Opinião | Por que trabalhamos tanto?

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Sou Ezra Klein, e este é “The Ezra Klein Show”.

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Portanto, um dos maiores ensaios da história do pensamento econômico é este ensaio de 1930 de John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possbilities for Our Grandchildren”. E é um ensaio estranho. Foi feito no auge da Grande Depressão, então tudo é terrível e as pessoas são muito pobres. Mas Keynes dá um passo para trás e apenas imagina o futuro.

E ele faz sua famosa previsão de que em 2030, que é daqui a 100 anos, os seres humanos seriam muito mais ricos, muito mais avançados tecnologicamente do que o problema da escassez, do que o problema que definiu a economia e, possivelmente, o mundo. civilização humana, até então – teria sido resolvida. E agora trabalharíamos apenas 15 horas por semana. E todo o problema seria o que fazer com todo esse tempo.

E a razão pela qual este ensaio ainda é falado, debatido e escrito é que Keynes estava curiosamente certo e errado. A parte disso que parece difícil e provavelmente parecia muito deslocada quando ele fez isso, os cálculos de quanto mais enriqueceríamos em 100 anos, não estavam certos. Na verdade, ele era conservador. Aprovamos suas previsões de crescimento de receita décadas atrás. E então ficamos ainda mais ricos do que isso.

Mas você pode notar que não trabalhamos 15 horas por semana. Na verdade, em um investimento de história anterior, quanto mais dinheiro você ganha agora, mais horas você trabalha no geral. Antes, o objetivo de ser rico não funcionava. E agora construímos um sistema de valores sociais. Portanto, a recompensa por ganhar muito dinheiro no trabalho é que você pode realizar ainda mais tarefas. E assim todas as pessoas que sobem e descem a escada da renda com níveis de abundância que teriam sido chocantes para qualquer pessoa na época de Keynes estão sobrecarregadas, esgotadas, sempre querendo mais, sentindo que não há o suficiente.

Então, o que deu errado? O que Keynes fez de errado? Meu convidado de hoje é o antropólogo James Suzman. E vira toda essa conversa de cabeça para baixo. Suzman passou os últimos 30 anos vivendo e estudando uma das sociedades de caçadores-coletores mais antigas e duráveis. Durante a maior parte da história da civilização, a crença predominante era que a vida antes do que agora consideramos civilização era, como disse Thomas Hobbes, feia, brutal e curta.

Mas a antropologia moderna mudou isso. Os caçadores-coletores costumavam ser saudáveis. Eles eram geralmente bem alimentados. Mesmo em climas muito implacáveis, eles tendiam a ter dietas diversas. E eles fizeram isso gastando apenas cerca de 15 horas por semana caçando e coletando.

O novo livro de Suzman se chama “Trabalho, uma história profunda da Idade da Pedra à Idade dos Robôs”. E o argumento geral é que a maneira como trabalhamos hoje não é movida pelo que precisamos. É impulsionado pelo que queremos. Também é impulsionado por como regulamos socialmente ou encorajamos desejos, que é parte de onde sua pesquisa sobre caçadores-coletores entra em cena e como eles abordam isso. Mas o importante aqui é que Keynes entendeu ao contrário. A humanidade resolveu o problema da escassez e alcançou uma semana de trabalho de 15 horas muito antes da modernidade. Mas, à medida que ficamos mais ricos e construímos mais tecnologia, desenvolvemos uma máquina não para acabar com nossos desejos, não para satisfazê-los, mas para gerar novas necessidades, novos desejos, novas formas de competição por status.

Você não pode resolver o problema da escassez com nosso sistema atual porque nosso sistema atual é projetado para gerar indefinidamente o sentimento de escassez dentro de nós. Você precisa disso. E assim continuamos trabalhando cada vez mais e sentindo que temos cada vez menos, mesmo no meio de muito, pelo menos, para muitos de nós. Como sempre, meu e-mail, [email protected].

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James Suzman, bem-vindo ao show.

Muito obrigado por me convidar, Ezra.

Então, vamos começar aqui. O que John Maynard Keynes predisse em “As possibilidades econômicas para nossos netos”?

Ah, ele previu uma grande mudança em quase tudo. Não, mas foi um ensaio extraordinário o que ele escreveu. E ele escreveu isso em 1930. E ele tinha acabado de perder sua fortuna pessoal no crash da bolsa de valores e ele estava assistindo a Grande Depressão irromper na Europa, América e no resto do mundo.

E o que Keynes decidiu fazer foi se desiludir com visões de curto prazo para tentar entender o que foi a Grande Depressão no contexto de uma história econômica mais ampla. E ao fazer isso, o que ele fez foi prever como seria a economia daqui a 100 anos, no tempo de seus netos, então nominalmente agora. E ele previu que, com a combinação de crescimento de capital, melhorias de produtividade e avanços em tecnologia, ninguém trabalharia mais de 15 horas por semana.

E mesmo assim, ele estava sugerindo que as razões para isso, para que as pessoas continuassem a trabalhar, era porque realmente era uma questão de hábito. Sua opinião era que, assim que cruzássemos todos esses limites, as necessidades básicas de todos seriam atendidas. E se as necessidades básicas das pessoas fossem atendidas, ele raciocinou, junto com muitos outros pensadores que vieram antes dele, de Oscar Wilde a Bertrand Russell, que se as necessidades básicas das pessoas fossem atendidas, elas parariam de dedicar suas vidas ao trabalho sem fim. E preferem passam o tempo trabalhando em coisas que importam para eles e são significativas para eles.

O que você fez bem nos detalhes disso? E onde ele errou?

Bem, quando Keynes fez suas previsões sobre crescimento de capital, avanço tecnológico e produtividade; os entendeu mal. Ele subestimou enormemente a velocidade do progresso nessas áreas. Então, basicamente, os limites em termos de crescimento de capital que ele previu teriam que ser atingidos para inaugurar essa semana de 15 horas, essa utopia econômica, nós os ultrapassamos há muito tempo, na década de 1980, assim como com a produtividade. A tecnologia, é claro, é muito mais difícil de medir.

Em outras palavras, ultrapassamos esses limites há 30 ou 40 anos. No entanto, aqui estamos. E trabalhamos quase tantas horas quanto as pessoas na década de 1930, quando Keynes escreveu o ensaio pela primeira vez. Então essa é outra coisa crítica em que você errou.

Portanto, o grande argumento contra-intuitivo de seu trabalho é que Keynes entendeu ao contrário. Na verdade, a humanidade havia resolvido o problema da escassez. Ele havia calculado uma semana de trabalho de 15 horas. Mas a solução estava em nosso passado. E os próprios avanços em tecnologia, renda e produtividade que Keynes previu são, na verdade, o problema, na verdade, as coisas que estão nos afastando da semana de trabalho de 15 horas. Me fale sobre isso.

Não necessariamente acho que essas são as coisas que estão nos afastando daquele sonho utópico que Keynes realmente teve. Acho que a forma como os abordamos é o que nos afasta daquele sonho utópico de Keynes, o fato de termos uma série de ideias culturais profundamente arraigadas na própria estrutura de nossa sociedade e nas próprias instituições que a cercam. que organizamos. nossas vidas. E isso, em certo sentido, está nos impedindo de realmente abraçar essa riqueza extraordinária que conquistamos.

E onde isso fica mais claro é quando olhamos para coisas como populações de caçadores-coletores como os Ju / ‘hoansi, com quem trabalhei, que tinham muito menos do que nós em um sentido material. Em um sentido material, eles eram profundamente empobrecidos para os padrões modernos. E, no entanto, eles se consideram ricos e desfrutaram de um certo grau de riqueza como resultado disso. No entanto, parece que estamos presos neste ciclo de mais e mais crescimento, de maior riqueza, de maior, ao que parece. Parece que nossas aspirações continuam a crescer ininterruptamente.

E estamos presos neste tipo de fita onde nunca paramos e desfrutamos das recompensas do que ganhamos. Então, de certa forma, acho que tem a ver com o fato de que basicamente esse crescimento e expansão de tecnologia e produtividade é algo que continua nos empurrando para frente. Mas, ao mesmo tempo, é também uma oportunidade de organizar a maneira como fazemos as coisas de maneira muito diferente. E para mim, isso é algo que realmente deveríamos olhar.

