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How many hours a week does an adult man in a hunter gatherer band deep in the Amazon or in sub-Saharan Africa work? Anthropologists say usually less than forty

How many hours a week does an adult man in a hunter gatherer band deep in the Amazon or in sub-Saharan Africa work? Anthropologists say usually less than forty hours, which means less than most people here. Not much money, but they don't pay $2000 a month or more for rent or a mortgage. No taxes. No profit from their labor sent to some class expropriating their surplus labor time. It's a basis of comparison any how. If our economic system was great you wouldn't have to pay think tanks to tell people how great their lot is.

gchamonlive 2y ago
I don't think this is the correct line of argument, to juxtapose two very different modes of living to make parallels and criticise the current way of living. First because it distracts from actually useful discussions which should revolve around making what we have now better, more sustainable, inclusive and fair. Second because our economic system isn't great because people pay a lot on mortgage or taxes, or because people have a hard time understanding state of the art research. It's not great because it is designed to produce profits at all costs, which leads to people getting overworked and underpaid.
- luqtas 2y ago
  maybe it's a type of an addendum on despite we now have more technology & facilities, we still need to work more to survive than when we had stones, berries & caves as surviving tools
- apercu 2y ago
  Poster summed it up well: "If our economic system was great you wouldn't have to pay think tanks to tell people how great their lot is." We're not healthy, mentally or otherwise.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    That is specious reasoning. It might not be perfect, but it is hard to show a better option with empirical success.
  - dannyobrien 2y ago
    Well, it's possible that certain groups in society -- in particular, highly-educated individuals in Western societies -- have become outliers in how positively they imagine the state of the world to be. (This was Hans Rosling's conclusion, which led to the formation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapminder_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapminder_Foundation ). It's probably not going to convince you for me to pull more stats from World In Data, but according to this, people do, in general, seem to be fairly happy with their lot https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
apercu 2y ago
I read something similar somewhere that while UK serfs had a lot of crappy conditions and a lack of autonomy, outside of planting and harvesting seasons they actually had a fair bit of free time. Especially in the winter. Sure, that time might be spent fishing and collecting sticks and twigs, and repairing clothes and nets, but how is that different than the housecleaning, yard maintenance (I have a large(ish) property with trees and gardens and chickens) and other things we all do after our 35-50 hour "work" weeks?
dannyobrien 2y ago
Well, apart from the often-documented regular raids from /other/ hunter-gather bands, including torture, rape, murder and slavery. Do you think, absent that $2000 a month mortgage, internal tribal and familial relations would not include abuses of power, including physical and sexual? Even if you think the current economic and social framework magnified or exacerbated this, can you point to systems in hunter-gather networks that would allow this to be systemically ameliorated at the same scales we now operate, and with the same resource challenges we now face? (I'd readily agree that there are differences in opinion about the levels of violence and the variation in prehistoric societies, but I think it's worth highlighted the assumptions that your statement makes about those levels.)
- feedforward 2y ago
  > often-documented regular raids from /other/ hunter-gather bands, including torture, rape, murder and slavery. There is no slavery in migratory hunter-gatherer bands, I can't even conceive how that would function. Slavery arose with the agricultural revolution. This is not "oft-dicumented" or even documented > internal tribal A hunter-gatherer band is not in a tribe. I am talking about migratory hunter-gatherer bands and you are talking about slave societies and then tribes.
  - dannyobrien 2y ago
    I don't think what you say is correct. Just a casual search of the literature reveals fairly detailed descriptions of slavery in pre-agricultural societies. Here's one book dedicated to an analysis of slavery in the hunter-gatherer society in the Pacific Northwest: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Aboriginal+Slavery+on+the+Northwest+Coast+of+North+America&publication_year=1997& https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Aboriginal+S... You can find many more, I hope! You seem to be making a strong distinction between "bands" and "tribes" that doesn't seem to be clear-cut elsewhere, which may be where we're getting confused; maybe it would be useful to just drop that element of my list, and concentrate on the other aspects of hunter-gatherer society?

gchamonlive 2y ago

I don't think this is the correct line of argument, to juxtapose two very different modes of living to make parallels and criticise the current way of living. First because it distracts from actually useful discussions which should revolve around making what we have now better, more sustainable, inclusive and fair. Second because our economic system isn't great because people pay a lot on mortgage or taxes, or because people have a hard time understanding state of the art research. It's not great because it is designed to produce profits at all costs, which leads to people getting overworked and underpaid.

luqtas 2y ago
maybe it's a type of an addendum on despite we now have more technology & facilities, we still need to work more to survive than when we had stones, berries & caves as surviving tools
apercu 2y ago
Poster summed it up well: "If our economic system was great you wouldn't have to pay think tanks to tell people how great their lot is." We're not healthy, mentally or otherwise.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  That is specious reasoning. It might not be perfect, but it is hard to show a better option with empirical success.
- dannyobrien 2y ago
  Well, it's possible that certain groups in society -- in particular, highly-educated individuals in Western societies -- have become outliers in how positively they imagine the state of the world to be. (This was Hans Rosling's conclusion, which led to the formation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapminder_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapminder_Foundation ). It's probably not going to convince you for me to pull more stats from World In Data, but according to this, people do, in general, seem to be fairly happy with their lot https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction

apercu 2y ago

I read something similar somewhere that while UK serfs had a lot of crappy conditions and a lack of autonomy, outside of planting and harvesting seasons they actually had a fair bit of free time. Especially in the winter. Sure, that time might be spent fishing and collecting sticks and twigs, and repairing clothes and nets, but how is that different than the housecleaning, yard maintenance (I have a large(ish) property with trees and gardens and chickens) and other things we all do after our 35-50 hour "work" weeks?

dannyobrien 2y ago

Well, apart from the often-documented regular raids from /other/ hunter-gather bands, including torture, rape, murder and slavery. Do you think, absent that $2000 a month mortgage, internal tribal and familial relations would not include abuses of power, including physical and sexual? Even if you think the current economic and social framework magnified or exacerbated this, can you point to systems in hunter-gather networks that would allow this to be systemically ameliorated at the same scales we now operate, and with the same resource challenges we now face? (I'd readily agree that there are differences in opinion about the levels of violence and the variation in prehistoric societies, but I think it's worth highlighted the assumptions that your statement makes about those levels.)

feedforward 2y ago
> often-documented regular raids from /other/ hunter-gather bands, including torture, rape, murder and slavery. There is no slavery in migratory hunter-gatherer bands, I can't even conceive how that would function. Slavery arose with the agricultural revolution. This is not "oft-dicumented" or even documented > internal tribal A hunter-gatherer band is not in a tribe. I am talking about migratory hunter-gatherer bands and you are talking about slave societies and then tribes.
- dannyobrien 2y ago
  I don't think what you say is correct. Just a casual search of the literature reveals fairly detailed descriptions of slavery in pre-agricultural societies. Here's one book dedicated to an analysis of slavery in the hunter-gatherer society in the Pacific Northwest: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Aboriginal+Slavery+on+the+Northwest+Coast+of+North+America&publication_year=1997& https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?title=Aboriginal+S... You can find many more, I hope! You seem to be making a strong distinction between "bands" and "tribes" that doesn't seem to be clear-cut elsewhere, which may be where we're getting confused; maybe it would be useful to just drop that element of my list, and concentrate on the other aspects of hunter-gatherer society?