From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Dec 27 2000 - 09:10:47 MST
"Emlyn" <emlyn@one.net.au> writes:
> > >Hunter gatherers apparently spent about 2 hours a day in work-like
> (staying
> > >alive related) activity, and from there it's gone downhill
> >
> > Emlyn, this is *ridiculous*.
>
> OK, I've got a book in front of me... "Macrosociology" (3rd ed), Stephen K
> Sanderson, 1995. Here's an OCRd passage (I think I've caught all the
> boo-boos), beginning page 508:
To quote from a review of Robert Wright, Non-Zero: The Logic of Human
Destiny by J. Bradford DeLong
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/nonzero.html
p. 73: "The seminal calculations of the !Kung workday--two
or three hours, then party time--have been put to skeptical
scrutiny and found wanting. The calculators forgot to include
time spent processing the food, making spears, and so on. It
now appears that these hunter-gatherers, at least, work
roughly as hard as horticulturalists."
I'm not sure the quote is from the reviewer or the book, but I think
the lesson is clear: we should be wary of widely spread memes that fit
in well with what seems to be likely but are not firmly supported. I
found a lot of references to a short hunter-gatherer workday among
civilisation-critical websites, but rather few references to any
primary papers and a lot of hints that they were happily quoting each
other to support their views.
I looked through my copy of _Strategies for Survival_ by Michael
A. Jochim, but I couldn't quite figure out how to convert his tables
into workdays for the !Kung and other hunter-gatherers. My guess is
that a more likely number than 2 hours is 4-5 hours per day, but that
likely does not take for example transports into account (which can be
a huge timewaster). There seems to be a strong increase in workday
when you go from hunting to farming though.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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