Why Do We Work So Damn Much?

Historically speaking, we live in an age of extraordinary abundance. We have long since passed the income thresholds when past economists believed our needs would be more than met and we’d be working 15-hour weeks, puzzling over how to spend our free time. And yet, few of us feel able to exult in leisure, and even many of today’s rich toil as if the truest reward for work is more work. Our culture of work would be profoundly puzzling to those who came before us. James Suzman is an anthropologist who has spent the last 30 years living with and studying the Ju/’hoansi people of southern Africa, one of the world’s enduring hunter-gatherer societies. And that project has given him a unique lens on our modern obsession with work. As Suzman documents in his new book, “Work: A Deep History From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots,” hunter-gatherer societies like the Ju/’hoansi spent only about 15 hours a week meeting their material needs despite being deeply impoverished by modern standards. But as we’ve gotten richer and invented more technology, we’ve developed a machine for generating new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition. So this is a conversation about the past, present and future of humanity’s relationship to work and to want. We discuss what economists get wrong about scarcity, the lessons hunter-gatherer societies can teach us about desire, how the advent of farming radically altered people’s conceptions of work and time, whether there’s such a thing as human nature, the dangers of social and economic inequality, the role of advertising in shaping human desires, whether we should have a wealth tax and universal basic income, and much more. Mentioned: “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” by John Maynard Keynes “‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’ 75 Years after: A Global Perspective” by Fabrizio Zilibotti “Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek” by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Carolyn Buck Luce Book recommendations: King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:19Ezra Klein?

  So one of the truly great essays in the history of economic thought is this 1930 essay by John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." And it's a weird essay. It's done in the depth of the Great Depression, so everything is terrible and people are really poor. But Keynes steps back and just imagines the future and he makes this now famous prediction that by 2030, which was 100 years hence, human beings would be so much richer, so much more technologically advanced, that the problem of scarcity, that the problem that had defined economics and arguably human civilization until then, would have been solved. And now we'd only work 15 hours a week and the whole problem would be what to do with all this time.

• 1:02Ezra Klein?

  And the reason this essay still gets talked about and debated and written about today is it Keynes was interestingly right and wrong. The part of this, it seems hard and probably seemed very out there when he did it. The calculations for how much richer we'd get in 100 years, that was not just right, if anything, it was conservative. We passed his predictions for income growth decades ago and then we got even richer than that. But you may notice, we don't work 15 hours a week. In fact, in an inversion of past history, the more money you make now, the more hours you generally work. It used to be the point of being rich was to not work and now we've built a social value system.

• 1:44Ezra Klein?

  So the reward for making a lot of money at work is you get to do even more work. And so people all up and down the income scale with levels of plenty that would have been shocking to anyone in Keynes's time are harried, burnt out, always wanting more, feeling there's not enough.

• 2:01Ezra Klein?

  So what went wrong? What did Keynes get wrong? My guest today is the anthropologist James Suzman, and he flips this whole conversation on its head. Suzman has spent the last 30 years living with and studying one of the oldest enduring hunter-gatherer societies. For most of the history of civilization, the prevailing belief was that life before, what we now think of as civilization, was, as Thomas Hobbes said, nasty, brutish, and short. But modern anthropology has turned that around. Hunter-gatherers were usually healthy. They were usually well nourished. Even in very unforgiving climates, they tended to have diverse diets. And they did it while only spending about 15 hours a week on hunting and gathering. Suzman's new book is called Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots.

• 2:46Ezra Klein?

  And the overarching argument is that the way we work today isn't driven by what we need. It's driven by what we want. It's also driven by how socially we regulate or encourage wants, which is part of where his research on hunter-gatherers and how they approach this comes in. But the big thing here is that Keynes had it backwards. Humanity solved the problem of scarcity and achieved a 15-hour work week long before modernity. But as we've gotten richer and built more technology, we've developed a machine not for ending our wants, not for fulfilling them, but for generating new ones, new needs, new desires, new forms of status competition. You can't solve the problem of scarcity with our current system because our current system is designed to generate endlessly

• 3:30Ezra Klein?

  the feeling of more scarcity within us. It needs that. And so we keep working harder and harder and feeling like we have less and less, even amidst quite a bit of plenty, at least for many of us. As always, my email, eshrakline [email protected].

• 3:50Ezra Klein?

