Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
The !Kung ‘Affluent Society’: What Hunter-Gatherers Teach Us About Work and Abundance
Here’s a provocative thought experiment: What if the “primitive savages” our ancestors pitied actually had it figured out? What if the people we thought were desperately clawing at survival were, in fact, working less than you are right now—and perfectly happy about it?
In 1966, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins dropped a bomb on the “Man the Hunter” symposium at the University of Chicago. Hunter-gatherers, he claimed, weren’t starving wretches one bad day from extinction. They were the “original affluent society”—people who solved scarcity not by producing more, but by wanting less.
His colleague Richard Lee had just returned from years living with the !Kung San (now often called Ju/‘hoansi) in the Kalahari Desert. What Lee found there challenged everything we thought we knew about human progress—and offers a surprisingly relevant blueprint for the age of AI and automation.
Why does this matter now? As AI and robotics make material production increasingly effortless, we face a question that economists have never had to answer: what does “enough” look like when scarcity of goods is no longer the constraint? The !Kung show that humans have lived—and lived well—with a fundamentally different relationship to work, possessions, and abundance than the one we assume is natural.
The 15-Hour Workweek (Yes, Really)
The Data That Made Economists Squirm
When Lee sat down to actually measure how the !Kung spent their time—clock in hand, notebook ready—he expected to document a grim struggle against nature. Instead, he got numbers that would make a French socialist weep with envy.
Adults in the Dobe camp worked an average of two and a half days per week on subsistence activities. Each workday lasted about six hours. Do the math: that’s 12-19 hours per week spent hunting and gathering.
The rest? Conversation. Visiting neighboring camps. Elaborate healing ceremonies. What we might call “hanging out.” The !Kung, it turned out, were not desperately surviving. They were living.
“Despite their harsh environment,” Lee reported, the !Kung “devote from twelve to nineteen hours a week to getting food.”
Compare that to the modern American, who according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2024 American Time Use Survey, spends about 42.9 hours per week at their job—plus another 30-45 minutes commuting each way, plus 2 hours on household activities. Add it up and you’re looking at 50+ hours devoted to survival labor. In an era of smartphones, self-driving cars, and ChatGPT.
The “primitive” !Kung worked less than half as much. In a desert. With sticks.
The Mongongo Hack
How did they pull this off? One word: mongongo.
The mongongo nut (Ricinodendron rautanenii) is nature’s energy bar—about 600 calories per 100 grams, packed with 28% protein and abundant fat. It was so plentiful and reliable that Lee estimated it alone provided one-third to one-half of total calories during certain seasons.
About 60-80% of the !Kung diet came from gathered plant foods—roots, berries, melons, and especially these miraculous nuts. Hunting (the stuff of all those dramatic cave paintings) provided the remainder, but it was gathering—primarily women’s work—that kept bellies full.
Here’s the counterintuitive kicker: the Kalahari Desert, that supposedly “harsh environment,” was actually a pantry. The !Kung maintained a population density of roughly one person per 10 square miles. At that ratio, even a desert provides more than enough.
Wait, What About the Revised Numbers?
Lee, being a careful scientist, later revised his estimates. In his 1984 book The Dobe Ju/‘hoansi, he included food processing, tool making, and general housework—activities he’d initially excluded. The new totals:
- Men: 44.5 hours per week
- Women: 40.1 hours per week
“Aha!” critics crowed. “They worked just as much as us!”
Not so fast.
First, what counts as “work”? Is chatting while you crack nuts work? Is walking to visit your relatives work? The boundary between labor and leisure in !Kung society was porous in ways ours isn’t.
Second, even these expanded numbers compare favorably when you count all modern productive time. The average American doesn’t just work 42.9 hours—they commute, do laundry, cook, clean, run errands, and manage the logistics of complex modern existence. A 2019 study in PNAS found that shifting from subsistence foraging to fully commercial labor increases men’s work from around 45 hours to 55 hours per week.
