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

by James Suzman

After all, we work to live and live to work and are capable of finding meaning, satisfaction, and pride in almost any job: from the rhythmic monotony of mopping floors to gaming tax loopholes.

Wow, that’s a sweeping assertion! I hope he addresses alternative cultural perspectives on work.

Beneath this lies the conviction that we are genetically hardwired to work

Again, what?!?

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.

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.

Ok, phew, his earlier statements weren’t really theses he was trying to defend.

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.

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.

Human work is purposeful, they insisted, whereas the work done by animals is only ever purposive.

many hard-to-explain animal traits and behaviors may well have been shaped by the seasonal over-abundance of energy rather than the battle for scarce resources, and that in this may lie a clue as to why we, the most energy-profligate of all species, work so hard.

Neither weaver birds nor termites are especially purposeful creatures—at least as far as we can tell. It is unlikely that either species set about building their nests or constructing monumental air-conditioned mounds with clear visions of what they wish to achieve.

Where we obviously differ from numerous other species is in the extent to which boredom spurs creativity. We play, we fiddle, we experiment, we talk (even if only to ourselves), we daydream, we imagine, and, eventually, we get up and find something to do. Surprisingly little scientific research has been done on boredom, given how much time many of us spend bored. Historically, boredom has only proved of sustained interest to those in solitary professions, like philosophers and writers. Some of Newton’s, Einstein’s, Descartes’s, and Archimedes’s greatest insights have all been attributed to boredom.

But it is hard to ignore the obvious problems that arise when adjudicating the cognitive sophistication of a people based mainly on the kinds of things they made. After all, many indigenous people the world over were until recently deemed subhuman by others on the basis of their simple material culture, none more so than Tasmanian Aboriginals in the eighteenth century, who were such efficient foragers that they acquired all the food they needed using a set of tools so basic that they would make a Homo erectus hand-ax look like cutting-edge technology.

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.

But among the most intriguing of all the discoveries thus far is that the neat story of Homo sapiens evolving from a single small distinct lineage of archaic humans somewhere in Africa and then spreading out to conquer the world is almost certainly wrong. Instead it now seems likely that several distinctive Homo sapiens lineages that shared a common ancestor around half a million years ago evolved in parallel with one another, and appeared near-simultaneously around 300,000 years ago in North Africa, southern Africa, and the East African Rift Valley, and that all people today are made up of a mosaic of genetic features inherited from all of them.1

But the formalists insisted that deep down all people were economically “rational” and that, even if people in different cultures valued different things, scarcity and competition were universal—everyone was self-interested in their pursuit of value and everyone developed economic systems specifically to distribute and allocate scarce resources. The substantivists, by contrast, drew inspiration from some of the more radical and original voices in twentieth-century economics. The loudest voice among this chorus of rebels was that of the Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi, who insisted that the only thing universal about market capitalism was the hubris of its most enthusiastic advocates. He argued that market capitalism was a cultural phenomenon that emerged as the modern nation state replaced more granular, diverse, socially grounded economic systems based mainly on kinship, sharing, and reciprocal gift-exchange. The substantivists insisted that the economic rationality the formalists believed was part of human nature was a cultural by-product of market capitalism, and that we should be far more open-minded when it came to making sense of how other people apportioned value, worked, or exchanged things with one another.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Foraging societies like the Ju/’hoansi also pose a problem for those who are convinced that material equality and individual freedom are at odds with one another and irreconcilable. This is because demand-sharing societies were simultaneously highly individualistic, where no one was subject to the coercive authority of anyone else, but at the same time were intensely egalitarian.

Among foraging Ju/’hoansi, for instance, demand sharing was moderated by a subtle grammar of reasonability. No one would expect someone to surrender more than an equal share of the food they were eating and no one would reasonably expect to have the shirt off someone’s back if it was the only shirt they had. They also had a long series of proscriptions and prescriptions regarding precisely who could ask for what from whom, when, and under what circumstances. And, because everyone understood these rules, people rarely made unreasonable requests. As importantly, no one ever resented being asked to share something even if they may have regretted it.

The “fierce egalitarianism” of foragers like the Ju/’hoansi was, in other words, the organic outcome of interactions between people acting in their own self-interest in highly individualistic, mobile, small-scale societies with no rulers, no formal laws, and no formal institutions. And this was because in small-scale foraging societies self-interest was always policed by its shadow, jealousy, which, in turn, ensured that everyone got their fair share and individuals moderated their desires based on a sense of fairness.

Their fisheries were so seasonally productive that for much of the year people in these societies spent most of their time and energy developing a rich artistic tradition, playing politics, holding elaborate ceremonies, and hosting sumptuous ritual feasts—potlatch ceremonies—in which the hosts attempted to outdo each other with acts of generosity. Reflecting their material affluence, these feasts were also often characterized by lavish displays of wealth and sometimes even the ritual destruction of property, including the burning of boats and the ceremonial murder of slaves.

