Common usage indicates that "than us" is just fine. Remember English grammar doesn't come from a grammar book - grammar books are merely imperfect attempts to describe common English usage.
Carl Sagan did, I recall a quote of his talking about the composition of the brain and he says something along the lines of "to consider that we live in a universe which permits the construction of biological machines as intricate and as subtle as we"
EDIT: These downvotes confuse me. It is a matter of fact that there exists an entire non-trivial linguistic school of thought which holds a belief completely incompatible with what GP just presented as more or less indisputable. GP's authoritative tone is unjustified, regardless of which camp you happen to agree with.
The article argues that even when they had a chance to work more they didn't. Maybe they were all being shortsighted, or maybe that happened in a brief climactic golden age.
This article is somewhat surprising. It does not seem to account for variation in the intensity of work at different times, for example planting and harvest. At those times it's hard to imagine that people worked anything less than dawn to dusk to ensure they had food for the next year.
> Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.
I think the point the above poster is making is that "working hours" logged in these sources are very vague. Does the "175 days" in the English manor mean that these people had free time for the rest of the year? Or did the go and work second or third jobs to get by? Remember, only have the manor's records.
Meh, I think this lacks perspective. Maybe you 'worked' less in that era in the sense that you provided a smaller portion of your time to a third party for pay. But, you worked more overall. You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner; You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer, then an hour creating clothing, then an hour cooking, then an hour mending the hole in your roof, etc.
it's not only due to the work but to the solitude as well. there used to be 70% of the population, men and women farming and living in farming communities, now only 3%, mostly men, actually working and not many people around
Remember that people didn’t really have money. Most folks subsisted or tended a few animals.
Capitalism wasn’t a thing, and the society was fundamentally different. People were in caste like social strata and did what they were supposed to do, no more.
We recently read Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods to the kids. The parents’ life was non-stop work from sun-up to sundown and beyond, and while there was some downtime in the winter, everyone was basically homebound. It did not seem like a bad life at all, but then I think there is an eternal virtue to hard work that is only tangentially related to sitting at a desk in the modern era.
I post this quote a lot, but I your point made me think of it again: "It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of society as a whole." - Ursula K LeGuin
Nobody has to like everything. I like cooking, I hate doing dishes and cleaning. I know people who hate cooking and enjoy dishes. It is good to have a mix of complementary skills and preferences in a household.
It's a hell of a thing when, as a cook, you can stand up from a good dinner you made and walk away from the mess knowing that your roommate Barry wants to have a quiet hour of not talking to anyone doing the dishes and tidying the kitchen because he has actually been looking forward to it and that's what gives him peace. The same peace I got from chopping vegetables and stirring pots.
I've even met someone who likes doing laundry! They wash and iron their own dress shirts despite being perfectly able to pay an inexpensive dry cleaner and describe it as "Cheaper than seeing a shrink".
You make it sound as if washing and ironing is a massive chore.
Let's say you have 5 shirts a week. Step 1: When you do your white wash, throw in the shirts. Hang them up afterwards. Incremental cost: 2 minutes of your time... Step 2: When you do ironing, incremental cost of 5 shirts @ 3 minutes per shirt is 15 minutes... Probably less that your two trips to the dry cleaner. Plus, nil $ cost, no plastic wrapping to throw away, no use of dry cleaning chemicals.
I recently experienced this with a specific work-related task, where I was shocked to find myself enjoying doing something that I usually hate. When I asked myself what the difference was, the only thing I could come up with was that during this particular run-through, it was the only time that I wasn't rushing through the task while thinking about what came next.
Any additional insight into what's going on here? I'd love to wield this power to help myself love other things that I hate.
There are many definitions of cooking. Do you hate cooking for thanksgiving, when step-parents are coming for supper on sunday or when you slap peanut butter on loaves of bread ?
This seems counter-intuitive, if you consider the work choices throughout history. People who had no choice did all the "direct benefit" work (cooking, cleaning, etc) whereas those with money engaged in a bunch of pursuits with no clear benefits, just for the sake of it: science, theoretical math, philosophy, art, etc. Often the fruits of their work only came after their deaths.
Aside from hunting and clothing (which a not-insignificant portion of families still partake in) these are still modern concerns? Homeownership isn't exactly a life of leisure.
It's a a plain fact that there are far more feast days and ecclesiastical holidays than federal holiday. In America, you're lucky to get a guaranteed 10 days off.
May be same could be said of your perspective and the comment thereof. It’s all relative. Your idea of you and you working is totally relative too. You are nothing but a collection of cells which never stop working until they all do together. By that logic nobody ever had free time.
To make it more concrete, I strongly suspect that pre-industrial people did not have any leisure equivalent activity to the five hours a day that the average American spends watching TV.
That is not universally true. I would much rather work (at my employer) than do household stuff. I like to cook but I still by the pre-planned bags with recipes since I don't like the planning part. But I pay someone else to clean my home since i rather work.
Firstly, what are you working in exchange for? Are you performing some kind of useful work for someone else, receiving nothing in exchange then going and being a hunter gatherer for some reason? Probably not.
>You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner
Money has existed for a very long time so purchasing food ready to eat isn't so far fetched assuming your life took you near a non-trivial population center. Bartering goods like food, clothing etc has existed for even longer.
