The History of Work: From Hunter-Gatherers to Modern Economies

The faulty definition of productivity leads to inequality and underperformance, urging a shift to focus on outcomes instead of visible activity.

### The Evolution of Work: From Hunter-Gatherers to Modern Knowledge Economy
* 🔥  The invention of fire allowed humans to **outsource energy needs**, expanding their diet and leading to the invention of **leisure**.
* 🌾  The transition to agriculture was a **growth-based phenomenon** that required everyone to **pull their weight**, with a **clear relationship between effort and reward**.
* 🏙️  The creation of cities allowed for the **accumulation of power and wealth**, and fostered the birth of **new professions and artisan skills**.
* 🤖  In the modern knowledge economy, our definition of productivity is faulty, focusing on **visible activity** rather than **outcomes**.
* 🧠  Intelligence is overrated in the hiring process, with factors like **drive, determination, and leadership skills** often more important.
* 🌐  The global economy is facing challenges with **excess inequality and lack of opportunity**, making it difficult for individuals to **generate wealth solely through work**.
* 🔍 " We need to experiment. We don't know what it's like to deal with all these different things we have. But we should approach the problem as if we approach any other problem, an engineering problem, **building a bridge over a river**.
* 📊  Slow productivity is proposed as a solution, focusing on **doing fewer things at once**, **working at a natural pace**, and **obsessing over quality**.

There's an awful lot of work, which I think is work we've simply created because we feel that humans cannot live without organized work - and also 'cause we organize our societies on that basis. But we end up with a lack of opportunity, excess inequality, and many individuals simply not performing up to their maximum potential. It's no longer you just see me in my office looking vaguely busy. You can actually see every email I'm sending and how active I am in a Slack chat. We're now faced with a situation where, as a society, we enjoy this extraordinary abundance, but it is very unevenly distributed. It's remarkable how weak is the correlation between success and intelligence. There are other factors such as drive and determination, energy levels, how well you work with other people, leadership skills, charisma - all of those can be more important than intelligence. We have a faulty definition of productivity.

that we've been following, and what we need to 
do instead is shift our focus onto outcomes. - Hey Big Thinkers. We'll get back to the video 
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your existing business operations,   visit odoo.com/bigthink to start a free 14-day 
trial. No credit card required or request a demo. My name is James Suzman, and I'm an anthropologist 
and the title of my latest book is called,   Work: A Deep History, from the 
Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Nobody actually knows why our hunter-gatherer 
ancestors made the sudden transition to   agriculture. It's one of the great mysteries of 
human history. Hunter-gatherer economies always   focused on the here and now. People did not spend 
a great deal effort doing anything which was more

than meeting their specific needs for that day. 
In agricultural societies, on the other hand, everything was to do with forward-planning. 
Everything was to do with being future-focused. Much of our financial vocabulary comes from this 
basic idea of Protecting your assets is exactly like having a young herdsman standing there 
protecting it from potential predators. You see these references and we forget them, but so many of 
the concepts around which we organize our economy now actually have their roots firmly planted 
in the fields of the agricultural revolution, and in many ways, are not particularly suitable 
to the highly automated modern world in which we live in now. There's an awful lot of work which 
I think is work we've simply created because we feel that humans cannot live without organized 
work - and also 'cause we organize our societies on that basis. Going back through all of human 
history, there are really three great revolutions that have happened in the world of work. Now, 
one of them happened long before Homo sapiens

was on the scene - and that was the invention of fire. Just the sheer ability to be able to make fire meant that humans were able to outsource some of their energy needs to energy stored in wood or coal or something that they could burn, and this was a fundamental transition in the way that they organized their living-working life; partially because it expanded the number of foods that they could eat. So suddenly things like potatoes and tubers and things which are basically inedible raw, they discovered you cook them, you concentrate the energy, and it was fundamental change. It was, I believe, the source of the invention of leisure. But the historical evidence suggests that our hunter-gatherer ancestors became ever more efficient in the food quest. Hunter-gatherers engaged with the land by making a living from harvesting and of course hunting. And that is done with consummate skill and consummate, in some ways, ease. Now, of course, it sounds a

