Work

By the end of the project, Takahashi’s team had observed 268 successful matings. To their astonishment they found no correspondence between mating success and any particular tail traits. The peahens mated as enthusiastically and frequently with males that dragged underwhelming displays behind them as they did with those that possessed the fanciest ... See more

Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so, there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and our a... See more

the problem is that the overwhelming majority of workers across the world don’t get a great deal of satisfaction out of their jobs. In the most recent iteration of Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace report, it is revealed that only very few people find their work meaningful or interesting. They note soberly that “the global aggregate fro... See more

Like love, parenthood, music, and mourning, work is one of the few concepts that anthropologists and travelers alike have been able to cling to when cast adrift in alien lands. For where spoken language or bewildering customs are an obstruction, the simple act of helping someone perform a job will often break down barriers far quicker than any clum... See more

At its most fundamental, work is always an energy transaction and the capacity to do certain kinds of work is what distinguishes living organisms from dead, inanimate matter.

The second problem is that beyond the energy we expend to secure our most basic needs—food, water, air, warmth, companionship, and safety—there is very little that is universal about what constitutes a necessity.

Many researchers interested in understanding our cognitive evolution have focused their efforts on revealing whether our closest primate relatives and other obviously smart creatures like whales and dolphins are capable of purposeful behavior in the same way that humans are. Being purposeful requires an intuitive grasp of causality, the ability to ... See more

Why do we now afford work so much more importance than our hunting and gathering ancestors did? Why, in an era of unprecedented abundance, do we remain so preoccupied with scarcity?

When economists define work as the time and effort we spend meeting our needs and wants, they dodge two obvious problems. The first is that often the only thing that differentiates work from leisure is context and whether we are being paid to do something or are paying to do it.