>You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer, then an hour creating clothing, then an hour cooking, then an hour mending the hole in your roof, etc.
It reads as if you are assuming that a given individual is going to have to do everything, which doesn't seem to have been the norm for most humans. Most people didn't live alone. Instead of doing all of that maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer. Meanwhile someone else created clothing, someone else cooked, someone else mended the roof.
Its also worth noting that all of these jobs have a very well defined point of being done. It doesn't matter if it takes you 2 hours or 20 minutes to acquire food. Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.
You should look into inflation. Most jobs pre-industrialization absolutely would not provide you food with delivery or several shirts in exchange for a couple hours of unskilled labor (which is what you can get today).
I'm not sure it's what the parent comment is doing, but it's beyond baffling to me when I see this view in the wild. You'd have to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, economics, and basic arithmetic to think that historical incomes were anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods, and yet I see this very often. (Not to be mistaken with more reasonable arguments that rely on the differences in utility derived from goods whose prices have gone down and goods afflicted by cost disease)
Well, one also has to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, culture, and social understanding, to think that historical cultural concerns where anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods and buying more stuff...
You could be perfectly content (and more happy than most office drones with 1000x the stuff) with a couple of clothe articles, food and a basic home...
And even if you replace "office drone stuff" with more highbrow items... You really don't need a lot of books either. I'd die an accomplished man if I grokked what's on ~2m of my modest bookshelf. Hell, if that was all what was available at me, I'd probably get there sooner.
> Well, one also has to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, culture, and social understanding, to think that historical cultural concerns where anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods and buying more stuff..
Uh, sure? This is a complete non sequitur, as nobody is making the claim you're describing. If you actually read my full comment, I address this directly by saying that it's a much more reasonable argument that utility from all goods isn't equally distributed and the important ones haven't gotten easier to get at the same rate as the unimportant ones.
That doesn't mean that it's not incredibly factually inaccurate to think that access to consumer goods hasn't become mind-bogglingly higher
Most farmers lived on farms. They actually did have to make a lot of their stuff themselves. Yes, you had a large family, but you needed that to be able to survive.
>Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.
You would salt and preserve the meat/fish and consume it in the future.
Imagine how you would live, if you could only buy metalworks from the store. Basically everything else you'd have to make yourself.
>You would salt and preserve the meat/fish and consume it in the future.
That is very environment specific.
Depending on when/where you are salt was expensive or extremely laborious to produce. Salting, smoking etc is itself laborious, can require special purpose equipment and can take weeks. Its entirely possible that the effort to obtain the supplies and equipment to preserve your surplus food exceeds the effort to simply obtain more food in the future.
There is a reason why salting/pickling/fermentation was common in places that had winters severe enough to impact the availability of food Vs anywhere closer to the equator. People did it when they faced a large chunk of the year when starvation was a serious concern.
No, they really worked less hours including those things, and it has been studied a lot. In fact, a lot of the work was those things precisely.
(Not that there's anything great to come home dead tired from a 10 hour day at the office + commute, and then have the "amazing" convenience to "order food for dinner").
You can still see it in societies that don't have our lifestyles. Go to a blue zone like in Ikaria (where people live in much longer age than average, often reaching 90-100). People tend to their farms some time of the season, do things leisurely, take noon naps, stay up late with friends to eat and drink (late as in, 2-3 am is not uncommon), and so on. Giving less fucks seems a major factor in those "blue zones" (I've also researched a similar one in Italy).
Heck, several french farmers have told me how their grown children in supposedly fancy city jobs (programming, banking, etc) work twice as much as they ever did, and still have a less enjoyable lifestyle.
French farmers and farmers in the EU have a lot of support from the CAP (subsidy). Having said that there are a lot of pressures suicides etc farming Is not some dream job.
If I was to visualize a Venn Diagram of people who write articles such as this on mit.edu and the people reading them, and my other circle being people who get the short end of the stick of capitalism, I see very little overlap.
It's true there are skilled workers that love what they do, and their jobs allow them to exert influence -- so they are motivated to work long hours (versus, say, a worker assembling widgets on a factory line).
Something about that dichotomy of the people who have the luxury of choosing how much to work, writing about how we work longer, is something I find interesting. The management class of workers are the ones who have the most influence on the working hours of an organization's individual contributors.
The federal reserve has a mandate. Maximum employment and price stability. There is no preservation of wealth or store of value. Any excess is soaked up by fed policy to maximize labor.
Seriously. Read the mandate at the feds website and process it literally.
I wonder how much more egalitarian forms of government are a factor.
If you have a fixed amount of land to farm, there's only so much work you can do. If you give the king or the bishop your excess crops, there's only so much motivation to work.
Whereas with good abstractions and maintainability, software can grow the pie/field significantly. It's not completely irrespective of hours and is totally contextual to how innovative/novel the challenge is. But there's still the potential for a multiplier that doesn't exist in farming, short of biological breakthroughs.
42 hours in Switzerland is IMHO a lie. I’ve seen and experienced tech and pharma setting expectations so high that people have to work at least 50-60 hours.
Don't you have anything like the Working Time Directive? I know Switzerland is not an EU member but then neither is Norway but we adhere to it as part of the obligations that we have regarding access to the Single Market.
> That's not really true. Once you exclude people who died in childhood the average life expectancy shoots up.