little bit idyllic and hunter-gatherers went through intensely difficult times, periods of climatic change, and so on, and there are genetic bottlenecks in hunter-gatherer history. But for the most part, living off the land seemed a very straightforward way of making a living, and we are, again, supremely adapted to making a living as hunters and gatherers. The second great revolution in the history of work was the transition to farming, and the transition to farming, of course, changed everything. Nobody actually knows what brought about the transition from foraging to agriculture, but whatever happened, agriculture suddenly took hold in the Middle East and then subsequently in South and Central America, in East Asia, and in Africa. It happened in many different places, and this wasn't based on shared knowledge. We know it was preceded by a period of great climate change, but suddenly, the crops that they expected or the fruits and vegetables and animals

and migrations that they expect just didn't happen 
in the way they were supposed to. And during that process, something happened that persuaded people 
that there were certain higher-yielding crops or higher-yielding wild plants that they might be 
able to nurture and forage. The societies that developed agriculture became considerably more 
productive than the societies that were still living a life of foraging- and agriculture 
is a completely growth-based phenomenon. It's very important that everybody pulls their 
weight because the amount of energy you put in was very close to the amount of energy you got 
out. Everybody had to do their bit. In farming societies, it was almost all about debt 'cause the 
first debt was between the farmer and the land, and those farmers who go to the effort to have the 
best fences, to guard their fields, weed the most diligently, to schlep up water from the riverbed 
if there's not enough rain, those are the farmers

that will succeed. So suddenly there's a very 
clear relationship between effort and reward. Of course, the transition to agriculture involved 
two things: One thing was domesticating plants, wheat and maize and so on, and the other thing 
of course was domesticating livestock and in particular, livestock like sheep and goats and 
perhaps most importantly of all, cattle. Now, when 
we think about cattle and cattle herds, we have 
to understand that early agricultural societies, meat was something very expensive and very rare, 
and in fact, what people used livestock for, in particular cattle, was actually to do work. Cattle 
basically could do labor for you, and cattle in a 
sense produced the basis of what our idea is of an 
So there's no coincidence that the word cattle 
and the word capital have the same etymological 
roots- they mean the same thing. So when we talk

about capital and capital growth, actually, 
the metaphor is very much a herd of cows. This   supports larger populations, and populations always 
grew rapidly to the maximum size, the maximum   productivity of that land. The instinctive thing 
you do is when that population goes up, and then   the harvest perhaps fails, then suddenly you think, 
Well, we need more land. So agriculture became   this great expanding force. Ever since 7,000 years 
ago is where you get the beginning of the third   revolution in the history of work- and that is the 
creation of cities. In agricultural civilizations,   when we tend to think of the ancient past, we 
do tend to think mostly in terms of cities.   We think of Ancient Rome or Athens or Sparta, but 
the truth is, in all these societies, most people   still lived and worked the land. So even the most 
sophisticated agricultural civilizations, still,   80% of people were actually in the countryside, 
focused all their labor energy on basically

producing the energy they needed to survive and 
live. Life in the city encouraged two things: First of all, it encouraged the ability to 
control and manipulate and use surpluses from the countryside as a means to accumulate 
power and wealth. It created this great melting pot which allowed for this vast efflorescence of 
new professions because humans, we do not like to sit still. We are naturally creative species. 
And within the cities, people began to create using that spare energy. You suddenly had the 
birth of all sorts of artisan skills. You had the birth of more complex cooking techniques. You 
had the emergence of all sorts of arts and music. Rome was divided into patchwork of what 
were called. You had the potters there, the leather workers there, the butchers there and 
these communities actually became far more than simply communities of work. People married into 
them, they lived in amongst them. They became