  James Suzman, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me, Ezra. So let's start here. What did John Maynard Keynes predict in the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Ah, he predicted a great change in pretty much everything. Look, it was an extraordinary essay that he wrote, and you know, he wrote this in nineteen thirty. And he'd just lost his personal fortune in the stock market crash and was watching the Great Depression clasp its way all over Europe and America and the rest of the world. And what Keynes decided to do was disabuse himself of short-term views to try and understand what the Great Depression was in the context of a larger economic history. And in doing so, what he did was he said about predicting what the economy would look like in a hundred years' time, in the time of his grandchildren, nominally round about now.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  And he predicted that the combination between capital growth, improvements in productivity, and advances in technology, that nobody would be working more than fifteen hours in a week. And even then, he was suggesting that the reasons for this, that people would continue to work, was because it was really a question of habit. His view was that once we crossed all these thresholds, everybody's basic needs would be met. And if people's basic needs were met, he reasoned, along with many other thinkers who were before him, from Oscar Wilde to Bertrand Russell, that if people's basic needs were met, then they would cease to devote their lives to endless toil and rather spend their time working on things that mattered and were meaningful to them.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  What did he get right in the specifics of this and what did he get wrong? Well, when Keynes made his predictions about capital growth, technology advancement, and productivity, he got those wrong. He massively underestimated the speed of advances in those areas. So basically, the thresholds in terms of capital growth that he predicted would need to be met to usher in this fifteen-hour-a-week, this economic utopia, we passed them ages ago in the nineteen eighties. Likewise, with productivity. Technology, of course, is much harder to measure. So in other words, we passed those thresholds, you know, thirty or forty years ago. Yet, here we are, and we're working pretty much as long hours as people did in the nineteen thirties when Keynes wrote the essay in the first place. So that's another critical thing he got wrong.

• 6:11Ezra Klein?

  So the big counterintuitive argument of your work is that Keynes had it backwards. Humanity actually had solved the problem of scarcity. It had figured out a 15 hour work week. But the solution was in our past and the very advances in technology and income and productivity that Keynes predicted are actually the problem, actually the things that are getting us further from the 15 hour work week. Tell me about that.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  I don't necessarily think those are the things that are taking us away from that utopian dream that Keynes actually had. I think the way we are approaching them is what's taking us away from that utopian dream that Keynes had. The fact that we have a series of cultural ideas that are deeply embedded in the very fabric of our society and the very institutions around which we organize our lives. And that in a sense is holding us back from really embracing this extraordinary affluence that we have won ourselves. And you know, where this becomes most clear is when we look at things like hunter gatherer populations, like the Jeanne Racy, who I worked with, who had much less than we do in material

• 7:24Speaker 01

  sense, in a material sense, they were deeply impoverished by modern standards. And yet they consider themselves affluent and enjoyed a degree of affluence as a result of that. Yet we seem to be trapped in the cycle of ever pursuing more and greater growth, greater wealth, greater anything, it seems. It seems that our aspirations continue to grow endlessly. And we're caught in this kind of treadmill in which we never stop and actually enjoy the rewards of what we have won. So in some ways, I think it's to do with the fact that basically this growth in the technology and expansion and productivity is something that keeps driving us forward.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  But at the same time, it's also an opportunity to organize the way we do things very differently. And for me, that is something that we really ought to be looking at.

• 8:20Ezra Klein?

  So before we get too deep into the hunter gatherer societies, I want to ask an epistemological question. How do we know how much time hunter gatherer society spent working? How do we know how they lived? I mean, these societies existed very long time ago. We're often working off of fragmentary evidence. There are some surviving pockets of this kind of lifestyle, but but it's not the bulk of it. So what makes you certain we can speak with confidence about any of this?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Well, the the truth is, when we talk about anything in our very deep history, we've got to be a little bit circumspect. I speak with confidence because it seems all the pieces fit together. But the evidence, as you say, is thin. The problem is, is that many of our hunter gatherer ancestors, and we now know that they've been around for 320,000 years. That's just hot modern Homo sapiens. And there's plenty of debate about how human the various antecedents of that were. So the problem is, is that most of their material culture was made of things that were pretty organic or stones and was very small scale. So we have very little in the way of actual material traces of how these societies organized themselves.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  And really, up until the 1960s, there was this absolute certainty, pretty much everywhere, that hunter gatherers probably endured lives of constant misery, that their lives were nasty, brutish and short, that they lived constantly on the edge of starvation and that this was in fact what instilled within us, this obsession we have with scarcity, this thing that we, you know, food today, having enough food today is simply a trigger for worrying about whether we're going to have more food tomorrow and so on. In the 1960s, some anthropologists took the view that if they looked at some of the surviving groups of hunter gatherers scattered around, and again, these tended to be in very ecologically marginal places, maybe they'd be able to develop some insights into

