The history of what we call work
thenation.com
thenation.com
It'd be useful to spell out just how this competitive nature is supposed to be transcended, in the author's future. There's a bit of handwaving towards the end about confiscating Bezos and Musk's resources, but not really much more. We've seen that approach in action for over 100 years.
"...economists assure us that, in any case, the only long-term solution to global poverty is more economic growth." While not a cure-all, I do remember reading that the primary reason why most of China has escaped extreme poverty in the last 100 years has been economic growth. I'm curious for the counter-perspective there.
We cannot continue increasing productivity exponentially forever, and likely not for a whole lot longer. We’re already seeing the system collapsing in on itself — the supply chain woes we’re seeing right now are IMO the result of over-optimization over the last 3 decades. Infinite growth assumes there’s an ample workforce. When birth rates are below replacement levels, that’s not a good assumption.
We need to take a mindset of “what is the most productive way to optimize the limited and shrinking resources we have” rather than “how do we keep productivity growing forever”. Otherwise unrest will grow, and it’s a lot easier to smash a broken system than it is to maintain one.
At 27 I just finished postgrad professional qualifications and share a 2 bed flat with 2 friends. I lose 65% of my income to taxes and rent and have 10sqft personal space.
Avg house prices are 9x salary vs 4.5x in the 70s, so it takes a long time to save up to get started.
Let's talk solutions. 1) Govt needs to stop propping up housing market 2) Govt needs to relax planning and allow more houses to get built 3) NIMBYs must be stopped 4) Workers deserve fairer wages 5) To do that, boomers need to pay more of their costs 6) More social housing
source: https://nitter.net/TypeForVictory/status/1443850540614668299...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/more-adults-l...
Either way, the second half of this century is going to be bleak. That’s the other reason young people aren’t having kids: why bring them into a world that’s likely to be pretty awful?
As pay goes up, so does competition over (limited) resources. You can't tell from incomes alone how much better off humanity is in terms of actual resources. There are also complex arrangements such as ownership, and carbon debt that further complicate things.
"...economists assure us that, in any case, the only long-term solution to global poverty is more economic growth."
Economists are so often employed as Marketeers working on behalf of the ruling class..
> These findings support a surprising thesis, one that reverses everything we used to believe about the deep history of humanity. It was not the hunter-gatherers who “suffered from systematic dietary deficiencies,” working themselves to the point of exhaustion yet attaining no lasting security.
I want to know what the expected lifespan was for these foragers. What was their childbirth success rate?
Without good dental hygiene adults can expect to lose their teeth by age 40, at which point (in a foraging society with primitive tools) that adult is going to be more than slightly malnutritioned.
So? They were using clothing as well, doesn't mean they weren't transmitting infections to one another willy-nilly.
> as I understand it, a lot of modern man's issues with dental health are due to our grain righ diets anyway.
Maybe. I never heard of that theory myself. Bu regardless of diet, foragers still eat a lot of fruit with sugar. That's bad for teeth regardless of how well the tribe's toothbrush is passed down.
Not sure what you mean by "the tribe's toothbrush" being passed down. You can make toothbrushes (that don't last very long) from small branches by feathering out the end. You can also use toothpicks (e.g. made from bone).
Anecdote: My dad was not really good at brushing his teeth at all. "Forgot" about it quite often. He was "always" using a toothpick though. He'd be watching TV and you'd see him poking around with his toothpick. Sitting in front of the computer doing something and he's be poking around with his toothpick etc. He never had a single filling done or any issues with his teeth whatsoever. Try it some time. When the wooden toothpick is new, it can be used to get larger sticky things out from in between your teeth, which is only a problem if you have something sticky to eat in the first place. Once the toothpick has "feathered out" naturally from that, it can be used like a mini toothbrush and you can get your teeth squeaky clean little by little. I guess it's not a 3 minute brushing ritual, more of a lazy do-something-with-your-idle-hands while doing something else but hey.
