I periodically encounter the claim that hunter-gatherer societies had “15 hour workweeks”, most recently on the Ezra Klein podcast (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-james-suzman.html). This has always surprised me so yesterday I looked into it a bit.
As far as I can tell this number refers to Richard Lee’s claim that the !Kung (or Ju/’Hoansi) spend an average of 16 hours hunting and gathering. But they spend 42 hours if you include a broader range of tasks like cooking, collecting firewood, drawing water, maintaining housing and clothing, etc Referring to only hunting and gathering as “work” looks meaningless and misleading.
So I’m curious: am I missing something? Is there any truth at all to the claim that hunter-gatherers worked short weeks? And if so, what’s the best summary of the state of evidence? My current impression is that most of the discourse about “affluent” hunter-gatherers is a crazy misrepresentation that survives as a combination of clickbait / political distortion.
It may well be surprising and interesting that modern Americans work about as much as hunter-gatherers, after a brief interlude of longer hours in agricultural and early industrial societies. But that seems like a completely different punchline.
More detailed thoughts:
Excluding housework seems particularly insane because modern people work to earn money that they spend on things like housing and clothing. So you obviously need to include “time spent making my own housing and clothing” if want to get a tally that even tries to be analogous to a modern work-week. If you instead arbitrarily exclude all “work” except for acquiring food, then modern people only spend perhaps 1 hour a week working.
I’ve seen a vague response like “Sure but we do 40 hours of work and then also do a ton of housework, so the quantitative point still stands.” I think that’s super lame, but it also looks quantitatively wrong—according to the American time use survey the average American adult spends 45.7 hours a week on work, education, shopping, and housework (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06192019.pdf). That’s close enough to 42.3 hours that the difference is dominated by small choices about what gets counted, how many people count as “adults,” and measurement errors.
Even the 42 hour estimate looks like it’s probably a bit low to me, e.g investigations of other groups seem to find somewhat higher numbers, and some parts of the year seem to involve longer hours.
My understanding of the anthropology comes largely from this David Kaplan paper linked from Wikipedia (https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf). The objections raised in that paper sound reasonable and I couldn’t easily find rebuttals, but I haven’t looked into this much and it might be very misleading (Kaplan maybe has an axe to grind?). I don’t feel very confident in my views on any of this, though I was coming in with a very skeptical prior.
Kaplan’s paper also left me skeptical about a bunch of common related claims like “surprisingly well-nourished.” Nancy Howell spent years with the same population and said “the !Kung are very thin and complain often of hunger, at all times of the year” and Kaplan reports several descriptions of chronic anxiety and frustration about food availability. And apparently all agree that the !Kung “grow significantly taller” if raised in an environment with abundant food. (Not to mention their high mortality rates which seem significantly due to hunger.)
(But largely I'm updating about the other claims because this 15-hour-workweek thing seems so deliberately misleading that I'm inclined to go back to my priors.)