The !Kung still won.
The Zen Road to Affluence
Sahlins’s Brilliant Inversion
Marshall Sahlins’s genius wasn’t in the data—it was in the reframe.
Economists had always assumed that poverty meant having too little. Sahlins asked: too little relative to what?
“Wants may be ’easily satisfied’ either by producing much or desiring little.”
He contrasted the Western “Galbraithean way”—named after economist John Kenneth Galbraith—where “man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited,” with what he called the “Zen road to affluence”:
“A people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty—with a low standard of living.”
Read that again. It’s a paradox designed to make your brain itch.
If poverty is the gap between wants and means, then there are exactly two ways to escape it: expand your means, or contract your wants. The entire edifice of Western civilization chose Door #1. The !Kung chose Door #2—and arguably came out ahead.
Why this matters for post-scarcity: The Unscarcity framework proposes that AI and automation will massively expand our means. But if our wants expand even faster—if every solved problem creates two new desires—we’ll never feel abundant no matter how much we produce. The !Kung teach us that abundance is partly a psychological and cultural achievement, not just a technological one.
The Possessions Paradox
To Western eyes, the !Kung looked poor. They owned almost nothing—a few tools, some ostrich eggshell beads, the clothes on their backs. But Sahlins argued this apparent poverty was actually liberation.
The !Kung were nomadic. Every possession had to be carried across the Kalahari. Under those conditions, owning things becomes a burden. Your stuff owns you.
Without possessions to protect, maintain, insure, store, upgrade, or worry about, the !Kung were free in ways that the owner of a McMansion and two SUVs rarely experiences. They trusted that tomorrow’s food would be there tomorrow, so they gathered only what they needed today.
This “immediate-return economy” stands in stark contrast to our “delayed-return” model—where we sacrifice the present (working jobs we hate) for a future payoff (retirement? wealth? something?) that may never arrive. The !Kung lived in what Sahlins called “the eternal present of sufficient provisions.”
That’s not poverty. That’s a different philosophy.
Demand-Sharing: Socialism That Actually Worked
The !Kung maintained their egalitarian abundance through demand-sharing—a system where anyone could request resources from anyone else, and refusal was essentially impossible.
Kill a large animal? The meat gets distributed throughout the camp according to elaborate social rules. Find a tree full of mongongo nuts? You’d better be ready to share.
Critics (particularly market-loving economists) argue this should destroy incentives. Why hunt more if others will just take what you earn?
But Lee documented that the system worked anyway. Social prestige for successful hunters. The knowledge that you could always rely on others in turn. A mutual insurance scheme where no one accumulated private wealth, but no one faced starvation alone either.
It wasn’t communism—there was no state to redistribute anything. It was something older and more organic: reciprocity enforced by social expectation. The kind of sharing that worked before “sharing economy” became a euphemism for Uber taking 30%.
The Revisionist Counterpunch
“Actually, They Were Oppressed Peasants”
No good thesis survives academia without a counterattack, and the “original affluent society” got a fierce one.
In 1989, anthropologist Edwin Wilmsen published Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari, arguing that everything Lee and Sahlins said was wrong. The !Kung, Wilmsen claimed, weren’t isolated foragers frozen in time—they were a marginalized underclass exploited by neighboring Bantu pastoralists for thousands of years.
According to the revisionists:
- The !Kung had been incorporated into regional trading networks for millennia
- Their foraging wasn’t ancient tradition but response to historical dispossession
- What Lee documented wasn’t pristine hunter-gatherer life but rural poverty
- Using !Kung data to understand human evolution was like studying homelessness to understand human housing preferences
This was a serious challenge. If true, it meant the “affluent society” was actually the “refugee camp.”
Lee Fights Back
Lee and his supporters didn’t take this lying down. Lee famously pointed out that Wilmsen had mistaken the word “oxen” for “onions” in an old Kalahari map—suggesting the revisionist’s documentary evidence wasn’t as solid as claimed.
