 Given the various forms of public anguish about the cost of living crisis, I thought it would be a good time to do another three-part special, focusing on the nature of how we live our lives, both today and in a distant past, to objectively question the basis of this modern lifestyle. The first book is Marshall Sarlin's Stone Age Economics, published 50 years ago in 1972. Beginning as a presentation in 1966, notes on the original affluent society, what Sarlin's challenge was the historic prejudice which dismissed the rights and values of undeveloped societies and their state of nature. I will not use the word primitive in this context as that is even more politically loaded. The idea of undeveloped societies lacking economic legitimacy and therefore supremacy over their land and resources had been evolved by figures such as Hobbes and Locke in the 17th century and was the basis of the justification which permitted the expropriation of land and the enslavement of peoples in Africa and the Americas under early European imperial expansion. As Sarlin says, The familiar conception makes assumptions peculiarly appropriate to market economies, that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improvable. Thus the gap between man's means and ends can be narrowed by industrial productivity. But it is also a zen road to affluence, departing from premises somewhat different from our own, that human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty with a low standard of living. Sarlin's revolutionary approach was to look upon the state of these peoples not as lesser or undeveloped, but as affluent, because they enjoyed something which people in the modern era with all their material wealth did not have, true economic freedom. Sarlin's work explores the way economic exchange in undeveloped societies was given value by directly creating their needs, rather than extracting surplus value from the control of property and the means of manufacture for a market. It prefigured recent activism by peasant movements around the world, as well as providing evidence to support 19th century theorists such as Proudhon. As Sarlin's notes, families in ancient societies were not self-sufficient, as defined by more recent hyper-individualist or libertarian models of autarchy. They worked collectively to obtain their needs, and the objectives of that process were broadly reciprocal, with the goal of supporting all rather than framed as a race for individual accumulation. As Sarlin says, As an economic rule, there is no class of landless paupers in primitive society, and not a systematic condition of the economic organisation. The producer's hold on their own economic means rules out the most compelling history as known, exclusive control of such means by some few, rendering dependent the many others. The modern concept of progress arose as the antithesis to defining undeveloped societies as having no value. Progress was given its own self-justifying logic by the Industrial Revolution, and became a driving social fetish during the rise of the consumer society. Sarlin's termed progress on its head. Firstly, in a society with minimal needs, the organised scarcity of industrial society and its inequalities does not exist. Secondly, where the means of production are practical skills, and the resources to utilise those skills are abundant and shared, free of property rights, it creates a completely different set of economic relationships in society based on the social value of transaction rather than the material value of the goods created. As Sarlin says, On a very broad view of cultural evolution, it is a question of the distribution of energy, skill and intelligence. In a primitive relation of man to tool, the balance of these is in favour of man. With the inception of the machine age, the balance swings definitively in favour of the tool. In undeveloped societies then, people did not work to buy consumer goods to express their freedom. People worked a few hours a day to obtain their basic needs for food and materials, and the rest of the time they made social goods to express their individual creativity, such as arts, crafts or music. Many criticisms of Sarlin's are based upon his application of economic theory, but there are deep political motivations at work here too. Sarlin's does not hold back and inferred criticism of the comparative material inequalities in modern society. For example, in medieval England, though people were poor, there was no general sense of destitution. That did not arise until the privatisation of common land between the 17th and 19th century, the resultant movement of rural populations into the first urban centres, and with it the enactment of the poor laws to control these destitute populations. Economic vested interests may find reasons to pick fault with Sarlin's observations, but those criticisms did not invalidate the broad historic patterns which Sarlin's work documents. In any case, Sarlin's conclusions did not propose a clear answer. I propose no definitive solution to the mystery, but I do have one such primitive theory of value that rates are set by social tact, notably the diplomacy of economic good measure appropriate to a confrontation between comparative strangers. At the same time, the guiding principle of generosity should give the agreed rate some semblance of the equilibrium. Though criticised and improved upon by many works since, Stone Age economics still stands as notable work. By examining the lives of ancient peoples, it questions the western paradigm of economic progress because, in terms of the individual, things may not have improved so radically after all, and in terms of the present day ecological crisis, it challenges modernity to define precisely what has progress done for us. Fifty years after its publication, it still deserves to be read so that we might gain that profound realisation too.