a celestial scale when galaxies and stars form to those that take place at a subatomic level. Science also now recognizes that the creation of our universe involved colossal amounts of work, and that what makes life so extraordinary and what differentiates living things from dead things are the very unusual kinds of work that living things do.

living things actively harvest and use energy to organize their atoms and molecules into cells, their cells into organs, and their organs into bodies; to grow and to reproduce; and when they stop doing that they die and, with no energy to hold them together, they decompose. Put another way, to live is to work.

Homo sapiens newborns, by contrast, are helpless and have to be held if they demand physical contact; they are characterized by their near-complete dependency on adult care for years. Newborn chimpanzees’ brains are close to 40 percent of adult size, but grow to nearly 80 percent of adult size within a year. Newborn Homo sapiens’ brains are around one-quarter of the size they will achieve at adulthood and only begin to approach adult size when they reach the early stages of puberty. Partly this is an adaptation to enable them to escape their mothers’ wombs through birth canals dangerously constricted by the demands of walking upright. It is also because, to develop properly, infant Homo sapiens’ brains depend on sensory-rich environments more than the gentle safety of the womb.

As helpless as Homo sapiens newborns are, their brains are all business. Assaulted by a noisy, smelly, tactile, and, after some weeks, visually vibrant universe of stimuli, infancy is the period when brain development is at its most frenzied, as new neurons bind themselves into synapses to filter meaning from a chaos of sensory stimuli. This process continues all through childhood until early adolescence, by which time children have twice as many synapses as they were born with and brains fired by fantastical, often absurd, imaginations. Basic skills acquired during this period of life are unsurprisingly the ones that feel most intuitive and instinctive in later years.

The process by which our brains are molded by our lived environments doesn’t end there. Neurological reorganization and development continue into early adulthood and into our dotage even if as we age the process tends to be driven more by decline rather than growth or regeneration. Ironically our species’ extraordinary plasticity when young and the extent to which it declines as we get older also accounts for why as we age we become more stubbornly resistant to change; why habits acquired when we are young are so hard to break when we are old; why we tend to imagine that our cultural beliefs and values are a reflection of our fundamental natures; and why when others’ beliefs and values clash with our own, we slander them as unnatural or inhuman.

Genomic studies in the future may well offer some new insights into this. In the meantime, though, we have little option but to stare at objects like hand-axes and ask why, after making them diligently for a million years, our ancestors suddenly abandoned them 300,000 years ago in favor of more versatile tools made with a series of new techniques. One possible answer is that our ancestors were genetically shackled to hand-ax design in much the same way that different species of birds are genetically shackled to specific designs of nest. If so, Homo erectus and others diligently made hand-axes while operating on instinctive autopilot with only a vague sense of why,8 until some 300,000 years ago they suddenly crossed a critical genetic Rubicon that spontaneously ushered in a new era of innovation. Another possible answer reveals itself if we abandon the idea that intelligence is a single generalized trait and instead view it as a collection of different cognitive traits, which evolved, initially at least, to do different jobs in response to different adaptive pressures. Thus problem solving can be thought of as one form of intelligence responsive to a particular set of adaptive pressures, abstract reasoning another, spatial reasoning another, and the ability to acquire and absorb socially transmitted information another still. If so, then Homo erectus may have clung on so doggedly to the hand-ax design because the ability to learn from others was a far more beneficial adapta...

“Just as the body survives by ingesting negative entropy [free energy],” Miller explained, “so the mind survives by ingesting information.”10

With our super-plastic neocortices and well-organized senses, Homo sapiens are the gluttons of the informavore world. We are uniquely skilled at acquiring, processing, and ordering information, and uniquely versatile when it comes to letting that information shape who we are. And when we are deprived of sensory information, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, we conjure sometimes fantastical information-rich worlds from the darkness to feed our inner informavore. It does not require a great deal of brain to keep our various organs, limbs, and other bodily bits and pieces running as they should. The vast majority of the energy-expensive tissue in our skulls is devoted to processing and organizing information. We are also almost certainly unique in terms of the amount of heat-generating work these otherwise immobile organs do, by generating electric pulses when mulling over the often trivial information our senses gather. Thus when we sleep we dream; when we are awake we constantly seek out stimulation and engagement; and when we are deprived of information we suffer.

This is why large-primate researchers are forced to spend endless hours sitting around watching their subjects methodically foraging and eating if they are ever to witness them doing something more interesting. We know that most of the larger primates spend between eight and ten hours per day foraging and eating. This equates to something between a fifty-six- and seventy-hour workweek. Chewing, digesting, and processing the leaves, pith, stalks, and roots is also time-consuming and energy-intensive.