a source of identity. So that micro revolution, 
that happened within these cities to completely different spaces, and that's always why there's 
been this long-term divide between rural world and city world, but in many senses, those cities 
were like sort of time-traveling microcosms of the future that we're in now. The future we're 
in now is one where very few of us work the land at all, and we're actually all in the business of 
expending energy, acquired one by farmers in the land outside, but also two, energy that we plucked 
out of the ground in the form of fossil fuels and so on. We're now faced with a situation where, as 
a society, we enjoy this extraordinary abundance, but it is very unevenly distributed. One of 
the fundamental problems of a more automated, more productive economy is the work that any 
individual can do is less and less capable of generating huge amounts of wealth. Now, the 
best way to generate wealth is to inherit a bit

of wealth and put that wealth to work. In other 
words, very difficult for people to be able to get any kind of the idea of the American Dream 
of being able to work your way up from poverty to tremendous wealth. It's no longer possible to 
do it. So what it is incumbent upon us to do is to experiment. We don't know what it is like to deal 
with all these different things we have. But we should approach the problem as if we approach 
any other problem, an engineering problem, building a bridge over a river, and we now have 
the challenge of reorganizing our economies in such a way that responds to the fact that 
actually the way we organize our economy now is posing far greater risks than 
it potentially brings us benefits. Hello, I'm Tyler Cowen. I'm a professor 
of economics at George Mason University. My latest book, co-authored with 
Daniel Gross, is called Talent:

How to Identify Energizers, Creators, 
and Winners Around the World. - My entire life, I've been involved with starting 
or managing projects. And in virtually every case, I found the true binding constraint was not 
enough talent. There was a recent study that estimated the total value of talent, or human 
capital, in the world, is over $550 trillion. So it seemed to me that as a social problem, we're 
not taking talent seriously enough. We end up with a lack of opportunity, excess inequality, and 
many individuals simply not performing up to their maximum potential. John Hammond was one of 
the great musical talents of the 20th century. But his contribution was not singing or playing an 
instrument. What he did was to find other musical talents. So he found and identified Count Basie, 
Aretha Franklin, Benny Goodman, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Stevie Ray Vaughan. He was one of the 
most phenomenal talent scouts of the 20th century.

He had at least two key features in his search for musical talent. First, his primary motive was love for music. He wasn't necessarily out to make as much money from these people as possible. Second, he did not have preconceptions about race or gender. And he, you could say almost ruthlessly, was devoted to hearing quality and then seeing through the process of advancing those people in their careers. What I'm saying in my book with Daniel Gross is that we need more John Hammonds, but in every single walk of life. There are so many problems on how talent evaluation is done today. In larger corporations, the problem tends to be too much bureaucratization. Too many boring interview processes that just make everyone a little bit numb. The interviewer goes through some rehearsed questions. The interviewee goes through some rehearsed answers. Everyone knows it's a bit phony. Neither side really learns that much. But I think that's also just the beginning

of the mistakes we're making. One problem is 
that people, when hiring, they're too prone to hire other people like themselves. Those are 
virtues they find relatively easy to detect. Think about the role of intelligence in the hiring 
process. For people who are highly intelligent, highly skilled, the evidence is that they are 
overrating intelligence. For any kind of job, there might be some basic, minimum level 
of intelligence that would be required. But when you look above that level, it's remarkable 
how weak is the correlation between success and intelligence. There are other factors such 
as drive and determination, energy levels, how well you work with other people, leadership 
skills, charisma- all of those can be more important than intelligence. So I wouldn't say 
that everyone overrates intelligence, but it's the smart people who do, and that's exactly the 
problem. If you're hiring people, you're also

looking for people who are undervalued by the 
rest of the market. The way you really do well, is by finding undervalued talents where the rest 
of the market is not seeing something. It could be the market doesn't understand fully how talent 
works. It could be a case of prejudice. There can be issues across race. There can be qualities 
that might appear negative, like neuroticism, but actually for a lot of jobs, neuroticism is a 
good thing. For your own success, focus not only on talent at the absolute level, but focus on 
which talents are the truly undervalued ones. I think another area where you find major 
biases is gender in the workplace. For instance, there is good evidence that very smart men tend 
to underrate how smart the very smartest women are. In most cases, I don't think it's explicit 
prejudice or chauvinism, though there is some of