An entertaining use of the word "true".
Yes, if you exclude a lot of the data, the average changes :)
Sarcasm aside, that is an important point in average life span statistics, but doesn't change the point that preindustrial life was "Nasty, brutish and short", as the old saying goes.
Also, 1850s England was the richest place on earth, almost a century into industrialism. Already a vastly elevated existence compared to our "natural state".
Your own numbers say that the richest population in the world in 1850 - way into industrialization - died at 55 on average, after ignoring child mortality. Which BTW means they watched maybe 1/4 of their children die.
If any population lived like that today, their lives would certainly be called nasty, brutish and short.
OK, the nasty and brutish part might not have been huge.
Modern medicine is great, but it turns out to not add that many years to our life spans. Mostly money does. Or more likely, the healthy lives money buys.
Put in other words, it's much better to not get sick than to have great health care!
(I'm not just bullshitting here, this is what the data shows (not that I have any links with proofs to show (so feels free to not believe this :)))
Poverty is usually measured relatively to the perceived average of your environment’s wealth because that is how poverty affects your life.
You can be 100 times as rich as some poor soul in a third world country and still be so poor in your own society that you are constantly struggling, fighting for survival, skipping meals and inheriting that struggle to your kids who are born into them without much chances of getting out.
This could be because the poor soul can maybe life decently within their society off a hundreth of the cost you have (sometimes you even just need to be a good hunter and be able to build some shelter).
The average societal wealth definition of poor used in sociology is not without critics of course, but you can ask yourself if 30 times the income buys 30 times as much rent today and helps you to sustain 30 times as many families (all costs and benefits considered). The income gap between rich and poor is higher today than it ever was under any industrial rule — I wish I’d be able to share your optimism, but considering the average top manager’s salery (including bonuses for failing upwards and fucking shit up) my optimism about the altruistic nature of today’s wealth distribution seems to vanish just a little too quickly..
I didn’t come up with that definition of poverty, it is the definition used by UNICEF,
UNDP (The United Nations Children's Fund) and the OECD.
And there certainly is discussion about that definition, but other poverty definitions also fail to capture certain aspects of poverty (e.g. the World Bank’s poverty line).
It isn’t status, when bith of your parents work full time and you still don’t get to eat on the last days of the week. That is poverty.
First of all, I don't know why we're discussing the word "poverty". I talked about "30x the income", never mentioned "poverty".
But let's talk about the word.
By the UNICEF/UNDP/etc definition of "poverty", poverty can never be eradicated. There will always be people below average, as any math teacher can explain to you.
In a "Richistan" society comprised only of dollar millionaires and billionaires, the least wealthy millionaires will be living in "poverty".
> It isn’t status, when both of your parents work full time and you still don’t get to eat on the last days of the week. That is poverty.
...but now you've jumped to absolute poverty measures! Those "Richistan poor" could easily dine in fine restaurants every day.
We’re arguing semantics, but if a working poor in the US has to work 50 hour weeks and 3 jobs (due to low status maybe —- livable income but high costs for transport, rent, debt and healthcare ect) to get food and shelter, that’s still poverty. A farmer in Eastern Europe could have much more freedom over their life while still earning less in absolute terms.
There’s no inherent reason why relative low status has to turn into slavery in practice, that’s a choice made by society.
The question of absolute material wealth is still relevant and interesting, but it is mostly a different question.
I invite you to try getting a mate or date while being a poor man in north america and see how it effects your mental and physical health.
You're a god moron, status matters and if you don't think it does you need to have your status and health reduced so you can feel what it's like to be on the receiving end.
And I invite you to ask yourself why UNICEF uses “my” definition.
I nowhere said that I don’t see that definition without problems or that I wholeheartedly stand behind it. Another definition used by the World Bank is the poverty line, which fails to capture other aspects of poverty (e.g. two parents with full time jobs unable to pay the rent in a rich society).
The definitions of poverty are a huge topic in sociology and economy and if you feel they misrepresent reality, go ahead and make a better one.
Maybe? It depends on whether that extra income makes people happier. I know people struggling to get buy on $4-500k/year. And I know people who live happily on a much smaller amount.
For me, the marginal value of a dollar diminishes pretty quickly, so the extra effort typical of the American schedule is definitely not worth it to me.
...what? Almost all of that 30x is because of better technology, not the number of hours. We could switch to something like 32 hour weeks, 40 work weeks per year, and still have a truly enormous GDP.
The value of extra income drops the more you have. All else equal, more money per hour should decrease the number of hours worked. The biggest exception is when you're taking advantage of a great deal to save up now and retire or half-retire early, but even that is still reducing your lifetime average work hours per year.
Humanity is stupendously rich, by the standards of all previous generations, and yet most of us work like crazy, certainly including many of the richest ones.
Or maybe we're talking about slightly different things?
Sure, many spend 8 hours at the office. But do they do 8 hours of work? Probably not. There are diminishing returns on time spent working, and it probably starts around the third hour.
I don't disagree with you. The average eight hour office worker probably only does do four hours of work a day. But I think the problem is that that nearly everyone has internalized that cadence.
If every office worker had their schedule cut to a 20 hours a week, I strongly suspect that only 10 hours of work would actually get done. It's just too much of the low efficiency is culturally ingrained on every level from the cultural to the organizational. It would probably take a generation for things to change.
