Work

October 12, 2020
Anthropologist Suzman (Affluence Without Abundance) attempts to untangle “the fundamental relationship between life, energy, order and entropy” in this thought-provoking yet uneven history. Drawing on the fields of economics, physics, evolutionary biology, and zoology to examine humanity’s different approaches to work across time and cultures, Suzman is at his strongest in the early chapters, offering an intriguing look at how the Ju/’hoansi tribesmen of southern Africa and other foraging societies were shaped by their focus on the present, as opposed to farming societies, which focused on the future. Suzman also details how the new skills and professions humans developed when they began to form cities 8,000 years ago created hierarchies of wealth, status, and power, and contends that the scarcity of “intimate kinship and social ties” in urban communities (as opposed to rural communities) led people to “bind their social identity ever more tightly to the work they did.” In modern economies, Suzman argues, automation threatens to exacerbate inequality. Though Suzman’s writing is full of lively digressions and fine-grained details, the book loses focus and persuasiveness the further it moves from his areas of expertise. This ambitious account asks bigger questions than it can answer.

January 8, 2021
In this well-researched, fully footnoted, scholarly anthropology text, Suzman (Affluence without Abundance, 2017) contends that everything is work, including basic cell division in the early stages of the development of life on Earth. He goes on to compare hunter-gatherers to foragers, those who work to save and store to those who only work to meet their immediate needs. Previous wisdom predicted that, by now, humankind would have learned enough about work to spend no more than a few hours a day at it to satisfy basic needs. Alas. Agrarian societies moved to industrial societies, then to technological societies; each brought its own level of development and change, each its own problems and losses. Suzman draws on the thinking of those from Malthus to Keynes, Levi-Strauss to Darwin, and uses examples from African tribes to weaverbirds to the importance of fire to technological unemployment. This fascinating book is better suited to readers with real anthropology chops than to dabblers, but academic libraries and large public libraries should consider it for their collections.

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Starred review from October 15, 2020
An essential feature of our lives receives an ingenious analysis. All living organisms expend energy (i.e., work), but humans have transformed this with spectacular creativity that began with stone tools and led to cities, nations, and networks of energy-hungry machines. Anthropologists specialize in describing this process, and Suzman delivers a delightful account of their findings without ignoring the occasions when colleagues missed the boat. For more than 1 million years, our ancestors' major tool was a crude, difficult-to-manipulate chipped-rock hand ax. Gathering food undoubtedly required its use, but that was also a laborious process. Gorillas eat 15% of their body weight per day and spend half their waking hours foraging; human today eat 2% to 3% thanks to fire, man's greatest labor-saving invention. Cooking vastly concentrates food energy, so evolution shrank our jaws, teeth, and guts and grew our brains. Experts once taught that hunter-gatherers led exhausting lives on the edge of starvation. Then studies revealed that they didn't work hard and ate better than cultures that followed. Once agriculture developed, work became grueling but produced quantities of poorer quality food that supported cities, cultures, governments, and innumerable trades. Animals provided almost all human nonfood energy until the 18th century, when the Industrial Revolution produced an explosion of power for industry and transportation. In the early 19th century, electricity transformed domestic life. The 20th-century computer revolution assumed much of human brain work, and 21st-century artificial intelligence has upset many observers who conclude "that not only were robots already queuing at the factory gates but that they had fixed their beady little robot-eyes on nearly half of all existing jobs." Ironically, as Suzman demonstrates near the end of this educative and entertaining book, this energy bonanza has not led to the life of leisure that futurists predicted. In the U.S., working hours have actually increased, and technology's profits mostly enrich a small minority who already enjoy a high income. A fascinating history of humankind as a consumer of energy.

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