Portanto, antes de me aprofundar muito nas sociedades de caçadores-coletores, quero fazer uma pergunta epistemológica. Como sabemos quanto tempo as sociedades de caçadores-coletores passam trabalhando? Como sabemos como eles viviam? Quer dizer, essas sociedades existiram por muito tempo, muitas vezes trabalhando a partir de evidências fragmentadas. Existem alguns bolsões sobreviventes desse tipo de estilo de vida. Mas não é a maioria. Então, o que garante que podemos falar com confiança sobre tudo isso?

Bem, a verdade é que quando falamos sobre algo de nossa história profunda, temos que ser um pouco cautelosos. Falo com confiança porque parece que todas as peças se encaixam. Mas as evidências, como você diz, são escassas. O problema é que muitos de nossos ancestrais caçadores-coletores, e agora sabemos que eles existem há 320.000 anos. Isso é apenas o Homo sapiens moderno. E há muito debate sobre quão humanos foram os vários antecedentes disso. Portanto, o problema é que a maior parte de sua cultura material era feita de coisas que eram bastante orgânicas ou pedras e era de escala muito pequena. Portanto, temos muito poucos vestígios materiais reais de como essas sociedades estão organizadas.

E realmente, até a década de 1960, havia essa certeza absoluta em quase todos os lugares que os caçadores-coletores provavelmente viviam vidas de constante miséria, que suas vidas eram feias, brutais e breves, que viviam constantemente à beira da fome e que isso era , de fato, o que nos incutiu essa obsessão que temos com a escassez, essa coisa que nós – você sabe, comida. Ter comida suficiente hoje é simplesmente um gatilho para se preocupar se teremos mais comida amanhã e assim por diante.

Na década de 1960, alguns antropólogos sentiram que se olhassem para alguns dos grupos sobreviventes de caçadores-coletores dispersos e, novamente, estes tendessem a estar em locais ecologicamente marginais, talvez eles pudessem desenvolver algumas idéias sobre como viviam. Nosso caçador-coletor ancestrais. E o que eles podiam dizer com alguma confiança razoável é que coisas como cultura material provavelmente eram relativamente semelhantes. Eles usaram ferramentas semelhantes. E da mesma forma, com base em evidências arqueológicas, a sugestão certamente estava em muitos lugares. E, é claro, houve variação.

E eles tendiam a ser grupos semelhantes em tamanho à caça moderna – populações contemporâneas de caça e coleta. E o grupo mais famoso escolhido para o estudo foram os Ju / ‘hoansi do norte da Namíbia, que, na época, viviam bem remotamente no nordeste da Namíbia e no noroeste de Botswana e viviam como caçadores-coletores, em geral.

E um antropólogo, Richard Lee, apareceu e fez uma análise econômica muito básica de entradas e saídas de como os Ju / ‘hoansi viviam. E isso foi em um – os Ju / ‘hoansi viviam em um bairro difícil. O deserto do Kalahari não é um lugar fácil. Este é um lugar que basicamente desafiou os agricultores que queriam entrar no Kalahari há 2.000 anos. Mas era um lugar muito duro. Basicamente, você não poderia criar gado ou plantar vegetais nos campos, etc.

E quando Lee chegou lá, ele começou a trabalhar. E ele estava muito preocupado porque estava no meio de uma seca terrível. Enfim, ele acabou trabalhando com eles. E ele descobriu que com base em cerca de 15 horas para as mulheres e 17 horas de trabalho por semana para os homens em termos de busca de alimentos, os Ju / ‘hoansi eram praticamente capazes de atender a todas as suas necessidades básicas. E, além disso, eles trabalhariam uma quantidade semelhante de horas em atividades domésticas, tarefas como preparar comida, fazer fogueiras, consertar ferramentas, etc. Em outras palavras, eles trabalharam muito menos do que nós.

E ele retirou essas descobertas. E vários outros antropólogos trabalharam com outras populações persistentes de caçadores-coletores, desde nômades caçadores-coletores do norte do Ártico até sociedades aborígines e a baía de Hadza na Tanzânia. E todos descobriram que tinham dados bastante semelhantes, que esses caçadores-coletores não viviam constantemente à beira da fome, que desfrutavam de bastante tempo livre e eram surpreendentemente bem alimentados com um esforço relativamente baixo. E isso foi apenas um esforço de indivíduos economicamente ativos. Em outras palavras, eles apoiaram os idosos e apoiaram seus filhos. Portanto, não se esperava que as crianças trabalhassem.

Portanto, com base nisso, com base nesta vasta extensão geográfica de evidências convergentes, podemos supor que, uma vez que essas populações de caçadores-coletores, que agora sabemos, não tiveram contato cultural por 60.000, 70.000 anos, a relação – Não havia contato cultural direto até este século entre, por exemplo, muitas populações de caçadores-coletores aborígenes australianos e grupos como os Ju / ‘hoansi. No entanto, eles são organizados de maneiras muito semelhantes.

E o que isso sugere para mim é que a própria natureza de ganhar a vida, essa natureza desse trabalho, tendia a criar tipos muito específicos de formas culturais, sociais e econômicas, que são amplamente consistentes. Obviamente, existem variações em todos os tipos de aspectos. Mas há muito mais em comum entre caçadores-coletores do que entre diferentes. E certamente há muito mais diferenças entre caçadores-coletores e sociedades agrícolas do que sociedades de caçadores-coletores.

E então é realmente com base nisso que podemos especular que deve haver uma compreensão maior que essas sociedades nos oferecem sobre a maneira como nossos ancestrais viveram e trabalharam do que qualquer outra coisa. Portanto, é uma lente imperfeita para ver o passado. Mas acho, no entanto, muito ilustrativo.

Então, em um sinal de para onde vamos chegar aqui, o grande ponto daquele ensaio de Keynes é que, eventualmente, seremos capazes de produzir tanto, não precisamos trabalhar porque teremos nosso caminho para a abundância produzido. E o que isso diz sobre as sociedades de caçadores-coletores é, e francamente, sobre a modernidade, o que vimos até agora é o oposto. A abundância não vem de uma produção infinita. Vem regulando efetivamente o que você deseja. Porque então você pode produzir o suficiente e atingir esse nível. Então, vamos falar um pouco sobre como Ju / ‘hoansi regula o desejo. E talvez possamos começar com a distribuição da demanda.

Uma das características mais distintas dos Ju / ‘hoansi, e de muitas outras sociedades semelhantes de caçadores-coletores, era que eles eram, para usar as palavras de Richard Lee, ferozmente igualitários. E eles tinham vários mecanismos para administrar esse igualitarismo. Agora, um dos mecanismos mais interessantes era um sistema chamado demanda compartilhada. Um antropólogo que não gostou muito disse que tolerava roubo.

E é um sistema que é, em muitos aspectos, a reversão completa de nossas regras de dar, compartilhar e receber. Quando pedimos algo a alguém, dizemos por favor. É uma oferta de dívida. Quando alguém nos dá algo, agradecemos. Estou em dívida com você. Existe uma espécie de senso de troca. E é direito do doador. E geralmente, eu sempre fui criado, esperando que alguém lhe oferecesse algo. E sempre agradeça e você deve estar em dívida com eles. E é de fato um direito do doador negar a alguém algo que ele pediu.

Nas culturas Ju / ‘hoan e, na verdade, em muitas outras culturas de caça e coleta, essa relação é invertida. Basicamente, de forma idealizada, o compartilhamento da demanda significa que praticamente qualquer pessoa em uma sociedade pode recorrer a qualquer outra pessoa. E lembre-se, esses são grupos sociais relativamente pequenos. Você pode ir a qualquer outra pessoa e exigir algo dela. Então se, por exemplo, eu tenho um saco de fumo, outra pessoa tem o direito de vir e exigir um pouco desse fumo de mim.

E seria considerado extremamente rude, na verdade, seria considerado ofensivo, se eu não desse um pouco daquele tabaco para ele. Ao mesmo tempo, não é considerado rude fazer esse tipo de exigência. Portanto, o que temos é uma sociedade na qual, de fato, todos podem sobrecarregar espontaneamente todos os outros. O resultado líquido disso é que ninguém se preocupa em comprar serviços porque eles simplesmente irão compartilhá-los e doá-los de qualquer maneira. E as pessoas acabam compartilhando tudo espontaneamente.

E eles vêem uma certa virtude. Não é algo totalmente inconsciente. Quer dizer, a cultura é habitual. Ele fica inconsciente. Mas as pessoas estão cientes de suas virtudes. E na vida do caçador-coletor, havia uma sensação real de que se alguém tenta acumular recursos ou dominar a distribuição e o fluxo de recursos, isso é socialmente prejudicial. Produz tensões. Produz ansiedades. Produz uma hierarquia ou uma tentativa de hierarquia. Acrescenta todo um nível de risco e custo à vida social do grupo.