On lifespans, expectation at birth was very different from expectation for a young adult. (The latter was still much less than now, yes.)
Similarly I think we need to know more about the distribution of good years and bad years -- when your numbers are limited by famine, which you can't really store up for, it's not strange for the good years to be relatively light on the day-to-day work needed. If this long article mentions this, I missed it in my skim.
If you go camping, and forget your toothbrush/toothpaste, rub your finger on the blackened remains of last night's fire and rub it on your teeth, it does a more than adequate cleaning job, albeit without the nice minty flavor. I've started to notice "charcoal" as a highlighted additive in commercial toothpastes recently, although I suspect this little bit of folk wisdom predates recreational camping and the advertising industry by a considerable amount, and is pretty easy to "discover" again should the thread ever be broken.
Also, a diet high in vegetable matter that requires heavy chewing and salivating is ime very good for overall dental health, as is chewing on anything not-sugary or otherwise damaging to your teeth, modern example: sugar free gum. Dental surgery is something I would not want to do in the premodern era, but if modern toothpastes etc were to disappear, I suspect we wouldn't miss them very much.
Personally, I hope we can shift the overtime bar from 40 hours to 32 hours in the near future, because if I understand my history, setting it to 40 is what hastened the work week we’ve considered normal for a century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Suzman
Being the head apologist for a company that generally does bad things in the world, I guess that convinced him after a while that the very concept of work was flawed. Maybe he would be more excited about the idea of work if he had worked for less evil companies.
BUT, the romantisized ahistorical model of the Ju/’hoansi people (also known as !Kung San, "bushmen") the argument detailed here is based on... had it's high point in 1966 indeed, and is no longer considered reliable by anthropology.
It's based on too many romantisized assumptions feeding into what Western anthropologists wanted to see.
1. That the Ju/’hoansi people had, just until the Western anthropologists showed up, been exclusively "foraging" and "isolated" without contact with their neighbors or "civilization". In fact, when Richard Lee showed up they were already in economic and cultural contact with their neighbors, but he left this out of his account, assuming it happened just before he got there and was "uninteresting".
2. That the Ju/’hoansi culture was unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years, and thus represneted how humasn lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. All people have history. Even to the extent they were "foragers", it doesn't mean their ancestors had been foragers for hundreds of thousands of years, had an unchanged culture for hundreds of thousands of years, or lived "just like" humans of hundreds of thousands of years ago.
3. That the Ju/’hoansi lived that way entirely by choice -- or entirely as determined by their "environment" and not as part of larger human regional multi-ethnic society. Edwin Wilmsen made an argument backed by evidence that can't be quickly dismissed that they actually functioned as a regional underclass in relation to other ethnic groups in the area, that perhaps they would rather have had more than "the minimum amount necessary" [or a different level of 'good life'] but didn't have access to the means of production to do so.
All of these counter-claims are also simplifications and debatable. But the original picture of "foragers who have been living this way for thousands of years with no contact with anyone else and thus show how humans lived in pre-history" is clearly also an over-simplification, and is not really how anthropology sees things anymore.
That people are still repeating it as gospel in 2021 I guess shows how attractive it is to some of us in our culture in 2021, as much as it says anything about prehistory or the Ju/’hoansi.
And to be sure, the Ju/’hoansi in the last half of the 20th century, show a different way to live, sure. As do all sorts of people around the globe. I think it is accurate and beneficial to let anthropology remind us of the incredible diversity of ways humans have found to live, that things we think are invariant or necessary for "healthy" culture almost never are, that there are far more paths available than we might assume.
How much health insurance would you need for a good life?
I can't help but thing everyone already does this, but some people have a different concept of "good life".
hunter-gatherers
farmers
slaves
serfs
employees on-site
employees WFH
contractors
temps
freelancers
China-fication
Uberization (gig workers)
RobotizationI guess its apropos for twitter.
Analogies are simplified models, all models are wrong, some are really wrong, but some are really useful.
The best professors are using them to explain complex phenomenons in simple terms.
