Production - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 66

Suppose there are two needs for basic survival in a small tribe or village:
food and shelter. One person or family can provide all its own food through-
out the year by working an average of 4 hours per day. Furthermore, it can
provide all its own shelter by working another 4 hours per day. Thus, meet-
ing all its own needs requires an average of an 8-hour day throughout the
year. The same is true for any other family or individual. Thus, both work
8-hour days in order to meet basic needs and survive.
Next, assume that for some reason, one person finds he or she is particu-
larly good at obtaining food—whether it is hunting, gathering, farming, or
whatever. Perhaps a man or woman finds that he or she enjoys economies
of scale by growing a bigger garden wherein he or she is both efficient and
effective in the practice of weeding, watering, and harvesting. Assume fur-
ther that a second individual enjoys a similar experience with providing
shelter. That individual may specialize in construction, finding materials,
using the appropriate tools, and so on.
As a result of these efficiencies, the first individual can produce enough
food for both of them in 6 hours per day, and the second can similarly cre-
ate enough housing for both in 6 hours per day. If the two of them decide to
cooperate, the first can produce only food, the second only shelter, and then
each gives half of their specialized production to the other. As a result, each
will have his or her requirement of food and shelter met and will only have
to work 6 hours per day—instead of 8 hours. This act of specialization and
division of efforts will result in 2 hours more per day of leisure, possibly to
nap or even draw pictures on the walls of caves.
Consider that hunter-gatherer peoples were the original affluent societies
because they lived with few material possessions for hundreds of thousands
of years and enjoyed lives that were in many ways richer, freer, and more ful-
filling than ours are today. These peoples so structured their lives that they
wanted little, needed little, and found what they needed at their disposal
in their immediate surroundings. They were comfortable precisely because
they achieved a balance between what they required and wanted by being
satisfied with little.
With relatively simple technology, such as wood, bone, stone, fibers, and
fire, they were able to meet their material needs with a modest expenditure
of energy and have the time to enjoy that which they had materially, socially,
and spiritually. Although their material wants may have been few and finite,
and their technical skills relatively simple and unchanging, their technology
was, on the whole, adequate to fulfill their needs, a circumstance that allows
us to conclude some hunting-gathering peoples were the original affluent
societies—not part of an ordained tragedy in which they were prisoners
at hard labor caught seemingly forever between the perpetual disparity of
unlimited wants and insufficient means.
The !Kung Bushmen of southern Africa, for example, spent only 12 to
19 hours a week getting food because their work was social and coopera-
tive, which means they obtained their particular food items with the least