More substantively, the “traditionalists” argued:
- Archaeological evidence for cattle and iron in !Kung areas was minimal—“small enough to fit in one hand”
- Even if some !Kung groups had contact with pastoralists, this didn’t invalidate observations about their subsistence practices
- The variation Wilmsen documented actually proved that some groups remained relatively isolated foragers
As Lee and Jacqueline Solway wrote in their 1990 paper “Foragers Genuine or Spurious?”, there was indeed variation—some San groups farmed, some kept livestock, some served as clients for neighbors. But this variation didn’t eliminate the category of “forager” entirely.
The Baby Mortality Problem
Perhaps the most damaging critique isn’t about historical context—it’s about bodies.
Research by Michael Gurven and Hillard Kaplan documented that among hunter-gatherer societies:
- 27% of infants die before age one
- 47.5% of children don’t survive to puberty
- Infant mortality is 30 times higher than in modern developed nations
Hard to call that “affluent.”
But the picture is more complex than it first appears. The modal age of death for hunter-gatherers who survived childhood was approximately 72 years—not far from modern expectations. The grim life expectancy numbers (25-37 years at birth) were dragged down by infant mortality, not because adults died young.
Many of those deaths came from infectious diseases that hammered all pre-modern societies—farmers included. Agriculture actually made disease worse by creating dense settlements perfect for epidemics. As James C. Scott documents in Against the Grain (2017), osteological evidence shows that early agriculturalists were shorter, sicker, and more likely to be anemic than their foraging neighbors.
The comparison should be hunter-gatherers versus pre-modern farmers, not hunter-gatherers versus people with vaccines and antibiotics. And on that comparison, foragers often win.
The Scholarly Consensus (Sort Of)
Today, most scholars take a middle position. The strongest version of “original affluent society”—hunter-gatherers lived in paradise—is overstated. But the opposite narrative—they lived in constant misery barely avoiding starvation—is equally wrong.
The 2019 PNAS study that examined multiple forager societies concluded that “even the least commercial people generally work harder than Sahlins claimed, notwithstanding significant variation across societies.” But it also confirmed that market integration increases work time. The core comparative claim holds: foragers worked less than farmers or industrial workers.
Whether that constitutes “affluence” depends entirely on how you define the term.
What the !Kung Teach Us About Post-Scarcity
The Tragedy of the Ju/‘hoansi Today
The !Kung San that Lee studied no longer exist as an isolated foraging population. Today’s Ju/‘hoansi—approximately 30,000 people across Botswana, Namibia, and Angola—live in permanent communities where they farm, herd livestock, produce crafts, and participate in the cash economy.
“No one in Nyae-Nyae depends exclusively on hunting and gathering any more. A half-century of land dispossession, well-meaning if ineffective development programs, and a decade of military occupation make it no longer possible for the Ju/‘hoansi to live as their ancestors did.”
The irony is bitter: the “development” that displaced !Kung foraging has not delivered greater abundance. As Lee documented, the Dobe people “have been transformed in two generations from a society of foragers… to a society of small-holders who eke out a living by herding, farming, welfare, and craft production.”
They traded 15-hour workweeks for something closer to 50. Progress!
Five Lessons for Designing Abundance
So what does any of this mean for the Unscarcity Framework—for designing abundance in an age of AI, robotics, and fusion energy?
1. Abundance Is a Relationship, Not an Absolute
Sahlins’s “Zen road” reminds us that scarcity is partly psychological and cultural. A society with fewer desires can feel wealthier than one drowning in possessions but burning with unsatisfied wants.
This doesn’t mean we should all become minimalists (a lifestyle choice available mainly to people who already have too much stuff). But it does mean that solving scarcity requires addressing desire, not just production. An economy that manufactures wants faster than it manufactures goods will never feel abundant.
2. Work Is Culturally Defined
The debates over how to measure !Kung work time reveal something profound: “work” is not a natural category carved into the universe. What counts as labor versus leisure, production versus consumption, depends on social meaning.