I compressed decades of my history learning into a single tweet here. Most people are unable to be succinct. They're writing 500 pages books about subjects that can be summarized in a tweet.
Please show what's wrong with the way I explaining the evolution of work?
As far as its incorrectness, this model implies both that this history of work is a progression, which it's not, and that each stage succeeds the previous, which it does not. Many of these stage overlap, sometimes by millennia.
In any case, it's cute. Lighten up a bit.
> to value free time over money.
I value free time over money, but, from what I can tell from the article, it seems that the author seems to believe that hunter/gatherer societies have a lot of “free time” on their hands.
I’d suggest taking a quick shufti through some documentaries about life in hunter/gatherer societies.
Hunting for food, when you have to do it often is work like any other. No matter how much you like aspects of it initially.
ps: Sincerely, I mentioned above about volunteering. I used to wake up at 6 in the morning to unload truck 3 times a day. For free. Yet, I woke up every day very nicely, went there free minded, felt like a damn game to me. I gained daily rhythm (important for health), daily physical activity, sense of contribution as it was a food charity helping people in the area and zero obligations.
Meanwhile my colleagues, who were paid employees were all angry. All. Ranting about not being paid enough, won't make more efforts for that money, not being respected, having to obey or I'm fired, having to follow some stupid orders not being useful, having to come early for nothing, paranoia of being less favored.
Being a free man requires a lot of effort, but gives you a lot. Seeking your own goals is powerful.
This is true.
I have written here, about my experience. After leaving my company of 27 years, where, frankly, I hated the work, even though they loved me, I started looking for other work; especially of a more technical bent (I was a manager).
I was shown the door at every company I applied to. In a few cases, they were nice enough to open the door, before throwing me through it.
So I have set up shop doing coding for a 501(c)(3). I don't make a dime, but I code 10 hours (or more) a day, seven days a week.
It's a joy. I have never been so happy.
Also, despite some insinuations, my work is not "hobby" or "hermit" work. The application I'm developing now, consists of three servers that are aggregated by a pretty large-scale iOS native app. I wrote two of the servers (one was the work of about ten years, the other, seven months). I've been writing the app for a year. I could have done it in a lot less time, but the folks I'm working with didn't really have a clear idea of how it would work, so we've been refining it as we go.
It would make a lot of Fortune 50 companies cry, and I'm doing it for free.
It seems to me that our society all revolves around an absurd pressure for housing~.
If you give a roof, clean water and some veggies to people, .. expect a solid 5x increase on every metric. When you stop playing shitty politic games, surprisingly people have more energy.
But since people are under threat they accept what the market offers and we're in this sad pool of misery.
UBI might never work but after my little volunteering and others [0] I was under the impression that we need a device of this kind to free people.
[0] did write a vuejs app for a small business while working an uber eats like gig, I was happy writing stuff for the pleasure of being useful and on my own terms. Deliveries were a social balancing trick, I get brain time off, stay on rhythm, avoid procrastination. And whenever I had an idea for a feature, I'd push a commit from my car (I took a laptop with me).
People in the wild don't hunt elephants to survive. They survived pretty well for ages, they climb for honey, find smaller animals. It's not easy but it seems most humans are capable of it. I'm pretty sure the deal is worth it. The amount of satisfaction in apt usage of your senses and body is quite immense. I suffer daily due to insufficient stimulation (to the point I volunteered my time for truck unloading) both physical and intellectual. And if you look at half the population, you can probably read that on their face too.
Once it's no longer choice between 'apt usage of your senses and body' and 'insufficient stimulation', but between maximum performance and starvation, it stops being fun. Just read the happiness on faces of homeless.
The "homeless" who do, don't stay homeless for long.
In fact, I once read a story about pygmy tribes in Africa, and their hunters would sit around smoking pot, waiting for prey.
Not sure that helps the aim, when it shows up, but hey, I guess they know how to handle their pot.
That's different from "free time," though. Veterans will tell you that combat assignments also have a lot of waiting around.