Portanto, o compartilhamento da demanda é apenas uma forma funcional de distribuir recursos dentro de uma sociedade. E nessas sociedades funcionou muito bem. Porque o fato de que todos podiam tributar todos os outros significava que todos recebiam uma parte razoável. Também significava que eles obtinham a quantia correta porque, se alguém cobrasse a mais de alguém, eles poderiam pagar os impostos em tempo. Então, foi uma espécie de senso de restrição social. E o que normalmente produzia, na maioria dos casos, era um modo de vida muito harmonioso e um modo de vida muito harmonioso, mesmo quando as coisas às vezes eram difíceis e os recursos eram escassos.

Então, deixe-me perguntar sobre o modo de vida harmonioso. Porque há um debate nos últimos anos, principalmente sobre o nível de violência intra e intergrupal entre caçadores-coletores. Então você lê Steven Pinker, e ele dirá, ah, nosso passado foi muito mais violento. Havia muito mais violência nessas sociedades. Já ouvi outros antropólogos e especialistas argumentarem isso. Eu acho que, olhando de nossa perspectiva atual, algo como compartilhamento de demanda pode levar a muita violência. Então, qual é a sua perspectiva sobre o nível de conflito aberto real?

Minha perspectiva sobre a troca de demanda era que isso certamente fazia os antropólogos se sentirem violentos até se acostumarem um pouco com isso. Mas entre todas as outras pessoas, era realmente algo muito pacífico. Agora, sim, houve um debate sem fim. E é realmente um debate sobre a modernidade, estejamos ou não neste grande caminho do progresso. Para defender o progresso, ajuda dizer que, na realidade, nossas vidas no passado eram muito mais miseráveis ​​e muito mais violentas.

Não tenho dúvidas de que nas sociedades de caçadores-coletores ao longo da história houve, é claro, violência. Certamente, com as histórias orais de Ju / ‘hoansi, definitivamente existem memórias e histórias de pessoas, grupos que vivem, alguém em [INAUDIBLE] luta com o povo de [INAUDIBLE] ou – acontece. As pessoas são violentas. E muitas vezes são violentos. No caso de Ju / ‘hoansi, como se costuma dizer, geralmente há uma luta por questões do coração e às vezes, ocasionalmente, alguma vingança. Claro, existe violência.

Mas, como regra geral, namorar caçadores-coletores e estar em sociedades como esta é na verdade extraordinariamente harmonioso. Então, estatisticamente, é difícil dizer se é mais pacífico agora ou mais pacífico então. Mas o que é absolutamente correto dizer é que os caçadores-coletores não viviam neste estado de constante guerra hobbesiana, que na realidade, como em nossas vidas, houve momentos em que a violência eclodiu. E abalou as pessoas quando aconteceu. As pessoas ficaram traumatizadas com isso. Foi difícil para eles. Eles não gostam disso. Não fazia parte da norma.

Mas, no geral, acho que a vida era bem tranquila. E este é, novamente, o tipo de sentimento avassalador, certamente da parte dos antropólogos que me precederam, que passaram mais tempo nessas sociedades quando ainda tinham mais liberdade para caçar e coletar; é claro que a área em que trabalhei tem sofrido constantes mudanças. E o sentimento avassalador de todos eles, novamente, é apenas a serenidade geral da vida sob essas circunstâncias. E acho que é justo dizer que, como espécie, somos relativamente amantes da paz. E acho que isso se aplica à maior parte de nossa história. Mas dentro disso, é claro, há casos em que as coisas teriam sido duras, brutais e violentas também.

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Você pode falar um pouco sobre a prática de insultar a carne?

Este é o outro grande recurso igual na vida de Ju / ‘hoan. No mundo de Ju / ‘hoan, as pessoas não dão muita importância aos recursos materiais. As coisas são compartilhadas de maneira relativamente fácil e uniforme. A distribuição da demanda não é uma fonte de tensão.

Mas uma coisa no mundo Ju / ‘hoansi que é amada acima de todas as outras é a carne. E é uma das poucas coisas que inspira as pessoas ao ciúme, à raiva, se elas se sentirem um pouco excluídas. E também é uma das poucas coisas que se alguém é muito produtivo em trazer carne, se alguém é um caçador muito bom, então há o risco de que essa pessoa comece a acumular capital social adicional como resultado disso, a acumular poder, simplesmente porque são transportadores e distribuidores de carne.

Então o que eles fazem é ter uma série de costumes, um, a distribuição da carne e, dois, como lidar com os próprios caçadores para lidar com qualquer tipo de tensão que possa surgir disso. Portanto, quando um caçador retorna com uma presa e, em particular, se for uma presa espetacular, algo enorme como uma girafa ou um touro eland, o caçador não será elogiado da maneira que geralmente esperamos e imaginamos que ele retorne. com este troféu. Ha ha, todo mundo vai se alimentar. Todo mundo vai ser maravilhoso. Dê tapinhas nas costas e agora sou o herói da noite.

Em vez disso, o caçador é ridicularizado e insultado. E é feito de uma forma despreocupada, mas também com um pouco de vantagem. E o caçador, por sua vez, deve se comportar com grande humildade. E o tipo de insulto que vai ser, todo mundo sabe que isso é um problema de performance, certo? Porque se aparecer uma girafa, é um grande pedaço de carne. Nenhuma pessoa pobre terá problemas para comer essa coisa em poucos dias.

Mas eles ainda dirão, ah, esta girafa. Ah, a carne cheira a urina. Ah, não dá nem pra alimentar minha sogra. E seus insultos saem repetidamente e repetidamente durante o curso de consumir este animal. E a razão de fazerem isso é para evitar que o caçador acumule qualquer hierarquia desnecessária, qualquer autoridade desnecessária sobre os outros e qualquer autoridade socialmente destrutiva sobre os outros.

Há uma citação maravilhosa, novamente, de Richard Lee, onde o homem descreve a base por trás das práticas. Nós o usamos para esfriar o coração dos jovens. E, dessa forma, caçadores bem-sucedidos eram, na verdade, encorajados ou desencorajados a caçar excessivamente. Agora, curiosamente, porque nos bandos de caçadores-coletores, todos gostavam dele, você queria desencorajar bons caçadores de caçar demais. E, ao mesmo tempo, você não queria que o incompetente saísse ou o velho saísse sem sucesso o tempo todo. Portanto, eles tinham outros métodos para distribuir a responsabilidade por aquela carne.

Então, tecnicamente, o dono de um animal que foi morto não era realmente a pessoa que matou o animal e o trouxe para casa, aquele que realmente fez o trabalho duro, mas, na verdade, a pessoa que fez a flecha. E, como resultado, isso significava que nas comunidades Ju / ‘hoan, anciãos, zambos e todos os outros podiam ocasionalmente alegar possuir um animal e ter o fardo adicional da responsabilidade de distribuir a carne e suportar insultos.

Então, isso chega aos nossos ouvidos, meus ouvidos, de uma forma muito estranha, certo? Quer dizer, isso desafia quase tudo que você pensa sobre motivação e como fazer as pessoas realizarem tarefas difíceis e se destacarem nelas. Então, neste mundo onde você é um caçador e derruba uma girafa, e aí você volta e todos te insultam, e outra pessoa pode distribuir a carne porque era a flecha deles e não sua, por que ser um caçador? Qual é a teoria implícita da motivação para fazer coisas que são valiosas para a sociedade, mas sem habilidades dentro desses grupos?

Essa é uma das coisas maravilhosas de olhar para a ideia de trabalho à medida que avançamos em nossa história profunda e, na verdade, até mesmo além dos Ju / ‘hoansi, na história evolutiva. É muito claro que evoluímos para amar o trabalho, em um sentido muito básico. Nós evoluímos, nos tornamos essas espécies focadas extremamente determinadas com essa variedade extraordinária de habilidades e dispositivos flexíveis, desde nossas mãos até nossos cérebros incrivelmente plásticos, que, em certo sentido, precisam ser alimentados. Há uma razão para que, quando estamos presos em confinamento solitário na prisão por alguma coisa, o tédio nos corrói. É porque basicamente não podemos aplicar essas habilidades extraordinárias para as quais evoluímos.

