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The Stone

The Bushmen Who Had the Whole Work-Life Thing Figured Out

Old Man Jagger at Skoonheid Resettlement Camp waiting for rain.Credit...James Suzman

Every year automation and computerization squeeze out new segments of the labor force. In response, trade unions and workers anxiously wring their hands while savvy politicians demonize the “sinister” forces of globalization and make promises about job retention that they almost certainly won’t be able to keep.

The anxiety induced by the prospect of ever greater automation is a far cry from the Jetson-like fantasies of robotic convenience that inspired so much optimism during the 20th century. This is hardly surprising. After all, work dominates our lives. It defines who we are, determines our social status, mediates our sense of self-worth, shapes our political affiliations and determines our entitlements to a slice of the economic pie.

The economist John Maynard Keynes held the view that our determination to work was the single biggest obstacle to achieving an economic Utopia. He expressed this view most forthrightly in an essay he published in 1930, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In it he predicted that by 2030, capital accumulation, improvements in productivity and technological advances would solve the “economic problem.” He argued that this would enable us to meet and maintain a high standard of living by working no more than 15 hours work a week, thus ushering in a “golden era of leisure.”

Sometimes referred to as the “problem of scarcity,” the economic problem Keynes referred to is the fundamental principle of most economy theory. It assumes that although people’s desires are limitless, the resources available to satisfy their needs and wants are limited. And as far as Keynes was concerned, the economic problem was nothing less than “the primary, most pressing problem of the human race” from the “beginnings of life in its most primitive forms.”

“We have been expressly evolved by nature — with all our impulses and deepest instincts — for the purpose of solving the economic problem,” he lamented. “If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.”

But Keynes was ultimately an optimist. He believed economics to be a rational science and people, on the whole, to be capable of making economically rational choices when presented with them. So he took the view that, save a few “purposeful money makers,” we would recognize the economic Utopia for what it was, slow down and “enjoy the abundance” when it arrived.

Hindsight tells us that Keynes’s optimism was misplaced. Capital growth and productivity are already much greater than he predicted they would be by 2030, and technological advances have exceeded his wildest expectations. Yet our collective appetite for work is undiminished.

KEYNES WAS ALSO WRONG in imagining that his “golden age of leisure” could come about only through advances in productivity and technology. Convinced that mankind had been on a journey of unrelenting progress since we emerged from the swamp, he believed the 15-hour week to be the culmination of hundreds of generations’ collective ingenuity and effort. Perhaps Keynes would have had a different view had he known that the 15-hour week was a reality for some of the handful of remaining tribes of autonomous hunter-gatherers, and that, in all probability, it was the norm for much of the history of modern Homo sapiens.

But in 1930, the idea that “primitive” people with no interest in labor productivity or capital accumulation and with only simple technologies at their disposal had already solved the “economic problem” would have seemed preposterous.

The possibility that our hunter-gatherer ancestors might not endure an unremitting struggle against the elements first came to public attention in the 1966. It followed a series of studies conducted by a Canadian anthropologist, Richard Borshay Lee, among the Ju/’hoansi “bushmen” of the northeast of southern Africa’s Kalahari. He was surprised to learn that Ju/’hoansi spent only 15 hours a week securing their nutritional requirements. Given that in 1966 the 40-hour week had only recently been introduced for federal workers in the United States, these figures appeared extraordinary. It was on the basis of this and subsequent work by anthropoligists — notably Marshall Sahlins in his 1972 book, “Stone Age Economics” — that Ju/hoansi and other similar hunting and gathering people came to be referred to as “the original affluent society.”

Subsequent research produced a more nuanced picture of the Ju/’haonsi’s affluence. It showed that they had an unyielding confidence in the providence of their environments and the knowledge of how to exploit this. As a result, they only ever procured enough food to meet their immediate needs confident that there was always more available, much like busy urbanites with empty refrigerators who get food on the go when they are hungry. This research also revealed that even though Ju/’hoansi did not have to work particularly hard, they were neither indolent nor bereft of purpose. They found profound satisfaction from the work they did and used of their free time to make music, create art, make jewelry, tell stories, play games, relax and socialize.

What was most compelling about this research was that it suggested that “economic problem” was neither universal nor the primary problem of the human race from the beginnings of time. For where the economic problem holds that we have unlimited wants and limited means, Ju/’hoansi hunter-gatherers had few wants that were easily met.

It is only very recently that the evolutionary importance of this work has become clear. New genomic research as well as a series of recent archaeological finds in southern Africa suggest that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle practiced by the Ju/’haonsi extends back much further in time than was previously thought. Genomic data now indicates that our species has been around for more than 200,000 years and, if the recent discovery of a distinctly Homo sapiens-like jawbone in Morocco stands up to scrutiny, there is case to push this date back beyond 300,000 years. Genomic data also suggests that the Ju/’hoansi and their broader genetic community — the Khoisan — have been hunting and gathering successfully in southern Africa for a significant proportion of human history. There is evidence to suggest that highly refined hunting technologies used by modern Ju/’hoansi hunters stretches back at least 45,000 years and possibly as far back as 90,000 years ago.

If the success of a civilization is judged primarily on its endurance over time, then the Ju/hoansi’s ancestors’ achievements render those of the ancient Egyptians, the Mayans or even the Victorians, mere novelties. It is difficult to be absolutely certain about how the Ju/’hoansi’s ancestors lived, but there is plenty more evidence to suggest that they were a lot like 20th century Ju/’hoansi and very little evidence to suggest that they were particularly different from them. And if the Ju/’hoansi are a good analog for how our ancestors lived, then this has implications for understanding our “natures” and how we respond to challenges like automation.

When Keynes bemoaned the “habits and instincts” bred into us over countless generations, he echoed a vision of human nature that existed long before economists determined that work was the elementary particle of human endeavor and that the economic problem was as much part of who we are as our instinct to fall in love. Now the evidence points to the Neolithic revolution as the genesis of the “economic problem.” For while agriculture was far more productive, it exposed rapidly growing populations to a new range of potentially catastrophic risks that inspired a range of innovations but that first and foremost placed a premium on human labor. For no matter how favorable the elements, farming requires plenty of hard work before it yields any rewards at all, and the consequences of not working are dire.

Most of us in the world’s richest countries now enjoy lives of unparalleled material abundance thanks to our productivity. We live in warm homes packed with all sorts of enterprising gadgetry and comforts that we feel compelled to replace and upgrade episodically to keep the wheels of commerce rolling. We are now so well fed by the 1 percent of us that still work in agriculture that we deposit as much food in landfill as we put in our bellies.

But many environmental economists warn that we have reached the limits of growth and that our continued productivity risks cannibalizing our future. Yet mainstream strategies for dealing with problems like climate change and biodiversity remain firmly rooted in the core assumptions of the economic problem — they aim to find more sustainable ways for us to continue to produce, consume and work as much as we do. Likewise strategies proposed to manage the impacts of automation tend focus mainly on the question of how to find replacement work for those made redundant.

But if our working culture is an artifact of the economic problem, then perhaps we would do better to embrace automation as an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with work so that we may, as Keynes put it, “look forward to an age of leisure and abundance without dread.”

James Suzman is the author of “Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen.”

Now in print: “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” and “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” with essays from The Times’s philosophy series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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