I beg to differ. Everywhere I've worked, people have despised the waiting built into the processes they have to conform to. Many roles are constructed so that they're actually two roles: one is pure productivity, with clear goals and deadlines. The other is some sort of service role where you're at the beck and call of clients who could waltz in whenever, defined less by your productivity than by your availability (which is always meant to keep you in an workplace for 6+ hours). Switching between roles is aggravating; effectiveness at one kills the other, to some degree. Most would rather just do one at a time, and be paid for either the time sacrificed or the work completed, at a dignified rate.
But that would cut into C-suite bonuses and dividends.
> But that would cut into C-suite bonuses and dividends.
I beg to differ. I think, the mixture of work items as you describe is solely motivated on fear that employees may produce less if not under 8hours control in open plan office. The fear however may not have anything to do with the reality.
With coders, that's clearly not the case right? Coding requires immersion. Same person working on same thing 60 hours per week will make a lot more progress per hour than if he worked 20 hours.
In the freelance world, this is name of the game: recruiters want people to work as much per week as possible for this reason, freelancers want to work as little as possible (that improves their skills quicker by working on many things at same time, plus provides job security of having 3-4 clients at same time so they are unlikely to all fire at same time).
Some kinds of coding do benefit from lack of interruption, so that's can be an argument for very focused work. But one way coding is different than, say, factory work or service work, is that our errors accumulate. It takes just seconds to put a bug in, but hours or days to take it out again. So anybody working long enough to get tired will very quickly hit diminishing returns. There's a nice presentation on this from a while back: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...
I also have come to be suspicious of the "hyperfocus for many hours to get large amounts of state into my head" approach to coding. Code I have to be extremely clever to write usually ends up being a giant pain in the ass to maintain. These days I think it's better to use things like unit tests, pair programming, and very frequent releases to get things done.
This article isn't about office workers. It's about workers. Laborers are doing 8+ hour days, too, and they would not be equally productive in half the time. There's a reason it tends to pay by the hour.
Let's compare apples to apples. Office jobs didn't exist in the medieval period, but labor jobs still exist today.
The small number is irrelevant. The OP said office jobs did not exist in medieval times. This is quite clearly an incorrect statement. I am perfectly happy to debate whether pointing this out is relevant to the point being made, but I stand by my assertion.
But those were the people that could actually read and write. Most people were illiterate. Only those privileged with status and wealth could have access to reading materials (and they would be the only people that would even desire them), and they were only men.
Cut the shifts in half and people work less individually while more people overall have job opportunities. As a benefit, working shorter shifts would result in more rested workers who would theoretically be more productive or at least have less chance of mistakes.
This would either halve incomes or double labor costs. Any improvements in individual productivity would be offset by the new logistical nightmare (especially for knowledge workers) of coordinating with twice as many team members to accomplish the same amount of work.
This seems like a recipe for skyrocketing costs.
> One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.
Hours spent working is hardly the same thing as quantifying human toll. Most people in agrarian society subsisted on a near-starvation diet, to the point where most women would not get their period until their late teens and early 20s. If you go to a civil war museum you might be surprised at how small the uniforms are - lower diets pushed average heights down by several inches. Antibiotics were non-existent so infections were lethal at drastically higher rates than they are today. Mortality between the ages of 0-20 averaged ~50%, and life expectancy at 20 was usually in the 40s or 50s. Due to this high mortality rate, the births per woman required to form the replacement rate was 6-8 (this is counted of the women that survive to adulthood, raw BPW is about half that). This meant that women effectively had to spend most of their adult lives bearing and caring for children, a big reason why agrarian societies are overwhelmingly patriarchal. Rates of literacy and education did vary, and were as high as 40% in some agrarian societies, but were still far lower than the >90% rate we see in most countries today. And I'm not even going to dig into the can of worms that is the amount of slavery that occurred in agrarian society that was displaced by industrialization.
Capitalism may have a higher demand in terms of hours worked in explicit employment, but I doubt many today would genuinely trade life in a capitalist country for life in a pre-industrial society.
All of what you said is why poverty is usally seen as a relative value — it is relative to the perceived average of the wealth of the society you live in.
A society that continuosly sustains high degrees of poverty under that definition, usually needs a narrative for why the poor people deserve to be poor and why the rich people deserve to be rich. Centuries ago (depending on the place) this might have been still been religion: you have been born into a poor life and those in the lead have been born as leaders and there is nothing you can/ought to do about it.
Today individualism takes that function: you are responsible for beeing poor, even if you have been born into it. But you can become a billionaire if you want — it is just very hard. This means also those who are billionaires must have worked very very hard and so deserve their wealth.
Rich people usually inherit their wealth tho, which makes a fool of the whole narrative and suggests who profits from it.
Beeing poor means to struggle to make ends meet every day and despite optimization efforts fail to do exactly that every now and then. You can have a hundred times the absolute wealth of someone in a different society and still be poorer than them in that you struggle for survival, while they do okay for the society thwy are in.
> Beeing poor means to struggle to make ends meet every day and despite optimization efforts fail to do exactly that every now and then. You can have a hundred times the absolute wealth of someone in a different society and still be poorer than them in that you struggle for survival, while they do okay for the society thwy are in.