E as pessoas gostam de um trabalho extraordinário. E muitas vezes podem ser diferentes tipos de prazer. Agora, no caso de Ju / ‘hoansi, tomemos o exemplo da caça. A caça é um trabalho extraordinariamente gratificante. É muito gratificante. Envolva sua mente. Comprometa seu intelecto. Envolve anos de habilidade adquirida e acumulada. Comprometa sua intuição. Comprometa sua força física. Comprometa sua resistência. E envolve você emocionalmente porque você tem uma enorme conexão empática com os animais que está perseguindo. É profundamente satisfatório. E no final, vira carne na barriga. Também o preenche bastante fisicamente no final.

Como um caçador Ju / ‘hoan me disse, ele estava tipo – ele disse no final,” Caçar faz meu coração feliz, minhas pernas pesadas e minha barriga cheia. ” É um trabalho profundamente gratificante. E obviamente faz parte da nossa herança evolutiva, essa capacidade de trabalhar com eficiência e aplicar nossas habilidades para adquirir os alimentos de que precisamos em primeiro lugar. Porque essa é a principal tarefa da vida: levar comida e energia ao nosso corpo para crescer e se reproduzir.

E então, quando temos um excedente de energia, claramente usamos as mesmas habilidades que nos capacitaram a sermos caçadores, coletores e ambientalistas tão versáteis e flexíveis. Aplicamos essas habilidades a muitas outras coisas, como criar música, criar arte, contar histórias, etc. E o trabalho é uma grande parte de quem somos. E quando somos privados da capacidade de trabalhar, nos sentimos miseráveis. Somos apáticos. Estamos entediados. Nós nos sentimos desconfortáveis. E de muitas maneiras, a vida não vale a pena ser vivida.

Isso faz algum sentido para mim em um nível teórico, mas deixe-me saber que essas práticas culturais foram realmente bem-sucedidas. Quando olho em volta, não vejo muitas sociedades de caçadores-coletores hoje. E aqueles que existem muitas vezes vivem em condições terríveis. Então, por que devo levar a sério o modelo do caçador-coletor como um modelo cultural de sucesso?

A extraordinária longevidade do Homo sapiens é particularmente relevante. 30 anos atrás, quando comecei a estudar antropologia, tive a sensação de que o Homo sapiens moderno – cognitivamente moderno, como era chamado – já existia há cerca de 40.000 anos e fisicamente moderno há cerca de 100.000 anos. Agora, com a pesquisa genômica, atrasamos essa data para talvez 320.000, 340.000 anos, sugerindo que o Homo sapiens está circulando, agindo de maneira relativamente inteligente e agindo como fez há algum tempo.

E também sugere que eles devem ter tido um modelo que funcionou, um modelo que efetivamente permitiu que eles se adaptassem, em primeiro lugar, às mudanças climáticas enquanto ainda estavam presos na África e, em seguida, se expandissem e se adaptassem a diferentes contextos ao seu redor . o mundo. La humanidad es extraordinaria por su capacidad básicamente para romper los hábitats y los nichos ecológicos, de los que la mayoría de los animales son absolutamente rehenes, y adaptarse y desarrollar formas completamente nuevas de ganarse la vida. Y creo que ese tipo de estructura fue una gran parte de este proceso.

Creo que ese tipo de flexibilidad, que se enfoca en el corto plazo, que se enfoca en asegurar sus necesidades básicas y luego dedicar tiempo de otra manera fue un sistema que funcionó efectivamente. Y permitió la expansión gradual de nuestra especie en todo el mundo. Así que creo que fue simplemente una parte de quienes somos. Somos seres culturales. Desarrollamos formas y sistemas de gestionarnos y organizarnos, que pueden ser muy diferentes, pero de vez en cuando te encuentras con una forma que funciona.

Y en el caso de los cazadores-recolectores, creo que la forma de sociedades de forrajeo a pequeña escala organizadas sobre bases muy cooperativas, basadas en compartir recursos, habilidades, etc., fue un modelo exitoso que permitió la expansión lenta y gradual de nuestro especies para alcanzar un período de casi dominio como lo había hecho poco antes de la revolución agrícola.

Creo que fue un sistema que funcionó, pero también fue un sistema cultural. Eso fue todo. ¿Y fue uno bueno? Si. Si mide el éxito de una civilización por su resistencia en el tiempo, por su sostenibilidad, entonces esa es una forma muy sostenible de trabajar. Quiero decir, 300.000 años es un período de tiempo muy largo.

Quiero destacar cómo medimos el éxito de las civilizaciones. Pero quiero establecer otra conexión que creo que haces en el libro, que es que una cosa que está sucediendo aquí es que estas sociedades desarrollaron, en demanda, compartiendo e insultando la carne y otras prácticas, estructuras sociales bastante extraordinarias para evitar que la gente se acumule también. mucho, para evitar que deseen demasiado, porque se vuelve una especie de dolor si tienes mucho. La gente simplemente te lo quitó, o se burlaron de ti, o se enojaron contigo.

Entonces, una de las cosas que están sucediendo aquí es que si no quieres trabajar tanto, si quieres una sociedad en la que tengas abundancia, crea ocio, tienes que mantener los deseos de la gente bajo control, y que lo que tienes aquí en estas sociedades de cazadores-recolectores, y ciertamente, en la que estudiaste de cerca, es un sistema bastante extraordinario para mantener el deseo bajo control. Si piensas en nuestra sociedad ahora como un motor sin fin del deseo, un apreciador y generador de deseo y un conspirador del deseo, básicamente tienes lo opuesto aquí. Y entonces tienes el tiempo, porque la gente está siendo disuadida, del tipo de cosas que conducen a la rutina hedónica.

No lo llamaría extraordinario. Yo diría que el lugar en el que nos encontramos ahora es extraordinario, sin duda, en términos temporales. Pero sí, absolutamente. What you had with these societies were societies where, effectively, the problem of scarcity, the economic problem, the thing which economists or classical economics tells us drives us to always want more, this idea that we have infinite wants and limited means, just did not exist. They had limited desires that were relatively easily met. So they weren’t caught in this sort of constant loop of wanting more in the future.

And you talk about it as extraordinary because, of course, you’re looking at it from a perspective of the United States. And you’re looking at it as I was looking at it when I first went and spent time with them. And they don’t view it as extraordinary at all. They find it extraordinary — or they found it; we’ve got to be clear on historical context here. Life is changing very fast for them. But they found it extraordinary instead that people might want to accumulate wealth, that people might not want to share. They respond to it with that same kind of visceral surprise that others respond to them.

And again, it’s a sort of telling thing about the power of how culture and experience really shapes our sense of the world around us and our sense of what is normal, what is natural, what is good. As far as Ju/‘hoansi are concerned, not sharing is something that is unnatural. So while we see the Ju/‘hoansi as abnormal or exceptional, they do the same thing with us. And I think this is the great power of cultural difference, it’s what gives me hope about the fact that, actually, the possibilities for humankind in the future are endless. Because what we often assume as nature is just culture masquerading as nature.

I was going to ask about that. This is a tremendously wide variation in how people act depending on the cultures they grow up in. I was thinking when you were saying that the Ju/‘hoansi see it as strange when somebody doesn’t share as unnatural, I mean, I’ve got a two-year-old. There’s definitely something natural about not wanting to share.

He definitely does not find it an intuitive concept, which is all to say, do you have a view on whether there is such a thing, at least in the way we discuss it now, as human nature? Or is basically most of what we consider to be human nature cultural imposition? And what is really human nature is our ability to absorb cultural and social cues and the flexibility therein?

Well, you’ve answered my question very nicely for me. We’ve often sought out human nature. Are we intrinsically good? Are we intrinsically bad? Are we cooperative? Are we not? And I think what we are is we’re a host of contradictions because human nature is to be, one, cultural, two, adaptive and, three, intransigent, all at the same time. So we’re the species that can adapt to circumstances with extraordinary ease.

Put us in a difficult place. Force us into a change. Like for example, the lockdown of last year, all the objections notwithstanding, we coped with it remarkably well. This was a almost unprecedented change in behavior that was required. And we got on, and we managed and adapted to it and even became habituated to it, which is now why flexible working is likely to be a norm in many societies for years to come.

So we’re this incredibly adaptable creature because we have these very plastic brains. And our experience imprints itself on those brains, and we become habituated to things. We become creatures of habit. Certain things are normal and acceptable and doable. And that’s just the way they are. And these things can be very, very different. And this is, at the same time, what makes us so intransigent, so resistant to change, which is why, for example, people smoke themselves into an early grave, knowing that it’s killing them, simply because they can’t change that habit.

