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Faith in progress is deep within our culture. We have been taught to believe that our lives are better than the lives of those who came before us. The ideology of modern economics suggests that material progress has yielded enhanced satisfaction and well-being. But much of our confidence about our own well-being comes from the assumption that our lives are easier than those of earlier generations. The notion is disputed that we work less than medieval European peasants, however poor they may have been. The field research anthropologists gives another view of the conventional wisdom.
The lives of so-called primitive people are commonly thought to be harsh their existence dominated by the "incessant quest for food." In fact, primitives do little work. By contemporary standard, we'd have to judge them very lazy. If the Kapauku of Papua work one day, they do no labor on the next. Kung Bushman put in only two and a half days per week and six hours per day. In the Sandwich Islands of Hawaii, men work only four hours per day. And Australian aborigines have similar schedules. The key to understanding why these "stone age people" fail to act like us increasing their work effort to get more things is that they have limited desires. In the race between wanting and having, they have kept their wanting low-and, in this way, ensure their kind of satisfaction. They are materially poor by contemporary standards, but in at least one dimension-time-we have to count them richer.
We do not raise these issues to imply that we would be better off as Polynesian natives or medieval peasants. Nor am I arguing that " progress" has made us worse off. I am, instead, making a much simpler point. We have paid a price for prosperity. Capitalism has brought a dramatically increased standard of living, but at the cost of a much more, but we are burning up those calories at work. We have color televisions and compact disc players, but we need them to unwind after a stressful day at the office. We take vacations, but we work so hard throughout the year that they become indispensable to our sanity. The conventional wisdom that economic progress has given us more things as well as more leisure but it makes difficult to sustain.
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