The 32-hour work week

Bernie Sanders proposes a Stone Age standard

This past March, Bernie Sanders and other members of Congress introduced the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act. He probably didn’t read my previous post, but there’s a lot in common between my thinking about Stone Age economics and his rationale for contemporary American labor.

As it turns out, back in the Stone Age, before we had agriculture, we probably worked about thirty-two hours a week. So when and why did we start working more hours? If our productivity and technology are always improving, shouldn’t we be working less and less, to live the same quality of life? But it doesn’t work like that. Instead, we keep working the same 40 hours, and feeling the same amount of stress, or maybe more.

How did we get here? Of course, it’s a complex story, unfolding over millennia. The Industrial Revolution, the 8-hour workday, and the Protestant work ethic are key events.

I want to go back even further. What led our ancestors to first abandon an easy life and start working more? Stripping away all our contemporary laws and policies and social expectations, what was the fundamental impulse that led us to step away from an easy life?

Maybe, if we can find that fundamental impulse, we can understand part of why Sanders’s 32-hour proposal can sound so radical. It might also give a clue about the origin of the exploitative political and social structures that mean that Americans today might be working more hours than our pre-human ancestors, and yet not have enough to eat.

(Most of what I write here, I learned from Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins and from Debt, written by David Graeber, who was a student of Sahlins.)

Our best clue about the first step on the economic hedonic treadmill comes from the “big man” societies, studied by Western anthropologists mostly in New Guinea and other parts of Oceania. In these societies, most relationships and economic activity are organized around extended family units. There is no separate political sphere in the sense we might think about it. For example, there are no hereditary chieftains.

Although there are no formal “leaders,” there are “big men.” A big man is the man (it’s always a man, as far as I know) in the local area who has accumulated the most social prestige. People look up to him and want to be like him.

The big man isn’t necessarily “big” in a physical sense. He doesn’t win his prestige through violence. Instead, he’s the one who gives the most stuff away. Because there’s not that much materially to be given away, not very much gold or steel, it mostly comes down to who throws the most lavish feasts, with the most yams and pork.

Anthropologists use the big man societies to trace a potential history. At first, people worked for themselves and their families, making enough food to feed themselves, and making gifts of things like food to other families when they were in immediate and temporary need. At some point, someone had the idea to spend more time working their fields, making some more yams than they needed, and throwing a party, giving away food to other people who weren’t in need.

I imagine these first few parties struck the attendees as kind of pathetic. “My neighbor wishes that people liked him better, and so he’s going to kill himself out in the field, growing extra yams. Sure, I’ll eat them. Why shouldn’t I, if he’s going to make such a fool of himself?”

But somehow, the party host also accumulated favor this way. People felt like they owed him for eating his food. The host liked that feeling. So he worked harder. And he had his family work harder, to get even more yams. Then he had his extended relatives work harder.

Eventually, when he had enough prestige, even people who weren’t part of his family would start working for him. They wanted to partake in his prestige, so they would work harder, make some extra yams for the party, and earn some favor too.

The classic anthropological documentary Ongka’s Big Moka, which you can watch on YouTube, is about the big man Ongka who is throwing a “moka,” one of the lavish parties, where he will give away 600 pigs. In an interview, his wife says: “I’m very tired. I wish it was over. When Ongka gets pigs, it’s me that feeds them. If I didn’t, people would say that I was rubbish, that no one helps Ongka. Pigs don’t look after themselves.”

It’s not hard to see how this eventually ends up in a hierarchical, redistributive society, where people are required to send some of their goods to a central place, and then receive back some fraction in some form or other. This is the bridge from small-time pork and yam farmers all the way to the massive Bronze Age civilizations of the Middle East and Mediterranean, where the big palaces were mostly places to store all the stuff that was sent in from the countryside.

People visit the Bronze Age palace at Knossos on Crete in part because of the original archaeologist’s fanciful reconstructions of its original splendor…

… but the real power of the palace dwellers is in the more prosaic parts of the site, with its thousands of enormous pots where food and other goods were collected, stored, and redistributed. (Source: wiki)

Once this treadmill starts, it can take us to dreadful places. Graeber writes about how 18th-century Africans would compete for prestige by buying entry into secret societies. One way to get rich quick was to foment a war to capture prisoners, or seize anyone who owed you any debt, or get people imprisoned for minor crimes, and sell them to the Europeans as slaves.

European colonists could later take advantage of the treadmill in another way: you co-opt the support of some locals by giving them your own currency, demand taxes in the form of your own currency, and offer to sell European-manufactured luxury goods in exchange for your own currency. The common people sell food to the co-opted locals, so they can get money to pay the taxes. And the powerful locals compete with each other for the luxuries you brought, ensuring that the local economy becomes ever more reliant on your imported currency.

I’m not trying to draw a straight line between these two practices, from the impulse to voluntarily work yourself hard, to the barbarities of chattel slavery and contemporary American poverty. But I do perceive a connection between the desire for prestige, the mechanism of work as a way to gain prestige, and then systems for exploiting other people’s labor to enhance your prestige.

This connection goes all the way back to the Old Stone Age, which doesn’t mean that it’s so remote that we can ignore, but that it’s so fundamental, that we need to incorporate it into any attempt to dislodge exploitation. The idea that the poor are “rubbish,” and that hard work is the way to prestige, is a double-edged sword we’ve held for so long we don’t even remember it’s there.