So human nature is to be cultural: to be, at once, adaptable, and to be intransigent. And anything beyond that I think is to impose some kind of universality on what is ultimately a cultural norm. So to say are we basically kind to one another and humanitarian, or are we basically selfish — those, in my view, are very clearly cultural norms. Those are normative behavior, which feel natural because that is culture’s extraordinary power over us.

So the implicit cultural tradeoff here seems to be between status egalitarianism and then personal striving and ambition. You can either encourage striving by choosing to give certain individuals greater status, greater wealth, greater social power, given what they produce, but the cost is jealousy and envy and inequality and this kind of positional competition. Or you can maintain status egalitarianism, but at the cost of discouraging some of that striving and ambition. You’re probably not going to invent antibiotics in a society. You’re probably not going to invent some of the things that capitalism or even agriculture drove us towards. Is that how you see the tradeoff?

I don’t. I tend to think that people do things because that is what we are. We are thinkers, doers, creators, makers. And we get intense personal satisfaction from doing so. Now we happen to live in societies at the moment where we get a certain amount of social credibility and social satisfaction from doing so. And also, the inverse exists. If you don’t work, you’re effectively denied social dignity.

But work in and of itself can be extraordinarily fulfilling. So that’s use the Ju/‘hoan example again. And there was some lovely studies done in the late ‘60s looking, in particular, at, say, child development. Ju/‘hoansi children typically play in mixed age groups. They look after one another, often with kind of cascading open responsibilities. Education is very undidactic. Children are expected to learn things, not to be taught things.

And the kinds of games that they play, some of them involve a huge amount of skill. Hunting, for example, practicing with bows and arrows involves skill. There’s games involving catching weighted vulture feathers that are thrown in the air with a stick and twisting them up. And these are highly skillful things, like playing tennis. And people master them because it gives them great pleasure to do so.

But there’s no lording it over others for being better or worse at it. And so you end up with actually quite — you end up with these games which are quite intensely individually competitive in the sense that somebody might be trying to master a skill or become much better at something. But because of the context in which it takes place, there’s very little of that kind of social pressure of that, again, the back patting and all the rest.

So for example, in Ju/‘hoansi society, there’s very much in one place left in Namibia where people are able to still hunt and gather. There are hunters who are absolute masters of their craft. And insults and what have you notwithstanding, they go on and they do the hunting because it brings them profound satisfaction. There is a great joy in executing that skill.

The truth of the matter is, it’s the same for most of us, most honest endeavors. If I play on my guitar, it brings me pleasure. But I know nobody in their right mind would want to listen to it. Most people who write books generally write them for themselves. Because you have to be very, very lucky to get read more widely than just a handful of people. So there is that thing. We’ve sort of forgotten, I think, and lost a sense of the wonder and the joy of that kind of purposefulness and the execution of the purposefulness and how important that is to human flourishing.

So let me play the cynic here. Because we’re talking about a set of societies that have been driven almost out of existence. I mean, as you’re saying, even for the Ju/‘hoansi, this is a period of extraordinary change. One way of looking at this history is that we had a survival of the culturally fittest societies. And now hunter-gatherer exists only in these protected pockets. That we sort of ran a competition, and they lost. And that the societies that supercharged our ambition, our intensity, our status competition, they created, for better and for worse, everything from these multitrillion dollar economies, to nuclear weapons, to CRISPR and mRNA vaccines.

Maybe we can modulate it on the margin, but some of this is a cost we pay for these kinds of advances. So to say that work is its own reward, it may be. I actually don’t disagree with that at all. But in terms of advancement and the kinds of things that we’ve seen in the past 100, 200, 300 years, there’s something going on there that is going on differently in the broadly capitalist, market oriented, et cetera, societies from some of their former competitors.

I’m not absolutely certain [about], for example, the narrative that capitalism per se is what creates this wealth of creativity and these great advances. There’s, of course — one goes through history. Wherever people have had sufficient surplus energy that they haven’t been stuck on the food quest, you’ve had these great sets of innovations and creativity, whether it’s artistry, whether it’s medicine, whether it’s theology, whether it’s physics, wherever you’ve had these concentrations of energy, so whenever there’s been a decent surplus and knowledge can be reproduced and shared and passed on from one generation to the next.

And I certainly think that the kind of capitalized culture that we’ve had is an organic consequence of the transition to agriculture. And it is very much part of what’s brought us to where we are now. But I don’t think it’s what’s part of what’s needed in order for us to take the next step on. And in fact, I actually think, in many ways, that the kind of innovation and the productivity and the growth mindset that came out of agriculture has brought us out of the miseries of the agricultural era, which was quite long and quite difficult, and into a brave new era. But that very same medicine that brought us this great prosperity that we enjoy now might now well be making the patient sick.

One of the fascinating threads of the book is the way the transition to farming transforms the way we experience labor, of course, but also the way we experience and understand time. And you really emphasize the human relationship to time, essential to our relationship to work. So can you tell me about that, the difference between how foragers and farmers related to time?

It is an extraordinary phenomenon. And it’s one that I was very attuned to right from the beginning of my first ever fieldwork. Because I was working with some Ju/‘hoansi who’d lost their land already. This was in the early 1990s. And my determination was to actually get a Ju/‘hoan oral history of what had happened. We had all these colonial histories dominating the story of Africa. I wanted to get their version of events, in a sense. And that, on the whole, I really struggled. People didn’t have history. They didn’t talk in historical terms. They didn’t think in particularly temporal terms.

And at the same time, you had lots of the farmers who were trying to employ them, saying, ah, the Ju/‘hoansi, they don’t think beyond today. They don’t have a concept of tomorrow and so on and so forth. And it turned out that this was what the Ju/‘hoansi largely agreed with. And part of the reason was they had what’s called historically an immediate return economy. In other words, pretty much all economic effort went into simply meeting their needs for that day.

And that was based on this idea that they had few needs easily met. So they were competent foragers. They knew that within a few hours of spontaneous effort, they could fill their bellies and so on in most circumstances. And as a result, they didn’t really spend a great deal of time planning into the future or, indeed, thinking about the past.

Now the transition to farming was very, very different. Where hunter-gatherers viewed their environments as inherently provident, as almost generous, as something which gave them, farming, you have to view your environment as only potentially provident. For it to be provident, you have to invest your labor into it.

But investing your labor into land in order for it to provide you with something to eat involves a time scale. If we use, for example, the early wheats that were grown in the first populations to embrace agriculture in the Levant, you have a seasonal cycle. You plant the seeds in the spring. You then have to nurture and look after the crop and water it and so on and so forth, nurture it over several months, then process it, and eventually, maybe by New Year’s Eve, you might have a loaf of bread out of it. Everything is focused on future rewards.

Now the problem with not being able to meet your immediate needs is those future rewards are rewards that are then stored and used to sustain you over the next agricultural cycle. So farmers found themselves locked into this kind of circular time, this process where they invested their labor into the land. And the land, in effect, gave them a return at some point in the future. And this, of course, changed not only the relationship with land because the land became something — if you worked that land, you had some kind of claim of ownership. So it change their notions of territoriality and ownership.

But at the same time it transformed the perception of time. Everything became future focused, much like it is for us today. Most of the work we do involves accruing some kind of return in the future. In fact, there are only a handful of activities that we routinely do, such as, for example, cooking is an immediate return economic activity, if you’re going to eat that meal immediately afterwards.

But most of the economic work we do is for the immediate future or the distant future. And in farming societies, often, the aim was, if you worked hard enough for long enough, you might be able to secure a sufficiently grand surplus that’s stored away in your silos that you might be able to, in a sense, enjoy some kind of retirement, some kind of time off. You might be able to purchase your liberation from labor. And all of this came with the fact that, actually, farming involved a great deal more effort and work than hunting and gathering did.

So there’s a trend in recent “history of human civilization” books of making farming sound really bad. So you work more. You have a less diverse diet. You’re more vulnerable to drought and to famine. You get pressed into these settlements. There’s more disease. I mean, honestly, if you read books — and yours is not a heavy one necessarily, but it is there.

The question that begins to rise is, well, why did human beings ever do this? If farming was such an unpleasant lifestyle compared to foraging, then for the people on the border of those two lives, why farming? What accounts for the human move into this, you know, apparently, much more toil-filled and unstable existence?

Look, part of the thing is to take away from it, to make sense of it, is to take away the idea that there was any kind of choice. In some sense, when you look at a transition from hunting and gathering to farming, it’s something that happens over a very long period of time. I mean, we talk about revolutions. It’s not a thing that it happened overnight. It’s a slow process, a gradual recalibration of norms and behaviors. And trying to make sense of the transition to agriculture, it’s one of the great mysteries of the world today.

