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