Die ursprüngliche Wohlstandsgesellschaft

With this short text, which was published in the 1970s as the first chapter of an entire volume on Stone Age Economics and is available for the first time in German translation, Marshall Sahlins breaks with the prevailing economic paradigm that more employees bring more prosperity. To this day, this paradigm is being proven wrong worldwide on a daily basis, giving the assumption of the original affluent society the explosive power it still has today: What if we had always been rich? And what shifts if we understand poverty not as a small amount of goods owned by individuals, but as a relationship between people? What the world-famous anthropologist outlines using empirical examples represents a radical theoretical break with the higher-faster-further that drives Western consumer society.If there is another way besides satisfying needs through ever greater production, then we should consider it again, especially in view of the depletion of our planet and the inequality in the distribution of participation: that wealth can also consist of desiring less.