Introduction
- Current conception of work defined in terms of scarcity, stemming from accumulation of wealth from agriculture (hmmmm…), vs focus of hunter-gatherers on present abundance
- Four major revolutions affecting humans and work = “domestication” of fire, agricultural rev, industrial rev, and current trends toward automation
Part 1
- Work vs entropy, physical definition of transfer of energy
- Biological systems/life = capable of purposeful/purposive work in a unique way vs non-living entities
- Many species have behaviors, qualities that seem to take more work not for pure survival purposes (ex. peacock feathers, vestigial bones and organs, bird mating behaviors)
- Some species = eusocial (termites, naked mole rats, humans?) in that they work for the benefit of community moreso than others
- Use of tools to do work is relatively widespread among species, but most prevalent with humans
- Starting with hand axe from stone things in the Stone Age among human ancestors
- Also lots of tools from organic materials that haven’t survived over time
- Hunting (running down animals) may have contributed to development of language
- FIRE = first and most important energy revolution
- Safety from predators
- Ability to cook → spend much less time foraging, more time for creativity and leisure
- Change of face shape because not eating as much roughage also may have helped evolution of language
- Fire literally does work on food
Part 2
- How hard did foragers work, what did they think about work?
- Study of current groups in Southern Africa show that they spend much less time acquiring food and doing other chores (“work”) than modern employed Americans spend working
- “Sharing economy” results from sharing environment in foraging societies (hmmm…) → no need to accumulate goods, not driven by fear of scarcity
Part 3
[Toiling in the Fields]
- The Agricultural Revolution, and how it transformed the laboring lives of humans (biggest hmmmm…. of them all, after reading The Dawn of Everything)
- Can be seen as an energy revolution, just as Industrial Rev is
- For the first time, people had specialized jobs not related to food
- Domestication of animals— first for work, then for food
- Urbanization (as a result of specialization of food production)
Part 4
- Cities → almost inevitable inequality, driving a unique form of scarcity
- Ford → Taylorism — assembly line manufacturing
- Kellogg → applied this to food production (the son did, father created his cereals for his mental asylum)
- “War of talent” by McKinsey and co.
- When this collapsed, led to lack of trust in actual experts like climate scientists and epidemiologists too
- Death by work — overwork actually a cause of death in Japan, China; organizations forming to counteract this
- Also widespread in practice in the West (US, France, Mexico), but not talked about
- Workoholism — an actual pathology?
- More and more “bullshit jobs” cropping up
- Parkinson’s Law → work will expand to fill the time allotted to it, bureaucratic bloat