The archaeology of ancient Sumerian cities suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that among the most promising trades to take up for those with ambitions of climbing the social ladder was brewing and selling beer. In part this was because beer, like wheat and silver, was a form of currency. It was also because beer houses provided loans to hard-up farmers who probably agreed to interest rates and default penalties that they would never have dreamed of accepting when sober.
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Turnbullâs descriptions of BaMbuti life evoked something of the deep logic that shaped how foragers thought about scarcity and about work. First, they revealed how the âsharingâ economies characteristic of foraging societies were an organic extension of their relationship with nurturing environments. Just as their environments shared food with them, so they shared food and objects with one another. Second, they revealed that even if they had few needs that were easily met, forager economies were underwritten by the confidence they had in the providence of their environments.
But he was intrigued by the fact that all immediate-return societies also spurned hierarchy, did not have chiefs, leaders, or institutional authority figures, and were intolerant of any meaningful material wealth differentials between individuals. He concluded that foragersâ attitudes to work were not purely a function of their confidence in the providence of their environment, but were also sustained by social norms and customs that ensured food and other material resources were evenly distributed. In other words, that no one was able to lord it over anyone else. And among them, one of the most important was âdemand sharing.
Foragers like the Ju/âhoansi remind us that we are as capable of ordering ourselves into fiercely egalitarian societies as we are of ordering ourselves into rigid hierarchies. As a result, many historians have argued that even if inequality is not a brute fact of human nature, then along with zoonotic diseases, despotism, and war, it was probably a direct and immediate consequence of our embrace of agriculture. They reason that as soon as people had big surpluses to hoard, exchange, or distribute, the more miserable angels of our nature took over.
Thus, while those who are very wealthy like to believe that they are worthy of the financial rewards they have accrued, many poorer people donât want to mess with the dream that they too might achieve such riches if only they work hard enough. For them to concede that perhaps the system was stacked against themâthat money had become far better at begetting more money than working long hard shiftsâwould be tantamount to abandoning their sense of agency and their cherished beliefs that what made their countries different was that anyone who worked hard enough could be whatever they wished to be.
The principal purpose, however, has been to loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held over our working lives, and to diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth. For by recognizing that many of the core assumptions that underwrite our economic institutions are an artifact of the agricultural revolution, amplified by our migration into cities, frees us to imagine a whole range of new, more sustainable possible futures for ourselves, and rise to the challenge of harnessing our restless energy, purposefulness, and creativity to shaping our destiny.