Lessons from the foragers: Hunter-gatherers don’t live in an economic idyll but their deep appreciation of rest puts industrialised work to shame

[Standing Birdy]

An interesting essay. I post only the last few paras. 

 

https://aeon.co/essays/what-hunter-gatherers-demonstrate-about-work-and-satisfaction

It is a delusion to think that work is a Neolithic or capitalist invention. The apotheosis of this view may be found in the writings of the anarchist Bob Black, who, building on Sahlins, admonished that ‘[n]o one should ever work.’ As we have seen, this idea is false: work has always been with us, just one part of an intricate web of interdependent relations connecting humans to other humans, and humans to their local landscapes. The human body and its mechanical potential do not belong only to the individual but to society at large. Hunters bring large game back to camp in the full knowledge that they will lose it all. Today, many of us are doing the wrong kind of work, one that rejects sociality, craft and meaning, turning people into machines. In contrast, the physical, mental and social are inextricably linked in hunter-gatherer work. Modern life has been stripped of these connections, and compartmentalised for the sake of efficiency and comfort. Lee wrote of the Ju/’hoansi: ‘everyone worked and everyone used both hands and mind.’ Shorn of its original social context and multiplicity, the human body in today’s world is adrift and sick.

In 1865, the economist William Stanley Jevons wrote a book about coal. He started with the observation that when the Watt steam engine was introduced, coal production increased unexpectedly. If the steam engine increased the efficiency of energy production, why would coal production go up? The answer was simple: reduced costs stimulated more demand. Wrote Jevons: ‘and eventually the greater number of furnaces will more than make up for the diminished consumption of each.’ The Jevons Paradox is everywhere. When the cotton gin was introduced in the mid-19th century, its increased efficiency at separating cotton seeds from the fiber meant more labor was needed for other parts of the production process. Instead of decreasing demand for slaves, it led to more slavery than ever.

 

‘[I]t is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being,’ wrote John Stuart Mill in Principles of Political Economy (1848). Indeed, our lives today are the Jevons Paradox in microcosm. Frictionless technology at our fingertips leads to the paradoxical situation of our smartphone screens becoming crowded with apps, our days increasingly divided into small things, and our attention shattered. Things that were meant to make our lives easier simply tempt us to put more things on our plates, increasing the amount that we work, and wreaking havoc on our wellbeing.

 

And yet, when we consider work from an evolutionary perspective, it is hard to be optimistic about technological efficiency delivering us to the promised land of Keynes’s 15-hour working week. In this age of unprecedented burnout, it may give some solace to consider that the Jevons Paradox has been with us since time immemorial. Our industry is the blessing and curse of our species, a mindset and cultural force shaped by the evolutionary process, and stamped into the very fibre of our being.