This doesn't seem right to me. Would you rather live as a middle class person, say 50th percentile in terms of wealth, in medieval Europe (which, despite being middle class still means 50% child mortality, little or no education, no effective medicine, etc.) Or a lower class person today - say 20th percentile by wealth. The latter is making $18,000 a year which will be tough to get by. But I'd still take that over any sort of pre-industrial life without hesitation.
> Capitalism may have a higher demand in terms of hours worked in explicit employment, but I doubt many today would genuinely trade life in a capitalist country for life in a pre-industrial society.
You are projecting the circumstances of Northern Europe. But this is a tough place to get by. So is Northern China etc.
On the other end of the spectrum on some islands in Indonesia people need no more then 7 days of work per year to put a food on a table (from sago palm).
Naturaly people would rather live where resources are abundant and living is easy.
Poverty in Indonesia has been decreasing with less than 10% falling below the international poverty line (which is the minimum amount needed to get food and shelter)[1]. Using them as a poster child of impoverishment seems to draw more on stereotype rather than fact. And again, the baseline needs to be compared against pre-industrial circumstances: do you really think that the average Indonesian wants to turn back th clock to pre-industrial Indonesia? That would be disastrous, the islands likely could not even support its current population levels without industrialization.
You missed my point. I have lived in Indonesia and traveled there a lot. The example is from book by Elisabeth Pisani [1].
My whole point is that you can still find places where living in preindustrial capitalism is fairly easy due to abundance of Nature. There were many more places like this ages ago maybe not like this particular example but without much hardship. Mediterraneans comes to mind. Thats it.
> My whole point is that you can still find places where living in preindustrial capitalism is fairly easy due to abundance of Nature.
Any my point is, no you can't. No preindustrial society lives "fairly easy", at least not unless you have a very different conception of "fairly easy" living. Even in the pre-industrial Mediterranean, people lived on near-starvation diets and routinely died of easily treatable illnesses. Average adult male height was bewteen 5'2" and 5'4" in the ancient Mediterranean, based on skeletal evidence. Child mortality was in the 50% range. Most women had no opportunities besides child-rearing and domestic work. No amount of natural abundance can replace antibiotics and industrialized goods like contraceptives, communication, medicine, etc.
If you have the conception that living off the abundance of Nature is at all easy, I highly suggest you dig deeper into this subject. During the 1960s to around the 1980s this idea that the state of nature is idyllic was popular. But as data on the lives of pre-industrial and pre-agricultural societies became more available all but the most ardent supporters of naturalistic idealism arrived at the conclusion that pre-industrial society is a lot worse than life in an industrialized society. Violence, and inability to provide for basic necessities is drastically lower in industrialized societies than it was in preindustrial societies.
Who said that we have to trade current life for pre-industrial? Learning from the advantages of pre-industrial life and applying them now, is the point of the article, not regression.
The author did, when she wrote that it is a myth that capitalism did not reduced human toll. Using number of days spent working per year in a pre-industrial society and comparing it with a modern work week is incredibly naive. The increase in human "toll" caused by this increase in work is drastically offset by the benefits that this work produces: all the amenities we take for granted living in a post-industrial society.
Hell even during WWII, less than 100 years ago, people were smaller. The draft board rejected a tremendous number for stunted growth etc. That's why we have the 'free lunch program' at public schools today - to ensure a good supply of citizens with good nutrition for military service!
And every year 4% of them died from measles, and every now and then half would die from a pandemic. In between pandemics their growth and mental development would usually be stunted, to some degree, by malnutrition.
In America, at least, we should consider the legacy of slavery and indentured servitude in attitudes towards working hours. Many of the expectations for economic output by American industry have been set by the productivity of people who had little or no right to question the conditions they worked under, overseen by people who cared little for their well-being beyond that productivity. If that's the basis of the American work ethic, no wonder your boss looks at you like you're crazy when you say you'd like to be able to live comfortably on 30 hours of labor a week.
There are plenty bosses like this in Germany, which doesn't have as much of a history of slavery.
I'd wager that when looking at countries with roughly the same level of industrialization, whether humans view fellow humans as something more than mere resources is linked to a certain set of attitudes.
I'd guess that reduced working hours are positively correlated to pluralism and pacifism, and perhaps negatively correlated to religiousness.
The more you think that life ought to be lived a certain way, the more likely you are to see work as a savior from straying from that way.
Looking at countries that have severely mistreated minorities, natives or remote people might also reveal a correlation, the more so the less this is part of the public consciousness.
Just an anecdote from quitting yesterday at a German IG-Metall company:
Yesterday I quitted my working student job in order to precipitately take the opportunity for an internship at another company.
My boss congratulated me for the offer, said it's a pity that I leave AND
spoke with HR so that I do have a shorter period of notice (otherwise I would have had problems).
All on the same day.
While accompanying me on my way out he said that especially with students, he invests in people. The doors are always open and he would be glad to see me there again.
In fact, he recommended a former student worker to join another company before graduation in order to have a better looking CV.
Im kinda blown away by this non-selfish (in a company's view) behaviour and strongly consider to rejoin at some point.
I received a similar experience choosing an offer from a different tech company over staying at my current one in the US. I could still easily return today even though it’s been three years.
Only stupid companies get angry at employees lured away by others.
