What do the Bushmen of the Kalahari have in common with John Maynard Keynes? In a visionary essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), Keynes made two prophecies: first, that the Great Depression would prove to be “only a temporary period of adjustment” and that prosperity would increase for the next two generations and more. On this his prediction that living standards “one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high” was correct; we are five times better off than our grandparents or great-grandparents were in 1930 and our children may be eight times better off than them by 2030.
His second prediction was that by the early 21st century the working week would have been cut to 15 hours. Here he was dead wrong. The number of hours worked in both the US and Europe has remained pretty steady for decades, at more than 40 hours a week, with Americans working much harder than Europeans. But the 15-hour working week is not a pure pipe dream; for millennia, until the possibilities for their hunter-gatherer lifestyle were taken away, the San (Bushmen) people of southern Africa thrived, with a good diet (2,500 calories a day), on little work (two to three hours a day) and much play.
This provocative comparison was made by the anthropologist Dr James Suzman in a recent lecture for Protimos, a charitable organisation committed to providing legal assistance to marginalised communities in the developing world. The traditional lifestyle of the San, he argued, represented a kind of “primitive affluence”. Our narratives of progress, starting with Hobbes’s lines about life in the state of nature being “nasty, brutish and short”, have assumed a steady improvement in the human lot as hunter-gathering, under threat from sabre-toothed tigers, has given way to farming and then industry (under threat from sabre-toothed bosses).