• 10:17Speaker 01

  how our hunter gatherer ancestors lived. And what they could say with some reasonable confidence was that things like the material culture were probably relatively similar, they used similar tools. And likewise, based on archaeological evidence, the suggestion was that certainly in many places, and of course, there was variation. And they tended to be similar group sizes to modern hunting, contemporary hunting and gathering populations. And the most famous group chosen for study were the Zinwasi of northern Namibia, who at the time were living fairly remotely in northeast Namibia and north, northwestern Botswana.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  And living as hunter gatherers by and large. And one anthropologist, Richard Lee, went out and did a very basic economic input and output analysis of how the Zingwasi lived. And this was in a, you know, these Zingwasi live in a tough neighbourhood. The Kalahari Desert is no easy place. This is a place that had basically defied. Farmers had been wanting to come in that in into the Kalahari for two thousand years. But it was too tough a place. You couldn't basically raise livestock or plant vegetables and fields and so on that. And when Lee arrived there, he set about doing his work and he was really worried because it was in the middle of a terrible drought. Anyway, he ended up working with them.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  And he discovered that pretty much on the basis of around fifteen hours for women and seventeen hours work a week for men in terms of the food quest. Zingwasi were pretty much able to meet all of their basic needs. And then on top of that, they'd work a similar number of hours on domestic household activities. Tasks like preparing food, making fires, fixing tools and so on and so forth. In other words, that they worked much less than we did. And he took those findings back and several other anthropologists who'd been working with other enduring hunter gatherer populations from northern nomadic hunter gatherers in the Arctic to Aboriginal societies, to the Hadza Bay along in Tanzania. And they actually all found that they had fairly similar data.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  That, you know, these hunter gatherers did not live constantly on the edge of starvation, that they enjoyed quite a lot of leisure time. And that they were surprisingly well nourished on the basis of relatively little effort. And this was just effort by economically active individuals. In other words, they supported the elderly and they supported their children. So children were not expected to work. So on the basis of this, on the basis of this broad geographical spread of convergent evidence, we can assume that since these hunter gatherer populations, which we now know have had no cultural contact for sixty, seventy thousand years. So the relationship, there's been no direct cultural contact until this century between, for example, many Australian Aboriginal hunter gatherer populations and groups like the Zingwasi.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Yet they organized themselves in very, very similar ways. And to me, what that suggests is that the very nature of securing a living, that nature of that work, tended to create very specific kind of cultural, social and economic forms, which are broadly consistent. There's obviously variation on all sorts of aspects. But there's a lot more in common between hunter-gatherers than there is different. And there's certainly a lot more different between hunter-gatherers and agricultural societies than there is between hunter-gatherer societies. And so it's really on the basis of that that we can speculate that there must be some greater insight that these societies offer us into the way our ancestors lived and worked,

• 13:51Speaker 01

  than certainly anything else. So it's an imperfect lens through which to view the past. But I think it is nevertheless a very illustrative one.

• 13:59Ezra Klein?

  So on a signpost where we're going to be going here, the, the big point of that Keynes essay is that eventually we're going to be able to produce so much, we don't need to work because we've produced our way into abundance. And the, the point you make about hunter-gatherer societies is it, and frankly about modernity, is that what we've seen so far is the opposite. Abundance doesn't come from endless production. It comes from effectively regulating what you want. Because then you can actually produce enough and, and fulfill that, that level. So let's talk a little bit about the way the, the Jean Troncy regulate want. And maybe we can start with demand sharing.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  One of the most distinctive features about the Jean Troncy and indeed many of the other hunter-gatherer societies, similar ones, was that they were, to use the words of Richard Lee, fiercely egalitarian. And they had various mechanisms to manage this egalitarianism. Now, one of the most interesting mechanisms was a system called demand sharing. One anthropologist who didn't like it much called it tolerated theft. And it is a system which is in many ways the complete inversion of Our rules of giving, sharing and taking, you know, when we ask somebody for something, we say, please, it's a offer of a debt. When somebody gives us something, we, we, we say, thank you, I'm in your debt.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  There's a kind of sense of an exchange going on. And it is in the right of the giver, you know, and generally it's, it's, you know, I was always brought up, but you know, wait for somebody to offer you something and always say, thank you and be in their debt. And it's effectively in the right of the giver to deny somebody something that they asked for. In Jungma cultures and indeed many other hunting and gathering cultures, that relationship is inverted. Basically, in an idealized form, demand sharing means that pretty much anybody in a society can go to anybody else. And remember, these are relatively small social groupings, can go to anybody else and demand something from them.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  So if, for example, I have a bag of tobacco, somebody else is perfectly entitled to come and demand some of that tobacco from me. And it would be considered extremely rude, in fact, would be considered offensive if I don't give him some of that tobacco. At the same time, it's not considered at all rude to make that kind of demand. So what you have is a society where in effect, everybody can spontaneously tax everybody else. The net result of this is that nobody bothers acquiring surfaces because you're just going to share it and give it away anyway. And people sponta- end up spontaneously sharing everything. And they see a certain virtue, it's not a completely unconscious thing.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  I mean, culture is habitual, it becomes unconscious, but people are aware of the virtues of it. And in hunter gatherer life, there was a real sense that if anybody tries to accumulate resources or dominate the distribution and flow of resources, it is socially unhealthy. It produces tensions, it produces anxieties, it produces a hierarchy or an attempted hierarchy. It adds a whole level of risk and cost to the social life of the group. So demand sharing is really just a functional way of distributing resources within a society. And in these societies, it worked really well because with everybody able to tax everybody else, it meant that everybody actually got a reasonable share.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  It also meant that they got the right amount because if somebody overtaxed somebody, they could be taxed back in turn. So it was this sort of sense of social moderation. And what it typically produced in most instances was a very harmonious way of living and a very harmonious way of living, even when things sometimes were tough and resources were scarce.

• 17:45Ezra Klein?