If the behavior is rewarded, it is not altruistic but self-interested, which is the true nature of things that capitalism rewards. It is not true in the general case that altruism aligns with self-interest, which is precisely the problem with capitalism.
> It is not true in the general case that altruism aligns with self-interest
Actually, it is true. Treating your customers, employees and associates results in them wanting to do business with you, which increases profits. Treat them badly, they go away and deal with someone else.
Put simply, you aren't going to go the extra mile for someone you hate.
Oh man, either you have a completely different experience than me or you don't know what it's like working elsewhere.
I'm Israeli & spent the last 6 years living in Germany. I lived in Austria for 8 years before that. Israel is quite a dog-eat-dog hyper-capitalism kind of economy, maybe not to the wild extent of the US but definitely closer to it than to Germany & Austria (the two countries have very similar culture/attitudes in this particular area).
While there are plenty of asshole bosses here, the kind of attitude common in hyper-capitalist countries is not comparable. Even the assholes will not dare publicly espouse the kind of Libertarian anti-working-class vitriol in a Berlin working place (or even outside of it).
How often did you hear your German boss say that the state should not offer welfare as it's just supporting laziness? Or that "taxes are theft"? That whatever work "the free market" doesn't directly support via consumers spending money should not exist (e.g. publicly funded theatre)?
Maybe anti-poor is a better description? Could also be that I only notice the assholes and the milder form of libertarians just don't stick out as much :)
No. Libertarians are against any sort of class system (i.e. legal privileges for certain groups). They are neither anti-rich nor anti-poor. Of course, there are libertarians who are jerks, but that isn't what Libertarianism is about. Also, most people only hear about Libertarianism from non-Libertarians, hence they only hear negative things about it.
Libertarianism is mainly about people being free to choose, and being responsible for their choices, as long as they aren't hurting others in the process.
Milton Friedman's book "Free to Choose" is a good introduction if you're interested in more.
The process of making sure people aren't hurting others is called "government" and "regulation", which self-professed Libertarians appear to be against. They say things like "the FDA is stupid, the free market will sort it out" - when the FDA was created because the free market was killing people.
Vis a vis classism, if you refuse to regulate and allow everyone to be "free to choose", you are essentially advocating a dog-eat-dog world where people with money and power consolidate more and more of it. This is "feudalism" and it generally results in a raw deal for the poor.
>Milton Friedman's book "Free to Choose" is a good introduction if you're interested in more.
At some point you have to acknowledge the irony at refusing to see Libertarianism as anti-poor ideology, while simultaneously pointing people to a man who worked (and trained others to work with at the University if Chicago) far right dictators like Pinochet.
(Ironically, you say Libertarian Friedman supported far right dictator Pinochet and the other reply says Libertarianism is for no government at all. Clearly something is amiss with these two criticisms of Libertarianism.)
Eh, I’ll take Allende’s ambassador, Orlando Letelier’s, word on the matter over a bunch of apologists on a subreddit (who largely and laughably quote what Friedman and his buddies said was there involvement). Letelier was killed by agents of Pinochet for saying as much:
It seems a wrong conflation of Libertarianism and Anarchism.
I already pointed you to one of Allende’s chief advisors identifying Friedman as providing the direct, ideological grounding for the Chilean coup, so I’m not sure what more evidence you want.
What Friedman said in his speeches and wrote in books is not the sum total of his work and ideology. There’s also what he did, who he allied himself with, etc. He was remarkably consistent in denouncing his detractors as part of a “communist conspiracy,” while at the same time being remarkably callous about things like the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Tiennamen Square massacre. So I find appeals to him as some undaunted supporter of “freedom” specious at best.
> I already pointed you to one of Allende’s chief advisors identifying Friedman as providing the direct, ideological grounding for the Chilean coup, so I’m not sure what more evidence you want.
Something from Friedman himself, not filtered through hearsay. Friedman has a very large body of work you can draw from. If he's a fascist, you should be able to find it in that work.
I don’t think Friedman was a fascist. I think he was a sophist who had no problem working with or lending support to fascists when he thought it served his interests and ingratiated him to him to elites in the economic and political milieu in which he operated.
Again, on the one hand you have someone who fled Chile and was murdered by the Pinochet regime and someone who flew into give speeches and pal around with the junta. I’m sorry if I weigh the account of the former more than that of the latter.
Again, your information is hearsay. I'm asking you if you have any words from Friedman's mouth or his typewriter. If he was the terrible person you say he was, there should be plenty in a lifetime of output from him.
Besides, do you really believe someone could talk with Pinochet for 45 minutes and thereby turn him into a monster? It's not credible. It's more likely Pinochet used Friedman for propaganda value, and stroked Friedman's ego. People who run governments tend to be users and tend to be masters at stroking ego.
I once had a conversation with a Senator whom I despised. He was incredibly charming in person. I can easily see falling under the spell of someone like that.
Frankly, you don't like libertarianism, which is your choice, but if this 45 minute conversation with Pinochet (for which no transcript exists) is all you have, it isn't much of anything.
I still think it's ironic that libertarianism's detractors claim it's both about no government at all and oppressive, authoritarian regimes. Clearly both positions can't be right, and likely neither.
> There are plenty bosses like this in Germany, which doesn't have as much of a history of slavery.