And this is where Lévi-Strauss’s structural model adds another critical dimension to the history of work, because it suggests that by giving our ancestors more leisure time, fire simultaneously breathed life into leisure’s conceptual opposite, work, and set our species off on a journey that would lead us from foraging in forests to the factory floor.

Now a rapidly growing body of data indicates that not only were early Homo sapiens every bit as self-aware and purposeful as we are now, but also that Homo sapiens have been around far longer than was ever imagined before. As new archaeological discoveries in southern Africa and beyond also show, people were already making all sorts of clever things tens of thousands of years before the supposed cognitive revolution. And, taken together with research conducted by anthropologists among geographically isolated peoples who continued to make a living as foragers in the twentieth century, this data suggests that for 95 percent of our species’ history, work did not occupy anything like the hallowed place in people’s lives that it does now.

What was most remarkable was that the Ju/’hoansi were able to acquire all the food they needed on the basis of “a modest effort”—so modest, in fact, that they had far more “free time” than people in full-time employment in the industrialized world. Noting that children and the elderly were supported by others, he calculated that economically active adults spent an average of just over seventeen hours per week on the food quest, in addition to roughly an additional twenty hours per week on other chores like preparing food, gathering firewood, erecting shelters, and making or fixing tools. This was less than half the time employed Americans spent at work, getting to work, and on domestic chores.

When Richard Lee convened the “Man the Hunter” conference, many other social anthropologists were struggling to reconcile the often bewildering economic behaviors of “tribal” peoples with the two dominant competing economic ideologies of the time: the market capitalism embraced in the West and the state-led communism embraced by the Soviet Union and China.

While Lee and others were plucking scorpions from their boots in deserts and jungles, he’d been ferreting through anthropological texts, colonial reports, and other documents that described encounters between Europeans and hunter-gatherers. From these he had concluded that at the very least the stereotypical image of hunter-gatherers enduring life as a constant struggle against scarcity was far too simplistic. What interested Sahlins the most was not how much more leisure time hunter-gatherers enjoyed compared to stressed-out workers in agriculture or industry, but the “modesty of their material requirements.” Hunter-gatherers, he concluded, had so much more free time than others mainly because they were not ridden with a whole host of nagging desires beyond meeting their immediate material needs.

“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 described by classical economics, was not the eternal struggle of our species.

Turnbull’s descriptions of BaMbuti life evoked something of the deep logic that shaped how foragers thought about scarcity and about work. First, they revealed how the “sharing” economies characteristic of foraging societies were an organic extension of their relationship with nurturing environments. Just as their environments shared food with them, so they shared food and objects with one another. Second, they revealed that even if they had few needs that were easily met, forager economies were underwritten by the confidence they had in the providence of their environments.

“People obtain a direct and immediate return from their labor,” he explained. “They go out hunting or gathering and eat the food obtained the same day or casually over the days that follow. Food is neither elaborately processed nor stored. They use relatively simple, portable, utilitarian, easily acquired, replaceable tools and weapons made with real skill but not involving a great deal of labor.”3

Woodburn described the Hadzabe as having an “immediate return economy.”4 He contrasted this with the “delayed return economies” of industrial and farming societies. In delayed-return economies, he noted that labor effort is almost always focused primarily on meeting future rewards, and this was what differentiated groups like the Ju/’hoansi and the BaMbuti not only from farming and industrialized societies, but also from the large-scale complex hunter-gatherer societies like those living alongside the salmon-rich waters of the Pacific Northwest coast of America.

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...

They also quickly learned that in foraging societies anyone who had anything worth sharing was subject to similar demands and the only reason that they received so many requests was because, even with their meager research budgets, they were immeasurably wealthier in material terms than any of their forager hosts were. In other words, in these societies the obligation to share was open-ended and the amount of stuff that you gave away was determined by how much stuff you had relative to others. As a result, in forager societies there were always some particularly productive people who contributed more than others, and also people who (in the language of finger-pointing politicians and perplexed economists) are often referred to as “freeloaders” or “scroungers.”

Nicolas Peterson, an anthropologist who spent time living among Yolngu Aboriginal foragers in Australia’s Arnhem Land in the 1980s, famously described their redistributive practices as “demand sharing.”5 The term has since stuck. It is now used to describe all societies where food and objects are shared on the basis of requests by the receiver rather than offers made by the giver. It may only be in hunter-gatherer economies that demand sharing is the principal means through which objects and materials flow between people, but the phenomenon of demand sharing is not unique to their societies. It is an important redistributive mechanism for food and other objects in specific contexts in all other societies too.

