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Martha Nichols's avatar

Oh, how disappointing this sounds! Taking on the economic focus on scarcity (not mention productivity) is fine by me, but I can’t imagine talking about work without a look at psychological attitudes and culture shifts over the centuries- it’s not enough to say that agricultural labor is grueling so it took a long time to become the norm...

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Bob Jones's avatar

Thanks for this one. As an Industrial-Organizational Psychologist who has published about the evolutionary psychology of work (APA, 2022) and comes from a U of Chicago/Harvard economics family, I am still unhappy that economists and anthropologists have managed to miss applied psychology and Behavioral Economics, and particularly Kahneman's (2003) Nobel Prize for establishing that the "rational man" is a grossly simplistic myth. It sounds like this author gives Kahneman a bit of lip service, then devolves to anthropology (and entropy!?) to argue that work has "evolved". Well, folks, how about asking people who actually study work?

I also love "The Dawn of Everything", partly because it debunks the usual anthropological myths, but also because it flirts with the assumption that our actual advantage as a species is our spectacular capacity for social organization. My book is clearer and more explicit about this advantage (came out at about the same time), and does more to try to understand how it happens as a practical matter. Graeber and Wengrow would probably appreciate all the postits in my copy.

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