Food preparation and preservation, shelter, crafting necessaries like eating implements, food storage vessels, clothing, and weapons - these keep a member of that society (except for some of the 'elites' of those societies, naturally) busy from dusk to dawn.
This persistent myth of the low effort required to subsist as a hunter gather needs to die.
I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of stuff that gets left out falls under the heading of "women's work". There's an enormous blind spot that underlies most discussions of work where working 'at home' is disregarded as though it is the natural state of women and not worth mentioning.
Women have always worked full time. Out of the home, in the home, with their partners, with their villages. Read frontier biographies from the US western expansion and notice the partnership and shared responsibilities. Notice who takes the deer carcass and processes the meet and hide. Notice who churns and cans and turns fabrics and leather into clothes and shoes and hats and bedding.
It rarely gets discussed, and feeds into a mythology which treats women 'working' as something that started in 1970 and is a sad byproduct of economic necessity.
The hunting and gathering (and storing, and shelter, and guarding, and...) surely were as varied as semi-modern (pre globalization) societies. The amount of work would depend on the natural environment and climate, hunting or fishing, trade with other local tribes, culture and mythologies.
I'd argue that the few, highly sequestered, remaining hunter gatherer societies, by virtue of being the only ones still around, are likely to be very much outliers in some dimensions and actually plausibly quite different from our own ancestors.
The article talks about Communism, but fails to mention that the USSR did not consider itself to be Communist. Rather, all the inhabitants were working on "building Communism" and once achieved everyone in the world would enjoy a post-scarcity society. Surely such a grand goal justified poor living condition - that are temporary anyway? Don't you believe in the vision of the party?
For the majority of history and or for the majority of people even today, 'work' was what you did to fulfill the most bottom of the tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - survival.
IOW, 'work' isn't some activity that exists outside of your 'real' life, it IS your life in a very literal sense.
I realize that kinda dovetails with the article's point, but I think before people get too outraged with the state of modern capitalism, a little perspective is probably in order.
Not exactly. You sell your labor power in order to earn a living so you can go out an acquire goods to survive. You work to have the means to live. That doesn't mean it is your life. You don't reap the benefits of what you create.
> You don't reap the benefit of what you create
And your risk is also much lessened and abstracted. If you produce a few bugs in your code, you don't get eaten by a tiger or have your family starve to death.
That would be ... so cool!
The notion of surplus is very interesting. I have no opinions, no hot takes. Just questions.
The very first facet I'd like explained is the observation that a surplus in one area creates a deficit elsewhere. I'm sure both author and reviewer touch on this.
Reviewer also makes a connection to Graeber's Bullshit Jobs thesis, how finance begets bureaucracy. Now I want to know if there's some kind of connection between surplus, inequity, finance, and bureaucracy. Perhaps repelling appeals to fairness, defending the hierarchy, what we now call Public Relations, begets more "justification work". (In contrast to productive work and caring work.)
This quote popped out:
"Suzman essentially argues that nature has programmed us, just as it has every other creature, to deal with surpluses of energy by working those surpluses out of our systems. With lots of available energy but little to do, we make work to release the tensions building up inside of us."
This has to be a nod towards Jeremy England's work, right?
"A New Physics Theory of Life"
A physicist has proposed the provocative idea that life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire life-like physical properties
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-physics-the...
I also want to contrast Suzman's Work thesis with Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus [2011]. https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Surplus-Technology-Consumer... It's been too long, so I'll have to actually reread.
Meanwhile...
Shirky's observation about widespread drunkenness in the 1700s really stuck with me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gin_Craze All that extra gin and idle labor with nothing to do. Of course everyone got drunk. Eventually, new demand for labor, the industrial revolution, absorbed all that supply. Problem solved. Begetting new problems, of course.
At the time, I saw the similarity between gin and online gaming. Today it'd be doom scrolling.
Any way. Great review. Exciting ideas. Will definitely lean into this topic.