that. Men, when they interview women, at least on average, they tend to put too much weight on how they perceive the woman's personality, whether they individually find it pleasant or agreeable. That might matter for the job, but you know, very, very often it doesn't. I think by being more open and just trying to look past some of your immediate emotional reactions, you can make better decisions. Disability is a very important topic in the workplace today. But let me first say, I don't even like the word disability. What is called a disability is not in every case a disability, or it can be understood in some better and more complex way. There are large numbers of individuals who are, for whatever reasons, quite different. One of the most common reasons might be ADHD. Another possibility would be some form of autism. These individuals do not always interview well, and very commonly they didn't do well in school 'cause our

school systems. They are not well-designed to deal with neurodiversity. But don't be so quick to dismiss them on the grounds of a bad interview or bad grades. Some of our greatest talents are highly unusual. There's plenty of talent there that is currently greatly undervalued. Of all the different parts of the American, and indeed global economy, I think the sector that does the best at finding talent is venture capital. Because the way venture capital is structured, a lot of your investments, they're gonna lose money - you know it. But there'll be a small number that return to you 100x or 200x your initial investment. So your emphasis is on the deals you might be missing and how you can find them. And that makes people more open-minded, more tolerant of their own errors, less risk-averse, and more willing to think outside the box. They have the mentality:

Fear of missing out, and that's the direction we all need to move in. - I'm Cal Newport. I'm a computer scientist and writer. My most recent book is Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. We're increasingly facing burnout. How is it possible to do work that you're proud of and not feel like your job is encroaching on all parts of your life? Because it's no longer you just see me in my office looking vaguely busy. You can actually see every email I'm sending and how active I am in a Slack chat. I could do this on the way to work, on the way home from work, at home, on the weekends. Enough is enough. We're increasingly exhausted. We have a faulty definition of productivity that we've been following, and what we need to do instead is shift our focus onto outcomes. So the knowledge sector emerges in the

mid-twentieth century. When it emerges, our best understanding of productivity came from manufacturing. Manufacturing, this is something that we could measure very precisely. For example, how many Model Ts are we producing per labor hour going in as input? And we had a number we could look at. Knowledge work emerges. These type of metrics don't work anymore. Because in knowledge work, we're not producing one thing. I might be working on seven or eight different things at the same time. This could be different than the seven or eight things that the person right next to me is working on. Our solution to this was to introduce a rough heuristic that I call pseudo-productivity that said we can use visible activity as a crude proxy for useful effort. So if I see you doing things, that's better than you not doing things. Come to an office and we watch you work. If we need to be more productive, come earlier.

stay later. We'll just use activity as our best 
marker that you're probably doing something   useful. More and more of our time is focused on 
performing this busyness, which means less of our   time is spent actually doing things that matter.
So what's the solution? Slow productivity is a   way of measuring useful effort that is now much 
more focused on the quality things you produce   over time as opposed to your visible activity 
in the moment, and I define it to be built on   three main principles. The first is to do fewer 
things. Now this idea scares a lot of people when   they first hear it because they interpret do 
fewer things to mean accomplish fewer things.   What I really mean is do fewer things at once. 
We know this from neuroscience and organizational   psychology that when you turn the target of 
your attention from one point to another,   it takes a while for your brain to reorient. 
The things you're thinking about over here

leaves what's known as attention residue. This is 
a self-imposed reduction of cognitive capacity,   so you're producing worse work. Even worse, 
it's a psychological state that is exhausting   and frustrating, so the experience of work itself 
just becomes subjectively very negative. So what   happens if I'm working on fewer things at once? 
More of my day can actually be spent trying to   complete commitments, which means I'm going to 
complete them faster. And probably the quality   level is going to be higher as well because 
I can give them uninterrupted concentration.
  The second principle is to work at a natural pace. 
One of the defining features of human economic   activity for the last several hundred thousand 
years is that the seasons really matter. There   was migration seasons when we were hunting. 
There was planting seasons. We were planting,   and harvest seasons when we're harvesting, and 
seasons where neither of those activities were