Busy minds would entertain and be distracted by stories, ceremonies, songs, and shamanic journeys. Agile fingers would have found purpose in developing and mastering new skills. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the efflorescence of artwork in Europe and Asia that archaeologists and anthropologists once assumed indicated Homo sapiens crossing a crucial cognitive threshold may well have been the progeny of long winter months. It is also unlikely to be a coincidence that much of this art, like the 32,000-year-old frescoes of mammoths, wild horses, cave bears, rhinos, lions, and deer that decorate the walls of Chauvet Cave in France, was painted in the light of fires illuminating the interior of weatherproof caves, while most rock in places like Africa and Australia tended to be on more exposed surfaces.

Having remained resolutely single throughout his life, the prospect of a lonely retirement on an inadequate pension played some role in Childe’s decision to end his life. But his letter to William Grimes was, above all, an unemotional meditation on the meaninglessness of a life without useful work to do. In it he expressed the view that the elderly were no more than parasitic rentiers who leeched off the energy and hard work of the young. He also expressed no sympathy for the elderly who continued to work, determined to prove that they were still useful. He insisted that they were obstacles in the path to progress and robbed “younger and more efficient successors” of the opportunity for promotion.

It also now seems increasingly likely that some of what he thought were consequences of the adoption of agriculture—like people living in permanent settlements—were actually among its causes.

As farming societies grew more productive and captured more energy from their environments, energy appeared to be scarcer and people had to work harder to meet their basic needs. This was because, up until the Industrial Revolution, any gains in productivity farming peoples generated as a result of working harder, adopting new technologies, techniques, or crops, or acquiring new land were always soon gobbled up by populations that quickly grew to numbers that could not be sustained.

Why? Why would population grow under these conditions, but not under foraging?

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.

For early farming communities, droughts, floods, and untimely frosts were by no means the only existential environmental risks. A whole host of pests and pathogens could also lay waste to their crops and herds. Those who focused their energy on rearing livestock learned quickly that one of the costs of selecting in favor of traits like docility was that it made their livestock easy pickings for predators, with the result that they required near constant supervision.

Even despite these challenges, farming was ultimately much more productive than foraging, and populations almost always recovered within a few generations, so sowing the seeds for a future collapse, amplifying their anxieties about scarcity, and encouraging their expansion into new space.

But if the trajectory of human history was shaped by those farming societies with the highest-yielding, most productive, energy-rich crops, why was life in these societies so much more laborious than it was for foragers? This was a question that preoccupied the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, one of the most influential of the Enlightenment’s cohort of pioneering economists who, like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, were trying to understand why in seventeenth-century England poverty had endured despite advances in food production.

Malthus observed that agricultural output only ever grew “arithmetically,” whereas population, which he calculated (erroneously) tended to double naturally every twenty-five years, grew “geometrically” or exponentially. He believed that, as a result of this imbalance, whenever improvements in agricultural productivity increased total food supply, peasants would inevitably set about creating more mouths to feed, with the result that any per capita surplus was soon lost. He viewed land as an ultimate constraint on the amount of food that could be grown, noting that the marginal utility of additional labor in agriculture diminished rapidly, because having ten people work a small field of wheat that was once easily managed by one would not result in ten times the wheat, but instead result in a diminishing share of its yield for each of those who worked it. Malthus was of the view that the relationship between population and productivity was ultimately self-regulating, and that whenever population growth overtook productivity, a famine or some other form of collapse would soon reduce the population down to a more manageable level.

Where foragers’ provident environments shared unconditionally with them and they, in turn, shared with others, farmers saw themselves as exchanging their labor with the environment for the promise of future food. In a sense, they considered the work they did to make land productive to mean that the land owed them a harvest and in effect was in their debt.

As the anthropologist David Graeber has pointed out, Adam Smith’s parable of the entrepreneurial savages has become “the founding myth of our system of economic relations”9 and is retold uncritically in pretty much every introductory academic textbook. The problem is that it has no basis in fact. When Caroline Humphrey, a Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge, conducted an exhaustive review of the ethnographic and historical literature looking for societies that had barter systems like those described by Smith, she eventually gave up and concluded “no example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money,” and that “all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

Wow!

The Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy Franklin wrote about (and whom it is thought Smith had in mind when imagining his “savage” entrepreneurs) had a clear division of labor based on gender, age, and inclination. Individuals specialized in tasks like growing, harvesting, and processing maize, beans, and squash; hunting and trapping; weaving; house building; and the manufacture of tools. But they didn’t barter or trade the products of their efforts among one another.

In other words, foragers with immediate-return economies saw their relationships with one another as an extension of the relationship they had with the environments that shared food with them, and farmers with their delayed-return economies saw their relationships with one another as an extension of their relationship with the land that demanded work from them.

Their movement’s aim was twofold. Firstly, they wanted to protect the livelihoods and lifestyles of the skilled artisans who could no longer compete with clever machines, and secondly, they wanted to alleviate the dismal conditions under which the ever-expanding numbers of people who had no option but to work in the mills labored. In the first they were singularly unsuccessful, but in the second they made a lasting impact.

like Victorian Britons nearly two millennia later, considered themselves to be the inheritors of the ancient Greeks’ civilization. They too considered manual work demeaning, and working for a living to be vulgar. It was only appropriate for citizens to engage in big business, politics, law, the arts, or military pursuits.

