Marshall Sahlins called his 1968 essay “The Original Affluent Society” — probably the most influential anthropological essay ever written, which means you probably should have heard of it. Later collected in Stone Age Economics (1972), it flipped what we thought we knew about progress, work, and wealth. This lecture reads Sahlins alongside David Graeber and David Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, part of the Global Transformations hub, where Graeber and Wengrow push past Sahlins: there was no single original state, affluent or otherwise.
📚 The Dawn of Everything: https://amzn.to/4b6S77f (Commissions earned)
Key Concepts
- Marshall Sahlins identified two routes to wealth: increasing what you have, or reducing what you want — the “Zen road to affluence,” in which needs are easily satisfied.
- Richard Lee’s Kalahari research found foragers met subsistence needs in roughly two to four hours a day, leaving the rest of the day free.
- Technology rarely liberates — it typically intensifies work: the skill saw doubled production rather than shortening hours, and the same logic runs through computers and washing machines.
- In Turgot and Smith’s day Europe couldn’t claim superiority by objective measures, so it redefined the metric to material wealth and industrial capacity (Graeber and Wengrow, note 16, page 548).
- What counts as “work” is itself contested — across gender, and across whether art-making (a dozen Picassos among the Kwakiutl) counts.
- Graeber and Wengrow push past Sahlins: there was no single original state, affluent or otherwise — only diverse experiments, some alternating by season.
- The key question isn’t when authority first appeared, but when it became impossible to disobey — the distinction between formal freedom and substantive freedom.
When “Labor-Saving” Technology Doesn’t Save Labor
In 1848, John Stuart Mill observed that “all the labor-saving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being.” That’s probably an exaggeration — surely some people have benefited. But the pattern holds: every time something gets invented, people use it to increase productivity rather than decrease work.
My grandfather loved the skill saw. He told me about working carpentry back in the day, when there was a man whose whole job was sawing boards by hand. He got really good — he could rip through boards faster than anyone. When the electric skill saw came out, he said “I can beat that thing.” There was an actual competition. Eventually the saw won — the man was good, but he tired out. The machine just kept going.
Now what happened? Did they say “We’ve got this skill saw, now we only work four hours a day”? No. Production doubled. They built twice as much. And the man who’d built up all those sawing skills? He lost his job. Had to retrain, go back to school, take 20 credit hours for a new degree.
Speaking of 20 credits — that’s 20 hours in the classroom. By Andrew Carnegie’s credit-hour standard, you should do two hours of work outside class for every hour in it. That’s 40 hours of homework plus 20 hours of class: a 60-hour work week. Does the computer save time? Not really — I just assign more. Those web comments students do every class? When I was a kid you wrote it on paper and handed it in next week; you couldn’t do it every class. The computer didn’t save time; it enabled more assignments.
The washing machine? I love throwing clothes in and pushing a button. But in the old days people didn’t care if their clothes were that clean, and didn’t wash them that often. Now we run the machine constantly. My grandfather in Italy bathed three times a year — Christmas, Easter, and when the festival came to town. Talk about a time-saver. Whenever anybody says “this is going to save you a lot of time,” I get nervous: what are you going to make me do now that you’ve saved me time?
The European Inferiority Complex
Here’s context that rarely gets discussed. When Turgot and Adam Smith were developing their ideas about judging societies by material wealth and industrial capacity (1750s–1770s), Europe couldn’t claim superiority by most objective measures.
Graeber and Wengrow chase this in an endnote worth reading (note 16, page 548). At the time Turgot was writing, most criteria we now use to justify Western superiority wouldn’t apply — “Western civilization” wasn’t even a concept yet. European standards of hygiene and public health were appalling, much worse than among the “primitive” peoples of the time. Europe had no democratic institutions to appeal to. Its legal systems were barbaric by world standards. Europeans were still imprisoning heretics and burning witches, something that happened almost nowhere else. Standards of living and de facto wage levels were lower than in India, China, the Ottoman Empire, or Safavid Persia until perhaps the 1830s.
So how could Europeans claim superiority? By redefining the metric. Material wealth and industrial capacity became the measure of civilization: if you have more stuff, you’re more advanced — regardless of freedom, health, equality, or quality of life. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776, the same year as the American Revolution) argued that market capitalism would make societies wealthier. The assumption was that more stuff means more freedom from toil. The reality, as the skill saw shows, is that more stuff means more work to produce more stuff — even when people were working 14- and 16-hour days in the new mills, the metric insisted they must be better off than the “Stone Age hunters” of the past.
Sahlins’ Intervention: Two Ways to Be Wealthy
The prevalent idea before Sahlins was captured by archaeologist Robert Braidwood in 1957: “A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat, or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself.” Hunter-gatherers supposedly worked constantly just to survive, never improving their condition — the same as the animals they followed.
Sahlins flipped this. Wealth can be measured two ways. You can be rich because of the numerator — all the things you have. But there’s also the denominator — all the things you still want. Don’t have the latest iPhone? The denominator just keeps getting bigger; what you want keeps increasing while what you have stays small. Reduce what you need, though, and you become rich simply because your wants are easily satisfied. Sahlins called this the “Zen road to affluence”: affluence reached not by producing much but by desiring little.
Context matters here. In 1968 Sahlins was in France with Lévi-Strauss, having lunch every day with Pierre Clastres — the anarchist who wrote Society Against the State. That year brought the student-worker revolution in France. Lévi-Strauss was annoyed because the protesters were messing up the streets, but Sahlins and Clastres were into it, interested in transforming society. That context shaped the essay.