going on. We had a lot of variety throughout 
the year in terms of how hard we were working. I think in knowledge work, if certain 
times of year are more intense than others, this will lead to overall better and more 
sustainable outcomes. So the principle of working at a natural pace says it's okay to not 
redline it fifty weeks a year, five days a week. We can have busy days and less busy days. We 
can have busy seasons and less busy seasons.
The third principle of slow productivity 
is to obsess over quality. And what this means is you should identify the things you 
do in your work that produce the most value and really care about getting better at that. Any 
quest towards obsessing over quality has to start with a perhaps pretty thorough investigation of 
your own job. And then once you figure that out, start giving that activity as much 
attention as you can. For example,

invest in better tools so that you can signal to yourself that you're invested in doing this thing well. I did this myself as a postdoc. I was at MIT, didn't have a ton of money at that time, but I bought a fifty-dollar lab notebook. And my idea was this is going to make me take the work I'm doing in this notebook more seriously, and it did. So something about having this more quality tool pushed me towards more quality thinking. So this idea that you want to slow down, that you want to do fewer things, that you want to have a more natural pace, this becomes very natural when you're really focused on doing what you do well. You begin to see all of those meetings and the email and the overstuffed task list not as a mark of productivity, but obstacles to what you're really trying to do. If you are embracing these principles, a

few things are going to happen. The pace at which 
important things are finished is going to go up. The quality of what you're producing is going to 
go up, and the happiness is also going to go up. This is going to become a much more sustainable 
work environment, and you're going to be doing the work that's going to make you better.
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3 experts debunk common myths about work | James Suzman, Tyler Cowen, and Cal Newport

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The Evolution of Work from Hunter-Gatherers to the Modern Age

The transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture marked a shift from present-focused to future-focused economies.

The invention of fire not only changed the way humans organized their lives but also led to the invention of leisure.

Hunter-gatherer ancestors became highly efficient in food production, engaging with the land with skill and ease.

The Evolution of Work: From Hunter-Gatherers to Agriculture to Cities

Hunter-gatherer societies faced challenges but were well-adapted to their way of life.

The transition to agriculture brought higher productivity and a clear link between effort and reward, leading to the growth of farming communities.

The development of cities marked the third revolution in the history of work, with the majority of people still living and working in the countryside despite the rise of urban civilizations.

The Impact of Cities on Human Development

Life in the city led to the accumulation of power and wealth, as well as the emergence of new professions and artisan skills due to the ability to control surpluses.

Cities created a microcosm of the future, where people's energy shifted from working the land to using fossil fuels, leading to unevenly distributed abundance and a challenge in wealth generation.

Tyler Cowen, an economics professor, emphasizes the importance of identifying and utilizing talent to address inequality and maximize human potential.

John Hammond, a great musical talent scout, also highlighted the significance of recognizing and nurturing talent.

The Importance of Unconventional Talent Evaluation

John Hammond's approach to talent evaluation prioritized love for music and disregarded race and gender.

The current corporate hiring process is criticized for its bureaucratization and tendency to favor candidates similar to the interviewers.

The traditional overemphasis on intelligence in hiring is questioned, while the importance of undervalued talents and the impact of gender bias in the workplace are emphasized.

Rethinking Productivity: The Concept of Slow Productivity

The school system struggles to accommodate neurodiversity, leading to undervaluation of unique talents.

Venture capital stands out in recognizing and embracing unconventional talent, promoting open-mindedness and risk-taking.

"Slow productivity" offers a new approach, focusing on the quality of work produced over time and emphasizing the importance of doing fewer things at once for improved focus and effectiveness.

Principles of Slow Productivity for Better Work

Leaving behind "attention residue" leads to worse work and a negative work experience, so focusing on fewer things at once can lead to faster and higher quality results.

Working at a natural pace, with busy and less busy periods, can lead to better and more sustainable outcomes, reflecting the natural variety in human economic activity.

By obsessing over quality and investing attention in the most valuable aspects of work, productivity, quality of work, and happiness can all increase, creating a more sustainable work environment.