And what’s so mysterious about it is that there used to be this narrative that the transition to agriculture happened in the Levant around 12,000 years ago in the Middle East. And this great technology spread and was adopted by hunter-gatherers, saying, well, this is wonderful. Now we can grow our own food. But what we now know is that for a start, agriculture developed independently in populations where there was no chance of knowledge being shared across them.

It developed in Mesoamerica. It developed in Southeast Asia. It developed in West Africa. It developed in the Levant, all independently of one another within a very short period of time, a period of around 5,000 years, beginning 12,000 years ago. And quite why that happened, we don’t know. In the Levant, the most obvious answers are to do with this intense period of climate change that happened before, which would have transformed the ecological landscape and I think resulted in the case of these populations.

Suddenly, the fields of wild wheat is becoming prolific because of changes in the carbon cycle. And suddenly, people became dependent on it. So I imagine, in a sense, they were sort of seduced by a period of great [INAUDIBLE]. So if you imagine you have a wild stand of berries that, for example, you’ve harvested episodically every couple of years as a hunter-gatherer, and suddenly some shift in the climate happens, that this tree and this grove just becomes unbelievably prolific, and so you kind of move there and you become dependent on it.

And then after 200 years of being dependent on it, suddenly the weather changes again. The climate changes, and you start trying to nurture it to restore that. And I think some kind of process like this must have happened in the Levant. I think similar processes probably happened elsewhere. But as I say, it remains a great mystery. And I think it becomes less of a mystery if we take away the idea that there was any choice involved. This was things that happened slowly over many generations. And suddenly they were dependent on it.

And this is the way it is for all of us. We become dependent on things over time. We become habituated into them. And the other truth is that once you become dependent on a single resource, for example, going back to being a hunter-gatherer becomes rather difficult. The Ju/‘hoansi have learned over time, for example, to identify around 150 different edible plant species in parts. And they know how to track in the behavior of the animals.

Once you abandon that knowledge, it takes one generation to lose that. So one generation of eating maize and maize porridge and tinned meat, and you forget how to — many of the young generation of Ju/‘hoansi, they wouldn’t be able to survive as their fathers and grandfathers did. Because they simply no longer have that practical knowledge acquired through years and years of experience. And so I suspect that is what happened. And once we were on that hamster wheel of growth and agricultural change, there was no getting off.

So farming changes our relationship to time. It changes our relationship to work. And then you write about cities as really changing our relationship to want, that people began pressing in together. And then you write that they develop a form of scarcity, articulated in the language of aspiration, jealousy, and desire, rather than of absolute need, that we are around so many other kinds of people. We can see what they have or in competition with them. Can you talk a bit about the way density changes desire?

I think there might be something within us. We talked a little bit about human nature. There’s something within our nature that responds very viscerally to inequality, to somebody having more than us. And again, this is something we see when you watch two siblings sharing out their bag of sweets with immense precision. There can be no inequality in how it’s done.

Cities are different spaces. And we’ve got to remember, even though most history of the last 10,000 years or 7,000 years since the first cities were born, there’s a history of cities because that is where people learned to write. And that’s what they focused on. Most people still lived in the countryside and made a living. And when I say most, I mean really 90 percent. It was only sort of small elites that ever lived within city walls. Most people worked on the land, producing the energy that they needed to survive.

Cities, on the other hand, with these sort of exclusive spaces where nobody worked to produce energy, but everybody worked to expend energy. And so the ability to monopolize, control the distribution and flows of energy resources, whether those took the form of food, whether those took the form of beer, whether those took the form of, ultimately, money or exchanges and debts, became a source of great power and became a source of great differentiation.

But at the same time within cities, because people were expending energy and because they have this innate creativity, this drive to work, you ended up with a whole efflorescence of new professions, ways, and things of doing. You have this explosion of art and literature. You also had people developing religious centers and centering ritual power on themselves. And these forces ended up creating many micro communities within cities. But these micro communities were often highly differentiated by the amount of power they were able to accrue, the influence they were able to work.

And this effectively transformed the way people engaged and worked with one another and lived with one another and produced, I think, this real sense of people wanting things, people wanting. You were continuously confronted by somebody who had more than you or somebody who had less than you of whatever it had happened to be. It could be any form of capital, whether it’s social capital, ritual capital, or capital, capital. But you’re constantly confronted by people having more.

And we have that gut instinct to say, well, if they have that, maybe I want to have that, too. And in many ways, I think that is the kind of driver of — if it’s said that we have infinite desires. I don’t think it is. We just want to have as much as the next guy.

And there are two ways of achieving it. Either you work to try and get what they have, or you try and take what they have. Or, as has happened throughout history — and again, it’s very particularly a history of … there have been very few what you’d call sort of great, turning things over revolutions in purely rural communities — you have them in urban centers where you get elites brought down, crashing down. And then the process begins almost inevitably again.

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You talk in the book about Émile Durkheim’s theory of infinite aspiration. Can you just explain that?

Well, around that period when Émile Durkheim was writing, of course, this was the era where economics was becoming an established science, a science based on how people allocated scarcity. And there was the sense of trying to understand what is this basic economic problem, this problem of scarcity? What is this idea that we have such huge desires that we can never hope to satisfy?

And for me, it seems that there’s a very clear correlation between that sense of economic desire and what Émile Durkheim talked about when he talked about the sense of anomie, this idea that people felt left out or that they felt alienated in society, and, at the same time, this desire they had to have something, which they didn’t have at the time, this constant sense that there was something unfulfilled.

Durkheim explained this as a consequence of the transition really from the kind of artisan-based industries to early levels of industrialization as people moved into cities. And he believed that this kind of sense of alienation, of left-outness, would be ended because, eventually, people would coalesce around different kinds of artisanal communities in urban areas. And they would have a sort of sense of self and a sense of identity and a sense of purpose closely associated with them.

But I think this idea of constant unfulfillment is something very much associated with modern life. And part of it is because things are constantly changing. The goalposts are constantly moving ahead. So, for example, I’ve always been a bit of a tech junky. And I’m tired of it now. But the minute you suddenly reach your goal of having the iPhone 11, somebody has got an iPhone 12 out. There’s this constant reaching forth, this constant sense of unsatisfaction, this constant sense that as soon as we achieve a goal post, it moves onwards. And I think that is very much a function of urban life. And I think it’s also very much a function of this ever changing nature of modernity.

I think the natural way to think about that competition is material. You brought up the iPhone 11, and then somebody’s got an iPhone 12. You got a house, somebody gets a bigger house. But there’s also this social one. When I was reading the section of your book on Durkheim, you talked about how he believes at that time that he’s simply living through a transitionary moment in society. And people will figure it out. They’ll figure out how to regulate their wants a little bit better. They’ll figure out how to not have their head turned by everything, that it’s simply the explosion of material goods that is doing that.

So on the one hand, clearly, not. It just accelerated and accelerated and accelerated. But then on top of that, it made me think about the social media age. Because you often hear the same thing now, which is, well, we’re just getting used to these new technologies. Facebook, it’s certainly in my lifetime. I mean, it’s in my adulthood. Twitter even more so, Snapchat, et cetera.

But when I look at it, I wonder if what we’re developing now, for particularly people who are young, is an age of infinite social aspiration. So I mean, even if you could get a lot of things before, there was still pretty limited community in which you could play out the drama of your social standing, right? It was the people you knew and your family and your neighborhood. I mean, it was sort of geographically bound for most people most of the time.

And now it just isn’t. And you might have different social standings in different networks, some of which you’re participating in as a pseudonymous player on Reddit. And then you have your real name on Instagram and on Twitter.

And I’m curious how you think about that. Because a big driver here isn’t just material goods. I mean, material goods partially drive because they’re reflections of our social identities. But now, in some ways, we’re also disentangling that. And we just have more direct social competition in all these weird, little social micro worlds. So I’m curious what you see in that trend.

Well, I’ll tell you what I see. I see another mystery. So exactly as Durkheim imagined that we would enter some kind of next steady state, I’m now increasingly persuaded by — the data would suggest that actually, we’re now — we’ve entered an era of near constant flux. And what we are becoming good at and what I hope we become good at in our infinite adaptability is to become good at coping with and dealing with constant change. And I think it’s an extraordinarily difficult thing to untangle.

But I think that is the key. I think we now live in an era where there is no steady state for us to aspire to. There is no end game in front of us. And that requires an adjustment in our mindset in terms of how we engage with the world around us. And I may be being naive, but I take some encouragement from how some younger people actually seem relatively at ease with it. I’m constantly surprised by my own children, for example, in this respect.

