It's a detailed, complicated anthropological argument made by an expert — and he also does it in a very well-written way. I could attempt to lay out the argument myself, but ultimately everyone would be better served by just... reading the primary source, because I doubt I could do it sufficient justice. I recommend you actually just do the reading. But a general TLDR of the points made are:
- the estimates of how much time hunter-gatherers spent "working" were based on studies that either (a) watched hunter-gatherers in extremely atypical situations (no children, tiny band, few weeks during the most plentiful time of the year, and they were cajoled into traditional living from their usual mission-based lifestyle) or (b) didn't count all the work processing the food so it could even be cooked as time spent providing for subsistence, and when those hours are included, it's 35-60 hours a week of work even including times of enforced idleness pulling down the average
- the time estimates also counted enforced idleness from heat making it dangerous to work, or from lack of availability of food, or from diminishing returns, or from various "egalitarian" cultural cul de sacs, as "leisure" but at the same time...
- ... even the hunter gatherers themselves considered their diet insufficiently nutritious and often complained of being underfed, let alone the objective metrics showing that the were
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It's a detailed, complicated anthropological argument made by an expert — and he also does it in a very well-written way. I could attempt to lay out the argument myself, but ultimately everyone would be better served by just... reading the primary source, because I doubt I could do it sufficient justice. I recommend you actually just do the reading. But a general TLDR of the points made are:
- the estimates of how much time hunter-gatherers spent "working" were based on studies that either (a) watched hunter-gatherers in extremely atypical situations (no children, tiny band, few weeks during the most plentiful time of the year, and they were cajoled into traditional living from their usual mission-based lifestyle) or (b) didn't count all the work processing the food so it could even be cooked as time spent providing for subsistence, and when those hours are included, it's 35-60 hours a week of work even including times of enforced idleness pulling down the average
- the time estimates also counted enforced idleness from heat making it dangerous to work, or from lack of availability of food, or from diminishing returns, or from various "egalitarian" cultural cul de sacs, as "leisure" but at the same time...
- ... even the hunter gatherers themselves considered their diet insufficiently nutritious and often complained of being underfed, let alone the objective metrics showing that the were