Richard Lee, Mongongo Nuts, and the Famous Quote
When researchers actually measured work time in foraging societies, they found people could meet subsistence needs in two to four hours a day — like taking 2 credits instead of 20. The rest of the time went to singing, dancing, hanging out, whatever you wanted. This came mostly from Richard Lee’s studies in the Kalahari, where he measured what people needed to survive — food and shelter — and how long it took to provide.
Important questions have been raised: What counts as work? Were women’s work and men’s work measured the same? Is producing art work? The Kwakiutl produced so much art that Lévi-Strauss reportedly said it was like a dozen Picassos working at once in one small society. Is making a ceremonial mask work? The figures depend on how you answer.
Central to this story are mongongo nuts — abundant in the Kalahari, very nutritious, requiring no cultivation. As one person put it: “Why should we plant when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” Why put wheat and barley and rye in the ground and work it, when you can just gather the nuts — or better, have someone gather them and bring them to you?
That quote has been cited in a thousand treatises on the origins of farming. I’d love to know who actually said it: I believe Richard Lee got it from someone in the Kalahari, and whoever it was deserves the credit. The deeper attribution problem — how Jared Diamond reused this material in his famous “Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” article without crediting Lee — is examined in detail at The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, now the canonical investigation of Diamond’s sources.
Beyond a Single Original State
Here’s where Graeber and Wengrow go beyond Sahlins. They aren’t arguing that hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society (singular). They’re arguing there was no single original state at all.
Some societies were leisurely; some were industrious. Some valued religious equality but tolerated economic inequality; some did the reverse. And some alternated by season — hierarchical in one season, egalitarian in the next, switching back and forth. (Graeber and Wengrow develop this seasonal alternation in depth; see Seasonality.) The people Lee studied were foragers in Africa, but that doesn’t make them the original state of humanity — there’s no one condition you can point to and say it was all like the Hadza, or all like the Kwakiutl.
There are many ways to be free, many freedoms a society might value; many ways to be wealthy, many things a society might equalize. And — a point Graeber and Wengrow dwell on less — many ways to be oppressed, many ways people try to control each other and create inequality. There’s no original condition from which everything else descended. People have experimented with radically different arrangements throughout history.
Formal vs. Substantive Freedom
One useful distinction Graeber and Wengrow draw is formal freedoms versus substantive ones. A formal freedom is a right you theoretically have — you can travel anywhere, you don’t have to obey superiors, you’re free to do whatever. A substantive freedom is whether you can actually do those things. You can travel anywhere — if you have money for transport and a place to stay. You don’t have to obey — unless you need the job to survive. You’re free to walk away — if you can afford to lose your income.
That’s the trade at the heart of the lecture’s “I like having stuff” passage. I want the laptop, the phone, the passport, the ability to fly rather than walk. But to get the money for all of that, I need a job — and having the job is exactly what keeps me from leaving. The question, then, isn’t when chiefs and kings first appeared; people with formal authority have always existed. The question is when it became impossible to disobey them — when you could no longer leave, refuse, or walk away. That’s the real criterion for thinking about free and equal societies.
The Nuer, described by Evans-Pritchard in one of the most famous ethnographies ever written, illustrate one possibility. On page 132 of The Nuer: “There is no master and no servant in their society, but only equals who regard themselves as God’s noblest creation” — everyone “strutting about like Lords of the earth.” Feminist critiques have since noted gender inequalities Evans-Pritchard missed or minimized, particularly around marriage; but later authors also found that women retained substantial freedom, and the Nuer still stand as a substantially autonomous, egalitarian arrangement.
Why We’re Stuck
Graeber and Wengrow’s central puzzle: how did we get locked into our current condition? Not just how inequality developed, but why we can’t even imagine alternatives anymore. Why can’t we picture a more equal society? A more free one? Social arrangements that shift by season? Different definitions of wealth? Substantive freedoms rather than merely formal ones?
The fact that societies throughout history experimented with radically different arrangements — some freer, some more equal, some alternating by season — suggests that our current inability to imagine alternatives is itself historically contingent. It didn’t have to be this way, and it doesn’t have to stay this way. To pursue that question, the lecture turns from the Ice Age into the warmer Holocene, toward hunting-and-gathering societies in Japan and in what is now Louisiana, Mississippi, and the Caribbean coast of North America.
Questions This Lecture Answers
Why hasn’t centuries of labor-saving technology shortened the work week? Because each invention has been used to raise productivity rather than cut hours. The skill saw doubled output instead of halving the workday; computers and washing machines raised expectations rather than freeing time.
How did Europeans come to see themselves as more “advanced” when, by the measures of the 1700s, they weren’t? By redefining the metric. With hygiene, public health, legal systems, and wage levels all comparing poorly to other societies, material wealth and industrial capacity became the new standard of civilization — the one measure on which Europe could come out on top.
What did Marshall Sahlins mean by calling hunter-gatherers the “original affluent society”? That affluence can come from wanting little, not only from having much. Foragers met their needs in a few hours a day, making them rich in the one currency that matters most — free time.
Continue Exploring
For the heavy investigation of how Jared Diamond drew on Richard Lee and Sahlins without proper attribution, see The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. For Graeber and Wengrow on societies that reorganized themselves by season, see Seasonality. For the broader arc of human-environment relationships and how colonial extractivism — not human nature — produced our current crisis, explore the Global Transformations hub.