“Tolerated theft” is what many people think when they scowl at their paychecks and note how much of it has been appropriated by the taxman. But even if formal taxation serves a similar redistributive purpose to demand sharing, “consensus-based command sharing” is probably a better description of government taxation systems—at least in functioning democracies. Unlike demand sharing, where the link between giver and receiver is intimate, national taxation systems are shrouded in institutional anonymity and backed by the faceless power of the state, even if they draw their ultimate authority from governments mandated by their citizens to take their money.

Market capitalists and socialists are both equally irritated by “freeloaders”—they just zero in their animosity toward different kinds of freeloaders. Thus socialists demonize the idle rich, while capitalists tend to save their scorn for the “idle poor.” That people of all political stripes now distinguish between the makers and takers, producers and parasites, even if they define the categories somewhat differently, might suggest that the conflict between the industrious and idle in our societies is a universal one. But the fact that among demand-sharing foragers these distinctions were considered to be relatively unimportant suggests that this particular conflict is of a far more recent provenance.

Envy and jealousy have a bad reputation. They are, after all, “deadly sins,” and according to Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae are “impurities of the heart.” It is not just Catholicism that has it in for these most selfish of traits. All major religions seem to agree that a special place in hell awaits those in thrall to the green-eyed monster.

At an individual level, the evolutionary benefits of our selfish emotions are obvious. In addition to helping us stay alive when things are scarce, they energize us in the quest to find sexual partners, so enhancing our chances of survival and of successfully passing on our individual genes. We see this play out among other species all the time, and it is fair to assume that something akin to the emotions stimulated in us by envy and jealousy flood through the synapses of other animals when beating each other up to establish social hierarchies, or to gain preferential access to food or sexual partners.

But Homo sapiens are also a social and highly collaborative species. We are well adapted to working together. We also all know from bitter experience that the short-term benefits of self-interest are almost always outweighed by the longer-term social costs.

Smith took the view that people were ultimately selfish creatures. He believed that man “intends only his own gain.” But he also believed that when people acted in their own self-interest somehow everybody benefited, as if they were guided in their actions by “an invisible hand” to promote the interests of society more effectively than “man” could, even if he had intended to. Smith’s points of reference for this were the market towns of eighteenth-century Europe, where the traders, manufacturers, and merchants all worked to make their own personal fortunes, but where collectively their effort had helped to enrich their towns and communities. This led Smith to conclude that free enterprise unburdened by regulatory interference would inadvertently create wealth for all and so ensure “the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants.”

Indeed, based on his philosophical writings, it is hard to imagine that he would not, for instance, have supported the Sherman Act, which was passed unanimously by the U.S. Congress in 1890, a century after Smith’s death, with the aim of breaking up the railway and oil monopolies that by then were slowly but surely throttling the life out of American industry. But ironically, the social role of selfishness and jealousy in foraging societies suggests that, even if Smith’s hidden hand does not apply particularly well to late capitalism, his belief that the sum of individual self-interests can ensure the fairest distribution of the “necessaries of life” was right, albeit only in small-scale band societies. For in societies like the Ju/’hoansi’s, envy-fueled demand sharing ensured a far more equitable “distribution of the necessaries of life” than is the case in any market economy.

“When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors,” one particularly eloquent Ju/’hoan man explained to Richard Lee. “We can’t accept this. . . . So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”

There is no suggestion that the foragers who settled into central and northern Asia and Europe beginning around 50,000 years ago were anything near as materially sophisticated as the civilizations that flourished in the Pacific Northwest between 1500 BC and the late nineteenth century. Nor is there any question that the environments they lived in were large permanent communities. But there is a good case to make for critical elements of the seasonal nature of their work being similar to the Pacific Northwest coast peoples, and that this represented a significant departure from the way small-scale foragers in warmer climates organized themselves.

For a start, populations who settled, for instance, on the frosty steppes of Asia had to do more work than African foragers just to stay alive. They could not roam naked or sleep under the stars throughout the year. Enduring long winters demanded that they make elaborate clothing and sturdy footwear and gather far more fuel for their fires. They also needed to find or build shelters robust enough to withstand winter blizzards. Unsurprisingly, the oldest evidence for the construction of near-permanent structures and dwellings comes from some of the coldest places where humans settled during the frostiest years of the last glacial period—roughly between 29,000 and 14,000 years ago. They take the form of sturdy domes constructed from hundreds of heavy, dry mammoth bones that have been discovered at sites across Ukraine, Moravia, the Czech Republic, and southern Poland. When in use, these domes were likely shrouded with animal hides to make them windproof and watertight. The largest of them have diameters in excess of twenty feet, and the sheer effort involved in their construction suggests that their makers returned to them annually.