I hear people say that. And my interactions with young people and then my read of the data is that they’re not at ease with it. Very, very, very high rates of anxiety, of depression, of competition, of fear, of suicide, for that matter. One of the things that I think all this comes to is, we’re in an era where the dominant systems in which we live have hooked into our desires. And they use them to propel everything forward, right? That’s a part of our humanity that you could either emphasize or deemphasize, to the point of this whole conversation. And we really emphasize it. And so you get weird things now, weird outcomes, when you have direct conflict between the desire for leisure and the desire for work.

So one of them is — a really strange trend in affluent countries today, is that elites are often working more than ever. They often work more than the middle and lower class work, at least on the income scale. That’s weird because it used to be the point of being rich is you didn’t have to work. You did all kinds of things to show you weren’t working.

But now there is survey research published a few years ago in the Harvard Business Review that found that 62 percent of high-earning individuals work over 50 hours a week. More than a third work over 60 hours a week. One in 10 works over 80 hours a week. So I mean, here are people who absolutely could have abundance, right? To some degree, I’m one of these people. I work a lot. And I’m very tired. And I recognize that I’m enough outside it to realize something is weird in this. But I’m curious how you look at that. Because I mean, we really are seeing the collision here. And even the people with the most capacity to choose leisure are choosing labor. And they’re doing so more and more. I mean, it’s different than it was 100 years ago.

Yeah, look, it’s a very strange phenomenon, in some senses. And in others, it seems perfectly natural. I mean, again, I tend to take an anthropologist’s eye on this. Most of us are urban creatures now. We get our sense of identity, our sense of self-esteem, our sense of purpose, our sense of community comes from work and the workplace. So beyond that kind of purposefulness, even if we’re doing a job which is not particularly important but it gets us money, we continue to do it.

And I think, in many senses, because the people who are in the upper echelons, the workers, the highest paid and the best rewarded, actually, they’re in a position to dictate the nature of their work and to be able to nudge their work towards being something that actually gives them great satisfaction. So in a sense, it’s a kind of privilege. And if you look through history, again, I mean, lots of people who were — we talk about the original aspiration to be — you do your work, and then you get free for leisure. But people with that leisure time spent that time doing work that meant something to them.

And it just so happens I think in the urban modern world that we live in, for many people, there actually isn’t a great deal of life outside of work. And as cultural creatures, that’s what we do. We stay with the communities and systems and processes and ways of doing things that make our lives meaningful that we are comfortable with and that we are confident with and that don’t challenge us the whole time. So I think that’s probably where the culture of workism comes from. But again, I view it very much as a cultural phenomenon.

One of the things you say in the book is that the purpose of the book is to, quote, “loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held over our working lives.” Which is to say that you want to nudge us towards the idea that we can have lives of more leisure. We could enjoy the abundance we’ve created. But I found the book very pessimistic on this score. If you think the problem with how much we work is we simply haven’t produced enough, well, then you could say, well, maybe we’ll invent AI, or we’ll start mining asteroids or whatever it is. And we’ll get over that production threshold.

But if you think that our society’s obsession with work, it’s not simply a modern reflection. It kind of sits at the heart of how we’ve built human civilization since the move to agriculture itself and that it’s kind of conquered all these societies that didn’t have it, it’s won all these contests when it came to conflict with somebody saying, well, how about more leisure?

Then it’s much harder because it implies that sort of nothing we actually invent will do it. We’ll just always come up with ways to work more, or we will become miserable in the face of automation because people will feel not like they’re sharing in abundance, but they’ve been deprived of dignity, of a job of meaning. So instead of having a post-AI and -automation utopia, you have a dystopia. I’d love you to convince me I’m wrong, that there’s a more optimistic read of the trends here.

Well, no, let me put it this way. I am certainly not an optimist, but I always remain hopeful. Because if we abandon hope, then what good is it doing? What good is that doing anything? My sense of where we are and where we could be is pretty much aligned to Keynes’s dream. I mean, that’s really why I actually quote him so often. Because I kind of buy into the idea that once we are liberated from tedious labor, once we’re liberated from the difficult work, which I think machines can and will do, then we are free to do work that is meaningful to us.

And at the moment, of the many inequities of the way our economic systems are organized is you get lots of truly gifted people in one or other sphere of life who end up doing work completely unrelated to that gift. So I live in a university town, Cambridge. And I’ve lost count of the number of friends I’ve had who’ve gone from jobs that I think were doing really useful research, whether it’s in chemical engineering to medicine, to taking some job in the private sector to improve the consistency of honey or the sparkliness of somebody’s dress or something. We tend to get incentivized into doing work that is not particularly interesting.

I imagine that if we’re in a world where, actually, all of our basic needs, very basic needs were met, that people didn’t have to do unsatisfactory work, that we would end up, actually, having more of the good work done in the first place. So I mean, it’s a relatively trite example. But I think it’s one that serves the piece. I mean, the world is full of really great musicians who, pretty much, nobody’s ever listened to. And nobody’s ever listened to them because they just haven’t had the good luck, the kind of break that you need. For every top selling artist, there are 10,000 other ones who are just as skilled and accomplished who’ve never got anywhere.

And that’s because they’ve had to get stuck in doing whatever minimum wage jobs to get by because of the way we’ve organized our system of work. And what I think is that there are opportunities in front of us. And this is why I say we’ve got to unshackle ourselves from this sort of focus of perpetual growth and start asking ourselves this question, how do we use our wealth as well as we can?

And we can think about that wealth in terms of, again, this phrase, “human flourishing” in terms of enriching ourselves spiritually, in terms of enriching ourselves mentally and in terms of doing things that are of greater social good. And I think that world is possible, a world where people do what they want and that produces greater total value for everybody. That continues to drive some kind of progress forward for all of our benefit.

Let me ask about an example in the book where that came into direct question. You have this great sequence on the Kellogg’s cereal company. And that in the 1930s, Kellogg’s, they actually did it. I mean, they increased productivity. They went down to a 30-hour work week. They were paying people more per hour than they had been before. I mean, it’s everything you would think that we want. And so then people would have all this extra time, at least theoretically, in which they could make music or write novels or just hang out with their friends or play sports or take a walk, whatever it might be.

And then the denouement of that story was kind of shocking to me. It’s not that the Kellogg’s corporation brings back the 40-hour workweek, but the work force votes back the 40-hour workweek, largely because in a world of more material goods, they want the option to be able to make more money. So how do you read that story? Because that struck me as a real example of like, OK, we had the choice. And it wasn’t like the capitalists forced it back in. But the workers said, nah, in the society, unless everybody jumps at the same time, we’re not going to be the only ones working 30 hours a week and not being able to give our families or ourselves as much as everybody else is getting.

I think the guy who produced a great answer to that particular question was John Kenneth Galbraith, when he wrote that book, “The Affluent Society,” round about the same time that the Kellogg’s crew were busy voting themselves back into 40-hour shifts. And this was an era I think where you had massive amplification of desire created through advertising.

So when Galbraith wrote that book in 1950 — I can’t remember the exact year — he wrote it effectively as a warning to say that America was squandering its newfound wealth. And the way it was squandering it was by manufacturing desires. He made the case, effectively, that America had defeated scarcity. And that if they organized their resources well, then everybody could be comfortably looked after.

But he said the great risk was that now that we’ve defeated scarcity, this kind of desire for more amongst certainly, in particular, I suppose, wealthy entrenched businesses meant that people were manufacturing scarcity, and that this great scarcity manufacturing machine, in the form of an advertising industry, began to expand and play directly into people’s homes, elevated from small newspaper adverts to suddenly this wonderful television box and radio and just pumping desire into people’s home. Your life will not be complete if you don’t have x, y, or z.

And this, of course, was a great driver of growth, in a sense. This remains one of the great drivers of growth in our world, this idea that if we have a little bit more, we’ll find that point of satisfaction. And I think that’s really what happened. I think the Kellogg’s, that era, Kellogg’s was sort of swept up in this wonderful set of new great conveniences that emerged in post-war America, as all these sort of wartime technologies were repurposed into domestic technologies, from microwave ovens to all these great new wonders. And people wanted a part of them. And then advertisers were saying, well, if you’ve got more and more of this, then you might make it. And so, yeah, it fed. Basically, this desire took people to a point where they thought we need more.

Yeah, that’s a little funny piece of it there. But I want to hold on that the point about advertising. I’m always thrilled when a podcast gets back into “The Affluent Society.” I love John Kenneth Galbraith. I had Noam Chomsky on the show a couple of months back, and we ended up talking about that for a while.