  So let me ask you about the harmonious way of living because there is a debate in recent years, particularly about the level of intra and intergroup violence among hunter gatherers. So you read Steven Pinker and he'll say, ah, like our, our past was much more violent. There was much more violence in these societies. I've heard other anthropologists and experts dispute that. I think looking at it from our current perspective, you might expect something like demand sharing to lead to a lot of violence. So what is your perspective on the level of, of actual open conflict?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  My perspective on demand sharing was that it certainly made anthropologists feel violent until they got a bit used to it. But amongst everybody else, it was actually something very peaceable. Now, yeah, there's been this pretty much endless debate and really is a debate about modernity, whether we're on this great sort of path of progress or not. And to make the case of progress, it helps to say that actually our lives in the past were much more miserable and much more violent. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that, you know, in hunter gatherer societies throughout history, there was of course violence. Certainly with Jungasi oral histories, there's definitely memories and stories of people,

• 19:01Speaker 01

  you know, groups living, someone in Dengui getting in a fight with the people from Ngamchoa. Or it happens, people are violent and often they're violent. In the Jungasi case, as they say, usually there's a fight over matters of the heart and then sometimes occasionally some revenge. Of course there's violence, but as a general rule. Hanging out with hunter gatherers and hanging out with societies like this actually is extraordinarily harmonious. So statistically, it's difficult to say whether it's more peaceful now or more peaceful then. But what's certainly absolutely right to say is that hunter gatherers did not live in the state of kind of Hobbesian

• 19:42Speaker 01

  constant war, that actually, like our lives, there were moments where violence erupted and it shook people when it happened. People were traumatized by it, found it difficult, they did not like it, it was not part of the norm. But on the whole, I think life was pretty placid. And this is, you know, this is again, this is the sort of overwhelming sense, certainly from anthropologists who preceded me, who spent more time in these societies when they were still more free to hunt and gather. Of course, the era I've worked in has been one of constant difficult change. And the overwhelming sense from all of them again is just the general serenity of life in these circumstances. And I think it's fair to say that we are, as a species, relatively peace lover.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  And I think that applies to most of our history, but within that, of course, there are instances where things would have been tough and brutal and violent too.

• 21:00Ezra Klein?

  Can you talk a bit about the practice of insulting the meat?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  This is the other great egalitarian device in Zhenhuo life. In the Zhenhuo world, people don't place a great deal of store on material resources. Things are shared relatively easily and evenly. Demand sharing is not a cause of tension. But one thing in the Jungal world, which is loved above all others, is meat. And it's one of the few things that inspires people to jealousy, to anger, if they feel a little bit left out. And it is also one of the few things that if somebody is too productive in bringing meat, if somebody is too good a hunter,

• 21:47Speaker 01

  then there's a risk that that person starts to accrue additional social capital as a result of that, to accrue power, just simply because they're the bringer and the distributor of meat. And so what they do is they have a number of customs around, one, the distribution of meat, and two, how to deal with the hunter themselves in order to manage any kind of tensions that might emerge from this. So when a hunter comes back with a kill, and in particular if it's a spectacular kill, like something huge, like a giraffe or an eland bull, the hunter will not be praised in the way that we're generally expect. And imagine, you know, the hunter coming back with his trophy, ha, everybody's gonna get fed,

• 22:30Speaker 01

  everybody's gonna be wonderful, pat me on the back, and now I'm the hero for the night. Instead, the hunter is mocked and insulted. And it's done in a kind of lighthearted way, but also with a little bit of an edge. And the hunter, for his part, is expected to behave with great humility. And the kinds of insults that will be, everybody knows there it's a performance, a charade. Because if a giraffe shows up, it's a big piece of meat, no pole ban's gonna struggle to eat the thing over the course of a few days, but they'll still say, ah, this giraffe, ah, the meat smells like urine, ah, it's not enough to even feed my mother-in-law. And their insults come out again and again and again and again and again over the course of the consumption of this animal. And the reason they do this is to avoid

• 23:13Speaker 01

  the hunter accruing any unnecessary hierarchy, any unnecessary authority over others, and any socially destructive authority over others. There's a wonderful quote again by Richard Lee where man describes the basis behind the practices, we use it to cool young men's hearts. And in this way, successful hunters were in effect encouraged or discouraged from hunting excessively. Now bizarrely, because in hunter gatherer bands, everybody liked me, you wanted to discourage the good hunters from hunting too much. And but at the same time, you didn't want the incompetent ones going out or the elderly going out and being unsuccessful all the time.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  So they had other methods of actually distributing the responsibility for that meat. So technically, the owner of an animal that was killed was actually not the person who killed the animal and brought it home. The one who effectively did the hard work, but actually the person who made the arrow. And as a result, that meant that in general communities, the elderly, the club footed and all the rest could occasionally claim to own an animal themselves. And have the added burden of responsibility of distributing the meat and enduring insults.

• 24:25Ezra Klein?