In occasionally storing food and organizing their working year to accommodate intense seasonal variations, European and Asian foraging populations took an important step toward adopting a longer-term, more future-focused relationship with work. In doing so, they also developed a different relationship with scarcity, one that resembles that which shapes our economic life now in some important respects. But even if they needed to plan ahead more than foragers in warmer climates, they remained largely confident in the at least seasonal providence of their environments. Somewhat ironically, it was only when the earth began to warm 18,000 years ago that anyone would take the first fateful steps toward food production, and so lay the foundations of our species’ increasing energy footprint and obsession with work.

The researchers who established that the Natufians were enthusiastic home-brewers are almost certainly right to believe that the discovery of beer hastened the Natufians’ embrace of agriculture and hence a regular supply of grains to ferment. They may also be right that the beer was used mainly for ritual purposes.

Some more established theories linking climate change to the adoption of farming are broadly based on the hypothesis that the slow transition from the last cold glacial period to the current warm, interglacial period, between 18,000 and 8,000 years ago, catalyzed a whole series of ecological changes that in turn created terrible hardships for some established hunter-gatherer populations. They suggest that necessity was the mother of invention and that foragers had little option but to experiment with new strategies to survive as familiar staples were replaced by new species.

Foragers are opportunists, and, to the Natufians, the warm Bolling Allerød period was an opportunity to eat well for much less effort. Their summers became balmier, their winters lost their brutal edge, it rained more frequently, and food yields increased so much that over the following centuries many Natufians cheerfully abandoned their ancestors’ once necessarily mobile existence in favor of a far more sedentary life in small, permanent villages.

For at least a thousand years after the construction of Göbekli Tepe, foraging still played an important role in ancient Anatolian life. The archaeological record indicates that, initially at least, there were many communities in the Levant who turned their noses up at the idea of engaging in even low-level food production. But over time, as communities across the Middle East grew more dependent on farmed grains, their fields and farms displaced wild animal and plant populations, making it increasingly hard for even the most determined foragers to sustain themselves by hunting and gathering alone.

Both ancient farmers and foragers suffered seasonal food shortages. During these periods children and adults alike would go to bed hungry some days and everyone would lose fat and muscle. But over longer periods of time farming societies were far more likely to suffer severe, existentially threatening famines than foragers.6 Foraging may be much less productive and generate far lower energy yields than farming but it is also much less risky. This is firstly because foragers tended to live well within the natural limits imposed by their environments rather than skate perpetually on its dangerous verges, and secondly because where subsistence farmers typically relied on one or two staple crops, foragers in even the bleakest environments relied on dozens of different food sources and so were usually able to adjust their diets to align with an ecosystem’s own dynamic responses to changing conditions.

Early farmers’ livestock and crops were not the only victims of these new pathogens. The farmers were too. Their livestock in particular were fifth columnists who quietly introduced a whole new suite of lethal pathogens to humanity. Currently, zoonotic pathogens (those passed on by animals) account for nearly 60 percent of all human diseases and three-quarters of all emerging diseases. This translates to roughly 2.5 billion cases of human sickness and 2.7 million deaths every year.7 Some of these come from the rats, fleas, and bedbugs that flourish in the dark corners of human settlements, but most come from the domestic animals we depend on for meat, milk, leather, eggs, transport, hunting, and, ironically in the case of cats, pest control. Included among them are a bucketload of gastrointestinal diseases, bacterial pathogens like anthrax and tuberculosis, parasites like toxoplasmosis, and viral pathogens like measles and influenza. And our history of consuming wild animals from pangolins to bats has introduced numerous pathogens to our species, including SARS and SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The difference is that in the deep past when human populations were considerably smaller and widely dispersed, these outbreaks usually died off as soon as they killed their hosts or their hosts developed an immunity to the pathogens.

Entropy’s eternal diktat that the more complex a structure, the more work must be done to build and maintain it applies as much to our societies as it does to our bodies. It takes work to transform clay into bricks and bricks into buildings in the same way it takes energy to transform fields of grain into loaves of bread. Accordingly, the complexity of any particular society at any particular time is often a useful measure for the quantities of energy that they capture, and also the amount of work (in the raw, physical sense of the word) that is needed to build and then maintain this complexity.

Adults in the United States consume on average around 3,600 kilocalories of food per day,10 mainly in the form of refined starches, proteins, fats, and sugar. This is a good deal more than the recommended 2,000–2,500 kilocalories per day necessary to stay healthy. Despite the tendency to eat more food than is actually good for us, energy from food now accounts for a tiny proportion of the total energy we capture and put to work. But the energy footprint of food production is another matter.