As you may have noticed, people with power are typically reluctant to give it up, and often have the means to defend their prerogatives. This is a serious impediment, since there’s no way to build a human-centric organization without flattening the pyramid.

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 foragers’ 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 “demand sharing.

The only disciplined message put out by the impromptu coalition of dreamers and discontents who “occupied” Wall Street and other global financial capitals in the wake of the financial crisis was something along the lines of “burn the rich.” But their efforts to highlight inequality didn’t do much to change public perceptions. Numerous subsequent research projects have revealed that people in the most unequal countries routinely underestimate the levels of inequality, while those in countries where the bulk of national wealth is in the hands of large middle classes tend to be more accurate and occasionally even overestimate inequality.

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.

For some people in the study, making the economics work proved relatively easy, whereas for others it proved much more difficult. Family wealth served as a significant means to pursue a hedgehog in only six of the 34 lives we studied, whereas in ten of 34 cases people endured at least one significant phase of scarcity while in pursuit of a hedgehog. Yet whether easy or difficult (or somewhere in between), they committed to focus their inner fire in line with their encodings and they figured out how to make the economics work.