  So this falls on our ears, my ears, very strangely, right? I mean, it it defies almost everything you would think about motivation and how you get people to do difficult tasks and excel at them. So in this world where you're a hunter and you bring down a giraffe and then you come back and everybody insults you. And somebody else gets to distribute the meat because it was their arrow and not yours. Why be a hunter? What is the implicit theory of motivation to do things that are valuable for society? But scarce in their skill set within these groups.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  This is one of the wonderful things about sort of looking at the idea of work as we go into our deep history. And actually even beyond the genre, I see into our evolutionary history. It's pretty clear that we have evolved to love work in a very basic sense. We have evolved to become these extremely purposeful focused species with this extraordinary array of skills and flexible devices. From our hands to our incredibly plastic brains. That innocence need to be fed. You know, there's a reason why when we are stuck in solitary confinement in prison for something that boredom eats us up. It's because we can't basically apply these extraordinary skills we've evolved to have.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  And people get extraordinary pleasure out of doing work. And it can often be different kinds of pleasure. Now, in the Zhenhua case, let's take the example of hunting. Hunting is extraordinarily fulfilling work. It is very satisfying. It engages your mind, it engages your intellect, it engages years of acquired and accumulated skill. It engages your intuition, engages your physical strength, it engages your stamina. And it engages you emotionally because you have this huge empathetic connection with the animals that you're pursuing. It is deeply and profoundly satisfying. And in the end, it turns into meat in your belly. It fulfills you quite physically at the end as well.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  You know, as one Zhenhua hunter put it to me, he was like, he said at the end, you know, hunting makes my heart happy, my legs heavy and my belly full. It is profoundly satisfying work and it's obviously part of our evolutionary heritage. This ability to work efficiently and to apply our skills to acquiring the food, first of all, that we need. Cause that is the primary job of life, to get the food and energy into our bodies in order to grow and reproduce. And then when we have surplus energy, we clearly use those same skills that have empowered us to be such versatile, flexible hunters, foragers, understanders of an environment. We apply those skills to many other things like creating music, creating art, telling stories and so on and so on.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  And this is, this is, you know, work is very much part of who we are. And when we are deprived of the ability to work, we are miserable, we are listless, we are bored, we are uncomfortable. And, you know, in many senses, life is not worth living.

• 27:27Ezra Klein?

  That makes some sense to me on a, on a theoretical level, but make the case to me that these cultural practices were actually successful. Like when I look around, I don't see many hunter gatherer societies around today. And the ones that do exist are often living in, in, in pretty awful conditions. So why should I take the hunter gatherer model seriously as a successful cultural model?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  The extraordinary longevity of Homo sapiens is.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Particularly relevant. Thirty years ago, when I started studying anthropology, there was a sense that Homo sapiens, modern Homo sapiens, cognitively modern, as it was referred, had been around for maybe only forty thousand years and physically modern for maybe a hundred thousand years. Now with genomic research, we've pushed that date way backwards to perhaps three hundred and twenty, three hundred and forty thousand years, which suggests that Homo sapiens have been going around acting relatively intelligently acting as they did for quite a long time. And it also suggests that they must have had a model that worked, a model that effectively enabled them to adapt firstly to changes in climate when they were still locked in Africa, and then ultimately to expand and adapt to different contexts around the world.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  You know, humankind is extraordinary for its ability to basically break out of habitats and ecological niches, which most animals are absolutely hostage to, and adapt and develop entirely new ways of making a living. And I think that kind of structure was very much part of this process. I think that kind of flexibility, that focus on the short term, that focus on securing their basic needs and then spending time otherwise, was a system that effectively worked and that enabled the gradual expansion of our species across the globe. So I think it was simply just part of who we are. You know, we're cultural beings. We develop forms and systems of managing and organizing ourselves, which can be highly different.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  But occasionally you come across a form that works. And in the case of hunter gatherers, I think the form of the small scale foraging societies, organized on very cooperative grounds, based on sharing resources and skills and so on, was a successful model that allowed the slow and gradual expansion of our species to reaching a period of near dominance as had just before the agricultural revolution. I think it was a system that worked, but it was also a cultural system. That was it. And was it a good one? Yes. You know, if you measure the success of a civilization by its endurance over time,

• 30:04Speaker 01

  by its sustainability, then that is a very sustainable way of working. I mean, three hundred thousand years is a very long period of time.

• 30:13Ezra Klein?

  I want to put a pin on how we measure success of civilizations, but I want to draw out another connection I think you you make in the book, which is that. One thing happening here is that these societies developed in demand sharing and insulting the meat and other practices, pretty extraordinary social strictures to keep people from amassing too much, to keep them then from wanting too much, because it became kind of a pain. If you got a lot, people just took it from you, or they made fun of you, or they got mad at you. And so that one of the things happening here is that if you don't want to work that much, if you want a society where you have abundance create leisure, you have to keep people's desires

• 30:55Ezra Klein?

  under control. And that what you have here in these hunter-gather societies, and certainly in the one that you studied closely, is a pretty extraordinary system for keeping desire under control. Like, if you think of our society now as an endless engine of desire, an appreciator, a generator of desire, an applauder of desire, that you basically have the opposite here. And so you get the time, because people are being dissuaded from the kinds of things that lead to the hedonic treadmill.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  I wouldn't call it extraordinary. I'd say that where we are now is extraordinary, certainly in temporal terms. But yes, absolutely. What you had with these societies was 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 know, you talk about it as extraordinary, because of course, you're looking at it from a perspective of, you know, the United States, and you're looking at it as I was looking at it when I first went and spent time with them.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  And they don't view it as extraordinary at all. They find it extraordinary or they found it. I should, we've got to be clear on historical context. Yeah, life is changing very fast for them. But they found it extraordinary and instead that people might want to accumulate wealth, that people might not want to share. They, they, they responded with that same kind of visceral surprise that others respond to them. And this is the, 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 Jungla Cia concerned, not sharing is something that is unnatural. So while we