People in ancient cities didn’t have the security of being part of a single geographically distinct community cross-cut with ties of kinship. They also didn’t have the luxury of knowing everybody they encountered. Like urban dwellers today, they spent much of their time rubbing shoulders with complete strangers, many of whom led very different lives despite perhaps sharing loyalty to a common leader, having a common language, living under the same laws and in the same geography. And many of the regular day-to-day interactions between people in different professions in cities only ever took place in the context of performing those roles.

In Rome, these communities of practice formed the basis of the artisan collegia, which in addition to helping to protect workers in key trades from being marginalized by slaves gave individuals a sense of community, civic identity, and belonging. As a result, contrary to the current narrative that the marketplace is a hotbed of kill-or-be-killed competition, for much of history people in similar trades usually cooperated, collaborated, and supported one another.

“Put writing in your heart that you may protect yourself from hard labor of any kind,” an Egyptian father famously said to his son as he dispatched him to school in the third millennium BC, adding that “the scribe is released from manual tasks” and that it is “he who commands.”6

Where people in rural communities tended to exchange and share things mainly with people they knew or were related to, in cities most exchanges occurred between strangers. This meant that the traditional norms and customs dealing with reciprocity and mutual obligation couldn’t apply.

Most economists are wary of interrogating the specific needs or desires that might make things seem scarce in the first place. They dispose of questions such as why non-essential things like diamonds are more valuable than essential things like water as the “paradox of value,” and for the most part are content to say that it doesn’t much bother them why or what motivates different needs, as the relative value of those needs will be adjudicated by markets.

John Maynard Keynes broke ranks with many of his colleagues in this respect when he made the case that automation would solve the economic problem. He argued that the economic problem had two distinct components and that automation could only ever solve the first of these: those that dealt with what he called the urge to meet our “absolute needs.” These needs, like food, water, warmth, comfort, companionship, and safety, were universal, absolute, and experienced equally by everyone, from a prisoner in chains to a monarch in a palace.

But in distinguishing between absolute and relative needs, he recognized the importance of social context and status in shaping people’s desires. In this respect, he was thinking more like social anthropologists who unlike economists are interested in understanding why in some contexts, such as cities, diamonds are more valuable than water, whereas in others, such as traditional foraging communities in the Kalahari Desert—which now hosts the two richest diamond mines ever discovered—diamonds were worthless but water was priceless.

Even so, there is no doubt that from the middle of the nineteenth century, most factory and mill workers began to notice a determined upward trend in the quality of their material lives, and for the first time ever they had a little money to spend on the luxuries that until recently had been the exclusive preserve of the middle and upper classes. It also marked the beginning of many people viewing the work they did exclusively as a means to purchase more stuff, so closing the loop of production and consumption that now sustains so much of our contemporary economy. Indeed, for much of the following 200 years, labor movements and later trade unions would focus almost all of their resources on securing better pay for their members and more free time to spend it in, rather than trying to make their jobs interesting or fulfilling.

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the desire of poorer people in cities across Europe to consume what were once luxuries enjoyed only by the very rich was just as influential in shaping the history of work as the invention of technologies to exploit the energy in fossil fuels. Without it, there would have been no markets for mass-produced items, and without markets the factories would never have been built. It also rewrote the rules by which much of the economy operated. The growth of Britain’s economy increasingly came to depend on people employed in manufacturing and other industries reinvesting their wages in the very same products they and their factory workers manufactured.

Durkheim believed that a crucial difference between “primitive” societies and complex modern ones was that where simple societies operated like rudimentary machines with lots of easily interchangeable parts, complex societies functioned more like living bodies and were made up of lots of very different, highly specialized organs that, like livers, kidneys, and brains, could not be substituted for one another. Thus chiefs and shamans in simple societies could simultaneously be foragers, hunters, farmers, and builders, but in complex societies lawyers could not moonlight as surgeons any more than admirals could moonlight as architects.

He was particularly intrigued by the fact that, almost paradoxically, the increase in prosperity that accompanied industrialization in France had resulted in more suicides and greater social stress. This led him to conclude that it was the changes associated with urbanization and industrial development that were a major driver of anomie. An example he offered was of traditional craftsmen whose skills were suddenly rendered redundant by technological advances and who, as a result, lost their status as valuable, contributing members of society, and were forced to endure lives robbed of the purposefulness that their work once provided them.

He was also the first to realize that in the modern era most people went to work to make money rather than products, and that it was the factories themselves that made actual things.

Interesting. Again, introducing an idea without a lot of development. Were these ,win working for money because there was no longer an opportunity to work form satisfaction?

Lubbock was not unusual in this regard. Like Darwin, Boucher de Perthes, Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, Aristotle, and even the frenetic Frederick Winslow Taylor, Lubbock’s most important achievements were only possible because he was wealthy enough to afford to do exactly what he wanted to. If he’d had to work the same hours as the staff who maintained High Elms or the thousands of men, women, and children laboring on farms and in the factories, he wouldn’t have had the influence to push the Bank Holiday Act through Parliament, nor the time or energy to study archaeology, play sports, or carefully document the habits of garden insects.