Excuse me? My grandma was a slave worker in Germany. Kidnapped from the streets of Warsaw and forcefully moved to Southwest Germany to work for a rich farmer.
I purposefully wrote "not as much of", because NS-Zwangsarbeit was indeed massive.
It happened in the main part from 1939-1945, with a total of 8 million people enslaved at one point or another.
On the other hand, US slavery went on for three centuries, with a peak number of 4 million slaves and also about 8 million affected in total.
The time scale is why I think there is a major difference, both in terms of life years stolen as well as in terms of possible social and cultural adaptation or accustomizaton to slavery, the latter being the point of the OP.
Let's first get everyone on an even playing field. 40 hours is a laughable suggestion to many workers right now. If you could promise every worker that they have to work 40 hours a week for the rest of their life but that OT was forever banned after, I don't think you'd hear many complaints ever again.
Some might want to earn more money so they can retire earlier. Others might actually like their jobs. I've seen people work 10-20 hours more regularly without anyone asking them to.
You haven't worked on the line or a traditional factory job then? There are a lot of "practices" to power game your pay by working in such a way to ensure there is Overtime or to optimise your piece rate.
For example in the UK don't post a first class letter on Friday as work is deliberately kept back to ensure there is OT at the weekend.
This is a boatload of pop culture brainwashed hullabaloo spewed by a foreigner.
The basis of the American work ethic is in dreaming. Clearly, you've chosen to disregard the centuries of European, African, Oriental and S./Central American slavery, ritual sacrifice, imperialism and almost constant war and subjugation.
But, you know - the intentional racism instilled by the English must be the lingering driver of American commerce and ambition.
I'm an American. Pretending that New World slavery was not of a different, more brutal character than others is a white supremacist talking point and I'm not really here for it. Try something else.
If you look at hours per worked per family, things have gotten even way worse since woman were drafted en mass into the salaried workforce post ww2, going from a 40hr week to well over 70hrs.
It may be "work" but it's not the same work. Your boss is your family and its well-being when you do housework. It's not the same as someone who doesn't care about you.
I hate housework WAY more than “work work”. At least work has the possibility of being something new/interesting rather than the grinding tedium of washing the same plates, floors, furniture and clothes day after day after day.
I specifically mentioned 'salaried' work, as monetary income has a direct impact on prices. 2 salaries is now expected and often required for many families.
Not to mention that the work that had previously been the full time focus of the stay-at-homer (cleaning house, gardening, doing dishes, grocery shopping, misc shopping, cooking breakfast, preparing work lunch, preparing dinner) is still being done. Only now it’s being done after traditional working hours or on weekends.
>If you look at hours per worked per family, things have gotten even way worse since
No, they've got markedly better because of child labor laws. Kids during pre-industrial revolution time periods didn't just go of to daycare, football camp, elementary school... they did as much work as they were capable alongside their parents.
In fact, this still happens to some extent even in the United States on family owned farms. Once you're old enough to handle chores, you're out there mucking stalls or feeding horses/chickens/pigs, then when you're older and more capable you are driving equipment, mending fence, replacing fence posts, moving hay, servicing equipment.
For an easy look at this, just do a Google dive into FFA (Future Farmers of America). 670k kids across the country doing their various farming activities with the motto "Learning to Do, Doing to Learn, Earning to Live, Living to Serve"
I believe at the height of Imperial Rome, workers almost had one day off for every day worked. The Romans did use a lot of space labor, so that may also have something to do with it.
Imperial Rome enslaved the martians, and as a result creates an entire lower caste of space laborers. Over time they could not adapt to earth and their species went extinct. This resulted in the dark ages.
It seems like they’re just excluding domestic labor from their calculus. The fact that people had breaks from farming tasks doesn’t mean they were filling that time with medieval Netflix.
I have a hobby: when I meet Americans I'm starting to tell them how lazy we Europeans tackle working. I mean the work / life balance for us means nothing since we do life first then work.
And I'm telling them another thing: for me it seems in America everybody is working. The president, the millionaire, the middle and lower classes. Nobody does the `healthy meaninglessness`.
Of course all these are friendly provocations. What surprises me is the cognitive dissonance they cause.
On the topic of "healthy meaninglessness" and somewhat related to the discussions around Universal Basic Income, I think Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" is a mandatory read.
"One day's work was considered half a day, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two days-works." I've been saying this for years with programming and tickets! 4 hours a day is a full days work. If you can get a 4 hour ticket done each day you are right on pace. If you can get two 4 hour tickets done in one day, that's double pace!
> called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks.
They didn't exactly have a choice with the food. It's needed if you genuinely spend a hard day working. People used to make drinks for laborers containing things like molasses here in the US.
I admit we've lost the afternoon nap, but I'm not sure why. It does happen elsewhere. The China office at previous job worked long hours and all napped at their desks in the afternoon.
I think there is absolutely no need every adult person needs to work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. We might just as well work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. It seems to me, this is just a matter of how the market pressures people to spend as much time as possible at work vs how much work most people can tolerate.
How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their household and there are countries when it is mostly male parent that does the same with same effect. Yet, there is not much difference in their capability to provide, it seems in cases of both types of countries the system settled and regulated itself.
10h 4 days a week to keep the 40h work week. But it also depends on the type of work. I think desk jobs would benefit more than manual labour form longer days(asuming same total). As the mind and body recovers differently.