• 32:53Speaker 01

  say Jungla Cia are abnormal or exceptional, they do the same thing with us. And I think this is the great power of cultural difference is what gives me hope about the fact that actually, you know, the possibilities for humankind in the future are endless because what we often assume as nature is just culture masquerading as nature.

• 33:14Ezra Klein?

  I was gonna ask about that. This is a tremendously wide variation in, in how people act depending on, on the cultures they, they grow up in. I, I was thinking when you were saying that, that the Jungla Cia see it as strange when somebody doesn't share, as unnatural. I mean, I got, I got a two-year-old. There's definitely something natural about not wanting to share. He definitely does not find it an intuitive, 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 like what is really human nature is our ability to absorb cultural and social cues and the flexibility therein?

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Well, you, 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

• 34:41Speaker 01

  flexible working is, you know, 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 in 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

• 35:24Speaker 01

  intransigent. And anything above, 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 communitarian, 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.

• 35:52Ezra Klein?

  So the implicit cultural trade off 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, you know, this kind of positional competition. Or you can maintain status egalitarianism, but at the cost of discouraging some of that striving and ambition. Like, you're probably not going to invent antibiotics in the society, probably not going to invent some of the things that capitalism or even agriculture drove us towards. Is that how you see the trade off?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  I don't. It's sort of, it's. I tend to think that people do things because that is what we are. You know, 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. You know, if you don't work, you effectively deny social, social dignity. But work in and of itself can be extraordinarily fulfilling. So let's use a Xunhua example again. And there were some lovely studies done in the late sixties, looking in particular, let's say, child development.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Xunhua society children typically pay 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, the 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

• 38:01Speaker 01

  in a sense that somebody might be trying to master a skill or become much better at something. But there's very little of that kind of, because of the context in which it takes place. There's very little of that kind of social pressure, the, again, the back patting and all the rest. So for example, in Xunhua societies, very much, you know, in the one place left in Namibia, where people are able to still hunt and gather steak. You know, there are hunters who are absolute masters of their craft and, you know, 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, you know, it's the same for most of us, most honest endeavors.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  You know, 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.

• 39:13Ezra Klein?

  So let me play the cynic here because we are talking about a set of societies that have been driven almost out of existence. I mean, you know, as you're saying, even even for the Genshin, like this is a period of extraordinary change. One way of of looking at this history is that we had a survival of the culturally fittest societies and and now hunter gather exists only in these protected pockets that we sort of ran a competition and they lost. And that these societies that supercharge our ambition, our intensity, our status competition, they created for better and for worse, everything from these multi trillion dollar economies, nuclear weapons, to CRISPR and mRNA vaccines. You

• 39:58Ezra Klein?

  know, maybe we can modulate it on the margin, but some of this is a cost we pay for for these kinds of 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 have seen in in the past, like 100, 200, 300 years, there's something going on there that is going on differently in the the broadly capitalist, market oriented, etc. societies from some of their former competitors.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  I'm not absolutely certain whether, for example, you know, the the narrative of capitalism per se is what creates this wealth of this creativity and these great advances. There's of course, one goes through history. Whenever 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

• 41:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:51Ezra Klein?

  One of the fascinating threads of the book is the way the transition to farming transforms the way we experience labor, of course, but 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?

• 42:11Speaker 01

  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, you know, Zinzi who'd lost their land already. This was in the early 1990s. And my determination was to actually get a Zinzi oral history of what had happened. You know, we had all these colonial histories dominating what had had the story of Africa. I wanted to get their version of events, in a sense. And then 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 Zinzi, they don't think beyond today. They

• 42:55Speaker 01

  don't have a concept of tomorrow, and so on and so forth. And it turned out that this was what Zinzi largely agreed with. And part of the reason was, 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 on 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.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  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 labour into it. But investing your labour into land in order for it to provide you with something to eat involves a timescale. 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.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  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 labour into the land and the land, in effect, gave them a return some points 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 changed 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.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  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 sufficiently grand surpluses 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.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  And all of this came with the fact that actually farming involved a great deal more effort and work than hunting and gathering did.

• 45:52Ezra Klein?

  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, you know, you get pressed into these settlements, there's more disease. I mean, honestly, if you read books, and yours is not a heavy one in this way, but it is there. The question that begins to arise 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?

