The original affluent society

We tell one story about prehistory so often we forget it's a story: the caveman's life was nasty, brutish and short — every waking hour a war against starvation, a desperate scrabble for calories, until farming and then industry finally set us free. In 1966 the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins looked hard at the field data from people still living that way and said: nearly every word of that is wrong.

The argument

Sahlins called hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society,” and the phrase was a deliberate provocation. Affluence, he pointed out, can be reached by two roads: you can produce much, or you can want little. Modern economies took the first road — infinite wants chasing scarce means, a treadmill built into the design. Foragers took the second, and arrived.

The studies were startling. Richard Lee's work with the Ju/'hoansi (the !Kung) of the Kalahari — some of the harshest land on earth — found people feeding themselves on roughly three to five hours of food-getting a day. The rest was leisure: sleep, talk, visiting, ritual, more sleep. They were not failing to accumulate wealth; they declined to. Why build granaries when the bush is the granary? Mobility punishes property — a thing you must carry on your back is a burden — so they kept few possessions, and a person's standing was measured by what they gave away, not what they held.

The conclusion is the part that should keep you up. Their wants were finite and easily met, so by their own reckoning they lived in plenty. Scarcity, Sahlins argued, is not the human condition. It is the founding axiom of our economy — “the judgment passed by our market system” — and we have quietly projected it backward onto the entire species, mistaking our own arrangement for nature itself.

Where it’s contested

The thesis was a bomb, and it took return fire. Later work complicated the arithmetic: the rosy figure counted only food-getting and left out the hours of processing, tool-making, childcare, and walking; some forager diets were thinner and some lives shorter than the bright version implied; the !Kung of the 1960s were not a clean window onto the Pleistocene but a modern people in a specific, pressured corner of history. The strong claim — that they truly worked less — is genuinely contested.

But the deep claim survived the fight, and it's the one worth carrying: affluence is a ratio, not a sum. It is the relationship between what you want and what you have — and a civilization can manufacture dissatisfaction as deliberately as it manufactures abundance. Sahlins's real target was never the Stone Age. It was the assumption, so total we mistake it for gravity, that more is the only road to enough.