But we now know that hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi did not live constantly on the edge of starvation. Rather, they were usually well nourished; lived longer than people in most farming societies; rarely worked more than fifteen hours a week; and spent the bulk of their time at rest and leisure. We also know that they could do this because they did not routinely store food, cared little for accumulating wealth or status, and worked almost exclusively to meet only their short-term material needs. Where the economic problem insists that we are all cursed to live in the purgatory between our infinite desires and limited means, hunter-gatherers had few material desires, which could be satisfied with a few hours of effort. Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so, there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and our attitudes to work have their roots in farming.

In the summer of 1957, James Woodburn scrambled up the Serengeti Plateau to reach the shores of Lake Eyasi, where he became the first social anthropologist to develop a long-term relationship with the Hadzabe. In the 1960s, he was also was one of the most influential among the cohort of young anthropologists who spearheaded the resurgence in hunter-gatherer studies. And just like Richard Lee, he was struck by how little effort it took for the bow-hunting Hadzabe to feed themselves. In the early 1960s, he described the Hadzabe as irrepressible small-stakes gamblers who were far more preoccupied with winning and losing arrows from one another in games of chance than with wondering about where their next meal would come from. He also noted that, like the Ju/’hoansi, they met nutritional needs easily, “without much effort, much forethought, much equipment or much organization.

Woodburn described the Hadzabe as having an “immediate return economy.” He contrasted this with the “delayed return economies” of industrial and farming societies. In delayed-return economies, he noted that labor effort is almost always focused primarily on meeting future rewards, and this was what differentiated groups like the Ju/’hoansi and the BaMbuti not only from farming and industrialized societies, but also from the large-scale complex hunter-gatherer societies like those living alongside the salmon-rich waters of the Pacific Northwest coast of America.

They also quickly learned that in foraging societies anyone who had anything worth sharing was subject to similar demands and the only reason that they received so many requests was because, even with their meager research budgets, they were immeasurably wealthier in material terms than any of their forager hosts were. In other words, in these societies the obligation to share was open-ended and the amount of stuff that you gave away was determined by how much stuff you had relative to others. As a result, in forager societies there were always some particularly productive people who contributed more than others, and also people who (in the language of finger-pointing politicians and perplexed economists) are often referred to as “freeloaders” or “scroungers.

Foraging societies like the Ju/’hoansi also pose a problem for those who are convinced that material equality and individual freedom are at odds with one another and irreconcilable. This is because demand-sharing societies were simultaneously highly individualistic, where no one was subject to the coercive authority of anyone else, but at the same time were intensely egalitarian. By granting individuals the right to spontaneously tax everybody else, these societies ensured firstly that material wealth always ended up being spread pretty evenly; secondly that everyone got something to eat regardless of how productive they were; thirdly that scarce or valuable objects were circulated widely and were freely available for anyone to use; and finally that there was no reason for people to waste energy trying to accumulate more material wealth than anyone else, as doing so served no practical purpose.