• 46:38Speaker 01

  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, we, you know, when you look at a transition. From hunting, gathering to farming, it's something that happens over a very long period of time. I mean, it's not, you know, we talk about revolutions, it's not a thing that it happened overnight. It's a slow process, a gradual recalibration of norms and behaviours. And in trying to make sense of the transition to agriculture, it's it's one of the great mysteries of the world today. And what's so mysterious about it is that, you know, there used to be this narrative that, you know, the transition to agriculture happened in the Levant around 12,000 years ago in the Middle East.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  And, you know, this great technology spread and was adopted by hunter gatherers saying, well, this is wonderful. You know, 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, 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,

• 48:01Speaker 01

  which would have transformed the ecological landscape and, I think, resulted in, in the case of these populations, I mean, you know, the fields of wild wheat becoming prolific because you had changes in the kind of 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 giffness. 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 in 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,

• 48:46Speaker 01

  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 process has probably happened elsewhere. But as I say, it remains a great mystery. And I think. You know, it becomes less of a mystery if we take away the idea that there was any choice involved. This was thing 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've become dependent on a single resource, for example, going back to being a hunter gatherer becomes rather difficult. You know, Zinquasi have learnt over time, for example,

• 49:29Speaker 01

  to identify around 150 different edible plant species and parts. And they know how to track and the behaviour 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, you know, the many of the young generation of Zinquasi, they wouldn't be able to survive as their fathers or 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.

• 50:10Ezra Klein?

  So farming changes our relationship to time, changes our relationship to work. And then you write about cities is really changing our relationship to want, that people begin 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, we're in competition with them. Can you talk a bit about the way density changes desire?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  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 without, you know, when you watch two siblings sharing out their bag of sweets with immense precision, you know, there can be no inequality in how it's done. Cities are different spaces. And we've got to remember, you know, even though most history Of the last ten thousand years or seven thousand years since the first cities were born is 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, you know, when I say most, I mean really ninety percent.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  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, were 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 in debt, 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

• 52:02Speaker 01

  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 had 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're able to accrue, the influence they were able to work. And this effectively transformed the way people engaged and worked with one another

• 52:42Speaker 01

  and lived with one another and produced, I think, this real sense that 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 happened to be. It could be any form of capital, you know, 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

• 53:24Speaker 01

  or you try and take what they have, or as has happened throughout history. And again, it's very particularly a history of, you know, there've 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.

• 54:14Ezra Klein?

  You talk in the book about Emile Durkheim's theory of infinite aspiration. Could you just explain that?

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Well, around that period, when Emile Durkheim was writing, of course, this was the era where economics was becoming established science, science based on, you know, how people allocated scarcity. And there was the sense of, you know, trying to understand what is this basic, the 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 Emile Durkheim talked about when he talked about the sense of ennemi, this idea that people felt left out or that they felt alienated in society.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  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 and left-outness would be ended because eventually people would coalesce around different kinds of artisanal communities in urban areas and that have a sort of sense of self and a sense of identity and a sense of purpose closely associated with them.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  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, you know, for example, you know, I've always been a bit of a tech junkie and. I'm tired of it now, but you know, the minute you suddenly reach your goal of having the iPhone 11, somebody's got an iPhone 12 up. There's this constant sort of reaching for this constant sense of satisfaction, unsatisfaction, this constant sense that, you know, as soon as we achieve a goalpost, 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.

• 56:27Ezra Klein?

  I think the natural way to think about that competition is material. Like you brought up the, you know, the iPhone 11 and then somebody's got an iPhone 12. You know, you got a house, somebody gets a bigger house, but there's also this social one. When I was reading the, the section in your book on Durkheim, you talk 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, 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.

• 57:11Ezra Klein?

  You know, 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, 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's still a pretty limited community in which you could play out the drama of your social standing. Right. It's like the people you knew and your family and, you know, your neighborhood. I mean, it's sort of geographically bound for most people, most of the time. And now it just isn't. And, you know, you might have different social standings and different networks, some of which you're participating in as a pseudonymous, as a pseudonymous player on Reddit.

• 57:55Ezra Klein?

  And then, you know, 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, we're also disentangling that and we just have more direct social competition in all these weird little social micro worlds. So, so I'm curious what you see in that trend.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Well, I can, I'll tell you what I see. I, 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, I think we now live in an era where there is no steady

• 58:58Speaker 01

  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 are actually seem relatively at ease with it. I'm constantly surprised by my own children, for example, in this respect.

• 59:23Ezra Klein?

  I hear people say that. And my, my directions with young people and then my, my read of the data is that they're not at ease with it, you know, very, very, very high rates of anxiety, of depression, of, of, of competition, of fear, of suicide for that matter. One of the things that I think all this comes to is like, we're, 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, or de-emphasize 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

• 1:00:06Ezra Klein?

  and the desire for work. So, so one of them is that a, a really strange trend in affluent countries today is that elites are often working more than ever. They, they often work more than the middle and, and, 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, you did all kinds of things to show you weren't working. But now there's survey research published a few years ago in the Harvard Business Review that found that 62% of hiring 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? Somebody, I'm one of these people. I work a lot and I'm very tired.

• 1:00:50Ezra Klein?

  And I recognize like I'm enough outside to realize like 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.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's 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 gets 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

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  and to be able to nudge that 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, you know, we talk about, you know, the original aspiration to be, you know, you do your work and then you get free for leisure. But people with that leisure time spent their 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.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  So I think that's probably where the culture of workism comes from. But again, I view it very much as a cultural phenomenon.