As automation eliminates many forms of paid labor, we’ll need to renegotiate these categories. Is caregiving work? Is art? Is community organizing? The !Kung didn’t distinguish between “working” and “living”—and maybe we shouldn’t either.
3. Demand-Sharing Has Costs and Benefits
The !Kung’s egalitarian sharing system prevented accumulation and ensured universal provision—goals that align perfectly with the Unscarcity Framework’s Foundation. But demand-sharing also created constant social pressure and may have limited innovation.
The lesson: baseline provision should be unconditional (like !Kung sharing), but contribution incentives (like Impact Points) should reward effort in ways that pure sharing societies couldn’t.
4. Security Enables Generosity
The !Kung shared freely because they trusted in continuing abundance. This trust enabled a gift economy that would collapse under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty.
Modern basic income or universal services might similarly enable generosity by removing survival anxiety. When you know tomorrow’s food will be there tomorrow, you can give freely today. The Foundation creates the conditions for a gift economy at scale.
5. Population Density Breaks the Model
!Kung “affluence” depended on low population density—roughly one person per 10 square miles. Their mode of abundance cannot scale to 8 billion people foraging across finite land.
Technological abundance must solve the density problem that foraging could not. This is precisely what the Brain (AI), the Body (robotics), and the Fuel (fusion) promise: abundance that scales, that works in cities, that doesn’t require 10 square miles per person.
The Real Lesson
Marshall Sahlins died in 2021, having spent his career challenging assumptions about “primitive” societies and Western progress. The anthropologist David Graeber suggested Sahlins deserved a Nobel Prize in Economics for his insights.
What Sahlins showed—and what the !Kung demonstrated—is that abundance is possible. The question is not whether humans can live with enough, but whether we can organize societies to ensure everyone does.
The !Kung achieved their version of abundance through cultural constraints on accumulation and desire. Their way of life is no longer available—and was always more difficult than the “affluent” label suggested. But as AI and automation make material production increasingly effortless, we face the opposite problem from the one the !Kung solved. Our challenge isn’t limited means but unlimited wants.
Perhaps the original affluent society has one more lesson: in a world of potential plenty, “how much is enough?” is not an economic question but a philosophical one. The !Kung answered it through culture and reciprocity. We’ll need to find our own answer—one that combines their wisdom about sufficiency with technology’s promise of universal abundance.
The Foundation provides the Foundation. The Ascent provides meaning. And somewhere between the mongongo nut and the fusion reactor, we might finally figure out what “enough” actually looks like.
References
- Lee, R. B. (1968). “What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources.” In R. B. Lee & I. DeVore (Eds.), Man the Hunter. Chicago: Aldine.
- Lee, R. B. (1979). The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Lee, R. B. (1984, 2013). The Dobe Ju/‘hoansi. Belmont: Cengage Learning.
- Sahlins, M. (1972). “The Original Affluent Society.” In Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine.
- Sahlins, M. (1966). “Notes on the Original Affluent Society.” Presented at Man the Hunter symposium, University of Chicago.
- Scott, J. C. (2017). Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- Wilmsen, E. N. (1989). Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Solway, J., & Lee, R. B. (1990). “Foragers Genuine or Spurious? Situating the Kalahari San in History.” Current Anthropology, 31(2), 109-146.
- Kaplan, D. (2000). “The Darker Side of the ‘Original Affluent Society.’” Journal of Anthropological Research, 56(3), 301-324.
- Gurven, M., & Kaplan, H. (2007). “Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination.” Population and Development Review, 33(2), 321-365.
- Smith, E. A., et al. (2019). “Work time and market integration in the original affluent society.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(44), 22100-22105.
- Dyble, M., et al. (2019). “Engagement in agricultural work is associated with reduced leisure time among Agta hunter-gatherers.” Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 792-796.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2024). American Time Use Survey.
- Gallup. (2024). Why Americans Are Working Less.
