.So work is a consequence of a settled society – and so too is the more refined concept of a ‘job’. Once a society reaches a certain level of sophistication, it finds it has need of specialists. Skilled people such as blacksmiths, carpenters, bakers, tailors, doctors and priests needed long years of training in order to perform their roles – and could not do that if they had to spend all their time growing vegetables and tilling fields. So civilised society allowed certain skilled individuals to opt out of the business of producing food. In exchange for the specialised services they provided, they were permitted to live off some of the surplus that the rest of the community produced.