But that’s one of the places where I get very pessimistic. So I think when people talk about a post-work world, the typical technological savior is artificial intelligence and automation. The idea is that we’re going to have this super intelligent, cognitive, zero marginal cost workforce creating all the stuff for us. And we’ll just get to enjoy it.

And then I look at who is actually creating, who is actually creating the big AI platforms. And I see Google, and I see Facebook. And I see Open AI, which is hitched, in some ways, now to Microsoft and others. It’s more complicated, but still, there’s some connection to these companies. And you can keep going on like this. But Google and Facebook, who are two of the very big players here potentially, those are advertising businesses. They survive on generating desire.

And it’s already my view. And by the way, I’m in the media. I’m also in advertising and subscription, but an advertising business. And it’s my view that advertising is both inefficient, but also a pretty neglected economic force. The disdain with which a lot of modern economists treat Galbraith’s ideas just seems completely unmerited to me. But at the same time, again, advertising — and I know this for quite a fact — it’s usually pretty bad. It’s quite inefficient. It’s quite poorly done. It’s much more art than science. A lot of it is witchcraft.

Now, though, if you hook it to AI, feeding off of the level of data we have and the level of iteration it could do with us, maybe it gets a lot better. And so rather than this sort of AI world we’re moving towards being really, really good at creating abundance, I worry that particularly in the near term, it’s going to be really, really good at creating desire. More than it’s going to give us more of what we actually want, it’s going to become better and better at getting us to want more that we don’t have. Because that’s what the real business model is. And I’m curious if you have any reflections on that.

I think, regrettably, you’re kind of right. If I see one potential silver lining to that cloud — and it’s not a very cheerful silver lining either — is that this process of increased automation that we’ve been going through is having a number of secondary social and environmental impacts. And these produce absolute constraints upon us. Now the environmental ones you’re familiar with — I’m not going to rehearse them — but we clearly are at a stage in time in history where we need to constrain our economic behavior one way or another, or at least, alter it, in order to respond to environmental circumstances. So that’s one absolute constraint.

There is a second one. And this is the more automated our economies become, the more driven by AI, the more work that is actually done by machines, the less marginal utility human work actually has. And when you live in a society where human work has diminished value, you end up with a society where the ability to work yourself to prosperity diminishes. Prosperity becomes about access to capital because capital is what you use to acquire machines, which do the actual work.

And we’ve seen this mushrooming inequality, coincidentally since the beginnings of the digital revolution in the 1980s and, obviously, amplified by deregulation and so on. And that is because wealth now accrues effectively to wealth. Money begets money, to use Benjamin Franklin’s phrase. And this continued growth, if we have a continued amplification of desire and so on and so on, I can only see this inequality getting worse. And my sense is, is that we are. It is, again, part of our nature to respond to inequality. And I see these tensions as building up and potentially coming to a kind of crashing point, which either forces us to some kind of action.

Now my speculation and, in fact, my hope is, is that before you end up with some sort of hideous revolutionary action, and we’re seeing temperatures rising in all sorts of places, my suspicion is that something, perhaps an environmental disaster, which makes us start thinking a little more globally and recognizing the interconnectedness of our problems, might take us there. I speculated idly and kind of wish I hadn’t, actually, when I finished the book, I speculated idly that something like a pandemic might push us into that kind of frame of collaborative thinking. And I’m certainly not convinced that it has now.

But I think with these things, one has to have some kind of hope. Because otherwise, we’re not going to be able to deal with the bigger problems that we’re facing. And the bigger problems are, above all, environmental, and secondly, relating to greater social fragmentation in an ever smaller world.

Well, I do think the one message of the book, the more hopeful message of the book, is that culture can do more than we give it credit for. And if a lot of the science fiction conversation, the utopian conversation, looks towards technology to usher us into the world of abundance, I think some of what you’re saying is that no, it’s going to have to be cultural change that allows us to live within abundance. It allows us to appreciate abundance.

So in the societies that you mostly study, it’s a lot of social shame and mockery and demand taxing. Those are pretty big changes. And it’s hard for me to see a near-term version where they become the tools we use to police status and to police desire. But I’m curious if you think there are cultural trends or cultural tools that are suited or more adjacent to the societies we’re in right now that could begin to play that role.

I certainly think there are some tools that are available and there are some policy ideas that are available. I mean, we live in unprecedented times. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that’s been said again and again and again. But we have never before lived in an era of such extraordinary material abundance with such huge energy footprints, such a large population. Prior solutions are not going to work.

But there does seem to me to be a real willingness to expand beyond old ideas, for example, this kind of tired old division between capitalism and socialism, and start looking at other mechanisms that might be able to change the way we engage with things, like want and desire and so on, and indeed, change our relationship with work. And something along the lines, at least the moral lines, of the universal basic income strikes me as a potentially transformative tool in terms of getting us to, one, work better, and, two, diminishing, potentially diminishing, that sort of huge desire.

I also think that there’s great value — and I mean, I’m speaking to you from Europe, where we have a much stronger socialist tradition. But I think now that we are in an asset-based economy, it’d make perfect sense to have a taxation system based on asset ownership — in effect, a wealth tax, rather than an income tax. Income is so marginal in terms of real wealth creation at the moment, that it seems bizarre that that is what we’re taxing.

And if we instituted those kinds of structures, then it produces a kind of change in morality. In Denmark, they make a joke saying, well, we work three days for the state. And then Thursday and Friday morning, we work for ourselves. But there’s a sense that actually that’s a good thing. There’s a sense that that realizes the whole sequence of benefits. And it doesn’t drive people off to a mass, grand wodges of wealth, or it doesn’t incentivize it massively. And because they have that general system, things bizarrely, like asset prices, property prices in places like Copenhagen, remain relatively stable.

And I think there’s an opportunity to experiment. And I think because we are in unprecedented circumstances and because the risk is so high of not getting it right, we’ve got to be brave. We’ve got to be prepared to experiment. We’ve got to be prepared to learn from those experiments and accept where they don’t work.

And I think the best opportunity we have at the moment, the one that looks best prepackaged to me, is universal income. And I’d love to see a large scale experiment in it. And the problem with all the current experiments we have with it, that they’re basic income experiments. They’re not universal basic income experiments. And so we don’t see how that might incentivize our relationship with desire and aspiration on a societal level.

I think that’s a good place to come to a close. Let me ask you always our final question on the show. What are three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience?

So I’m going to mention three books, two of which are books that I’ve read recently and one of which is possibly my favorite nonfiction book of all time. And that one is Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost,” which tells the story of the exploitation of rubber in the Belgian Congo and the horrendous genocide that emerged out of that. For me, apart from being just a beautifully written piece of history, it’s a book that explores humanity at its absolute best and its worst. And it reminds us that in the kind of grimmest circumstances, there is some cause for optimism and that there is some basis to ideas that sometimes seem antiquated now, like dignity.

The other two books are kind of closely related in a strange way. “Entangled Life” by Merlin Sheldrake, which is, really, the story of fungus and how fungus interacts and is so critical to our ecosystem. And it’s one of these many books now that are bringing in, I suppose, a sort of mix between philosophy and very hard core science, but which reminds us that our environments are far more complex and interconnected than, really, we’d ever imagined before. And these are the kind of things that are driving the new extended evolutionary synthesis and really waking us up to the interconnectedness of our actions with those of our broader environments.

The other book which I want to talk about is “Other Minds” by Peter Godfrey Smith. And this is a story about alternate forms of intelligence. And it’s a mix of philosophy and biology. And it’s about his time working primarily with octopus. And so, in a sense, it’s a bit like that movie, “My Octopus Teacher,” but a far more sophisticated engagement with it. And what it does is it introduces us to the idea of possibly supremely different kinds of consciousnesses. And in the case of octopus, the fact that they have separate brains for each of their legs and that the main brain is actually a minor player in the mix is just amazing.

And he talks about — where it’s particularly wonderful is there’s now all this talk about potential extraterrestrial contact and alternative forms of intelligence. And it reminds us that intelligence can manifest in some supremely strange and very, very different ways, ways that force us to really question our basic categories of what intelligence is.

James Suzman, your book is “Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots.” I enjoyed it tremendously and recommend it very much, even as I betrayed almost every message in it while working on this to create the podcast. But thank you so much for being here.

Thank you very much for having me, Ezra.

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“The Ezra Klein Show” is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roge Karma and Annie Galvin; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.

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