How work has shaped society | James Suzman

**🌾 From Fire to Finance: The 3 Revolutions That Shaped Human Work** Nobody knows exactly *why* our ancestors traded the freedom of foraging for the toil of farming — but when they did, the world changed forever. 🔥 1️⃣ **Fire: The First Leap** The ability to control fire wasn’t just survival — it was the birth of *leisure*. Suddenly, humans could extract more energy from food, freeing up time and reshaping life itself. 2️⃣ **Farming: The Age of Debt & Discipline** Agriculture required future-thinking, debt, and discipline. You worked the land — or starved. It introduced concepts of property, labor, and reward. Even our word "capital" comes from "cattle" — because cows were our first real assets. 🐄 3️⃣ **Cities: The Creative Explosion** As cities rose, only a minority farmed. The rest? They turned surplus into *art, trade, and identity*. From butchers to potters, people built lives around work and community — creating pockets of the modern world long before our time. 🏙️ 🧠 But today, in our high-tech, automated age, this ancient system is cracking. Productivity is soaring — yet wealth is *deeply unequal*. The American Dream? Slipping away for most. The new challenge: to *engineer* a fairer system that suits the world we've actually built. 🛠️🌍 Folllow this Podcast for daily Episodes ------------ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices