Marshall Sahlins's "Original Affluent Society" (1968)
"Probably the most influential anthropological essay ever written [...] [w]hole schools of thought (Primitivism, Degrowth) would likely have never come about without it"
"perhaps the last truly great example of [the] genre of 'speculative prehistory'"
Sahlins argued that "over the course of human history the overall number of hours most people spend working has tended [...] to increase"
(drawing on examples: the San, Mbuti, and Hazda)
the "obvious flaw" is that "[t]he whole argument for an 'original affluent society' rested on a single fragile premise: that most prehistoric humans really did live in the specific manner of African foragers. As Sahlins was perfectly willing to admit, this was just a guess"
"he acknowledges that, just as there might have been many ways for free people to be free, there might have been more than just one way for (original) affluence societies to be affluent"