• 1:02:45Ezra Klein?

  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. Just 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, but if you think that our society's obsession with work, it's not simply a modern affliction, it kind of sits at the heart of how we've built the human civilization

• 1:03:27Ezra Klein?

  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 into 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, they're sharing in abundance, but they've been deprived of, of dignity, of, of a job, of meaning. So instead of having like a, like 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, that there's a more optimistic read of the trends here.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Well, no, let, let me put it this way. I am not, certainly not an optimist, but I always remain hopeful because if we abandon hope, then what, what good is it doing? What, what good is there 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, 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 freed to do work that is meaningful to us.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  And at the moment, you know, of the many inequities of the way our systems, 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, you know, I live in a university down Cambridge and, you know, I, 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.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  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'd 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 to, you know, 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

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  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 want us, I say, we've got to unshackle ourselves from the, from this sort of focus on 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, you know, 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,

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  and that produces greater total value for everybody, that continues to drive some kind of progress forward for all of our benefit.

• 1:07:01Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask about an example in the book where that that came into direct question. You have this great sequence on the Kellogg cereal company.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:10Ezra Klein?

  And that, you know, in the 1930s, Kellogg's, they actually, they actually did it. I mean, they, they increased productivity, they went down to a 30 hour work week, they're 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, you know, or play sports or take a walk, whatever it might be. And then the Dana Ma that story was kind of shocking to me. It's not that the Kellogg's Corporation brings back the 40 hour work week, but the workforce votes back the 40 hour work week, largely because in a world of more material goods, they want the option to be able to make more, more money.

• 1:07:54Ezra Klein?

  So how do you read that story? Because like that struck me as a real example of like, okay, we had the choice. And it wasn't like the capitalists forced it back in, but, but the workers said, no, in this 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, ourselves as much as everybody else is getting.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  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 played directly into people's homes. It elevated from small newspaper adverts to suddenly this wonderful television box and radio and just pumping desire into people's time. 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 is remains one of the great drivers of growth in our world. This idea that this, if we have this little bit more,

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  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, you know, domestic technologies from microwave ovens to all these great new wonders. And people wanted a part of them. And then advertisers 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.

• 1:10:18Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, that, that, that's a little funny, funny piece of it there. But, but I want to hold on that, that point about advertising. I'm always thrilled when a podcast gets back into the affluent society. I love John Kenneth Galbraith. People can, 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 postwork world, the, 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 this 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

• 1:11:00Ezra Klein?

  I see Google and I see Facebook and I see OpenAI, which is hitched in some ways now to Microsoft and others. It's more complicated, but still at least some connection to these companies. And, you know, 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 I, by the way, I'm in the media. I'm also in advertising and subscription, but, but in advertising business. And it's my view that advertising is both inefficient, but also 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, for quite

• 1:11:45Ezra Klein?

  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 where we're, 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.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  I think regrettably, you're kind of right.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  If I see one potential silver lining to their cloud, and it's, it's, you know, not a, 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 on us. Now, the environmental ones, familiar with, I'm not going to rehearse them, but, you know, we, we clearly are at a stage in time in history where we need to constrain our economic behaviour, 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.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  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 the marginal, you know, 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.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  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, we have. 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

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  of places, my suspicion is that, you know, 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, 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, you know, the bigger problems that we're facing, and the bigger problems above all, environmental. And secondly, relating to greater, greater sort

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  of social fragmentation in an ever smaller world.

• 1:15:29Ezra Klein?

  Well, I do think that 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, that 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 please status and to please desire. But I'm curious

• 1:16:14Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  I certainly think there's some tools that are available, and there's 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 it 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

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  like want and desire and so on, and indeed change our relationship with work. And something around along the lines, at least the moral lines of a 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're in an asset-based economy, it makes perfect sense to have a taxation system based on asset ownership, in effect, a wealth tax rather than an income tax.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  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. You know, in Denmark, they make a joke saying, well, we work three days for the state, you know, 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 a whole sequence of benefits and it doesn't drive people off to mass grand wagers 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 staple.

• 1:18:33Speaker 01

  And I think there's an opportunity to experiment. And I think, you know, because we're 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.

• 1:19:16Ezra Klein?

  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?

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  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 there. And for me, it's 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 crimmest circumstances, there is some cause for optimism and that there is some basis to ideas that sometimes

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  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 hardcore 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 interconnectedness of our

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  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 by Octopus Teacher, but a far more sophisticated engagement with it. And what it does is it introduces us to the idea of Possibly, you know, supremely different kind of consciousnesses. And in the case of octopus, the fact that they have separate brains for each of their legs,

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  that the main brain is actually a minor player in the mix is just amazing. And he talks about, you know, where it's particularly wonderful is, you know, 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.

• 1:22:00Ezra Klein?

  James Sussman, your book is Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. I enjoyed it tremendously and recommended 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.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  Thank you very much for having me, Ezra.

• 1:22:29Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Jeff Geld, Roche Karma, and Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.