What Abundance Built · Episode 1 of 8 · 39 min
What Abundance Really Is — and What People Build With It
Abundance is best understood as an energy and resource surplus, and surplus buys time that people reliably spend on culture: art, architecture, metalwork, ritual and shared story. The opening episode sets that thesis, previews five societies to come, and warns that the same surplus that built the cathedral also built the throne and the slave market under it.
Who's who
- V. Gordon ChildeArchaeologist who popularized the surplus-to-civilization story
- Marshall SahlinsAnthropologist who called foragers the original affluent society
- Ezra Klein+1 more episodeCo-author of the 2025 book Abundance
- Derek Thompson+1 more episodeCo-author of the 2025 book Abundance
Where it happens
- Pacific Northwest CoastSalmon societies that raised monuments without farming
- Basin of MexicoChinampa farming that fed Tenochtitlan
- Rapa Nui (Easter Island)+1 more episodeHome of the moai builders
- Guna Yala, Panama+3 more episodesLiving society where women sew molas
- Poverty Point, Louisiana+3 more episodesEarthworks built by people living on fish and waterfowl
Timeline
- c. 1700 BCEPoverty Point earthworks built without agriculture
- c. 1325-1521Tenochtitlan rises on chinampa agriculture
- 1860sPeruvian slave raids and epidemics crash Rapa Nui's population
- 1885Canada bans the potlatch; ban lifted in 1951
- March 2025Klein and Thompson publish Abundance
Still debated
Whether surplus causes civilization or merely permits it is increasingly qualified. Sahlins' picture of affluent foragers is also heavily critiqued, and Rapa Nui's pre-contact collapse is challenged by recent ancient DNA.
