In Praise of the 5-Hour Workday and Other ‘Radical’ Ideas
In 1966, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, in the famous &quot;Man the Hunter&quot; symposium coined the term &quot;the original affluent&quot; society which he ascribed to the hunter-gatherer peoples. His argument largely rested on studies conducted on the !Kung people of Southern Africa which found that the !Kung only needed to work about 15-20 hours a week to meet their daily needs. When compared to the 40 hour workweeks that (some) industrial nations enjoy (and have fought to achieve), they do indeed seem affluent<p>However, a mistake in this analysis was quickly pointed out. That 15-20 hours figure only represented the time necessary to gather food. It ignored the time necessary to gather firewood, take care of children, prepare food, etc.<p>So Sahlins went back to his analysis and took those factors into account. When taking those factors into account, the !Kung (and most San peoples that have maintained their traditional foraging societies) worked 40 hours to meet all their basic needs. However, when looking at the time spent by Western peoples outside of formal work doing informal work (laundry, cooking, etc), their workweek shot up to 80 hours.<p>In the end, the San (and likely most foraging societies) worked half as much as us, enjoyed great health [1], and even had better food security [2] (contrary to common assumptions about foraging societies).<p>The questions this opens up, in my view, are:
1) If our society is so much more efficient now than societies were before civilization, why is it that we have to work so much harder to meet our basic needs?
2) If it&#x27;s not the majority benefiting from this increased efficiency, who is?
3) Is our industrial society more efficient after all?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;30511505" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;30511505</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3917328&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC3917328&#x2F;</a><p>edit: 15-20 hours a week not a day