I don't understand this presumably American fixation with the 40 hour week. It's almost 10% longer than the default UK week which is already too long. Having worked both and currently on 36.75 there's still a huge amount of slack and wasted time assuming software development or other office jobs.
> I don't understand this presumably American fixation with the 40 hour week.
Not just America. We have elections coming up in Saxony (a state in East Germany), so I watched a 2-hour interview with the current MP from the conservative party (the same party as Angela Merkel). When it came to the topic of UBI and automation, he adamantly refused to consider any policy that would move away from the 40-hour work week. He meant that there were so many challenges ahead of us, we couldn't afford to lose any of our precious working hours. His mantra seems to be "Work harder, not smarter".
> His mantra seems to be "Work harder, not smarter".
Bavarian here. Your MP is a nutjob, as is Söder and the rest of the conservatives. The point is that conservatives (as well as the FDP and the AfD) focus primarily on the needs of the businesses which means keeping to old Prussian traditions no matter what.
Remote work may influence this. Commuting to a workplace just to do the things you might as well do from home will be considered old-fashioned, inefficient and/or shameful in a few years, if my crystal ball is not lying.
There are ways to work around that problem remotely.
When working similar to the Basecamp guys it's even the other way around.
Write problems down and give people time to chew on them. Everyone adds his thoughts and refining the idea will lead to better results than a two hours meeting.
Our team comes in the office once a week for some face time. But we have plenty of face time throughout the week on Webex Teams. We've eliminated the friction for remote face time.
If anything, it's an improvement over the in-office because instead of interrupting someone at work, we politely message someone (or the team) about doing a quick call once it's convenient for them.
Not only have others suggested the reduction of the week to 4 days, but if you manage to de-align everyone's work week then commuting can become faster. And de-centralising work (not necessarily to the home!) can also improve the commuting situation.
That's optimistic. I have what I think has to be about as close to optimal a bike commute as it's possible to get in the US (nearly all separated bike paths, minimal risk of getting hit be a car). I wouldn't call it particularly enjoyable, much less one of the best parts of my day. It's just a thing I do a couple times a week because I hate going to the gym even more and it saves a bit of gas.
Countries where it's normal for both parents to work rely on a serf class, usually of immigrant women, to care for their children at terrible wages so both parents can work. I wonder how long this can be sustainable.
They who work in the daycares are not a "serf class", they are paid professionals, and they don't need to have "terrible wages" in a civilized country.
Sure, they don't need to have terrible wages. Do they though? Are daycare workers a healthy mix of educated men and women with a lot of other economic opportunities but choose to be daycare workers because of the pay or emotional rewards?
Where I’m from (slovenia) you need to major in kindergarten education to be a kindergarten teacher. So while the major is a little limited, it’s still a bachelors.
>Are daycare workers a healthy mix of educated men and women with a lot of other economic opportunities but choose to be daycare workers because of the pay or emotional rewards?
That's shifting the goalposts a little. Why would they need to have "a lot of other economic opportunities" anymore than tons of jobs (restaurant staff, retail employees, factory workers, truckers, etc) have?
Here in Norway daycare is an OK respectable job. Not particularly high paying but not the lowest on the scale either. A full time daycare professional can pay their rent, living expenses and travel for vacation off that.
>They who work in the daycares are not a "serf class", they are paid professionals
I wouldn't say 'professionals', in the United States daycare workers can expect to make a little more than minimum wage to start and might get up to 10-11$ an hour for dealing with the maximum number of kids allowed by law all day.
And unless you're talking some elite, gotta get on a waiting list and pay 30 grand a year to send one kid, anyone that passes a background check can get a job in daycare.
I live in Germany, both my kids go to public kindergarten/daycare (there is no distinction between the 2 here, it starts when the child is 1 year old) & the kindergarten teachers are mostly German themselves.
They don't earn great wages but they are not indentured servants either.
Why do you assume the kindergarten teachers earn less than they would have otherwise had in a different job or less than the average parent of the kids in their group? I mean yes, I support better wages for them (jobs in education generally don't pay that great) & I'm sure people working in the financial sector earn much more but I don't think that was the alternative the common teacher had to chose from.
As I said wages are not great but they are not that far from the median. My wife (teacher in a music school) doesn't earn more than a kindergarten teacher, the advantage is mostly in economies of scale (1 teacher per 6-7 pupils vs 1 mother per 1-3 offspring).
> Why do you assume the kindergarten teachers earn less than they would have otherwise had in a different job or less than the average parent of the kids in their group?
Cause when they leave, they get jobs that earn more money.
Who leaves what job? There are plenty of kindergarten teachers who stay at that job their entire careers. If you refer to the parents, in Berlin it costs no money for the parent to send their kids to kindergarten (same as public schools).
And plenty who leaves at least around here. Those I knew personally got more money after. I can also check unemployment rates (low) and compare kindergarten salary to other jobs that hire same qualification (most of administrative work, junior tester etc).
I assume they earn less money they would otherwise, because those who left found better paid jobs without much problems.
In Iceland at least being a leikskoli teacher requires a degree and they are far from child storage. They work and care for the childs development. This is at least a fairly common model in Nordic countries and presume its similar in a lot of Europe.
I've heard horror stories about featureless cinder block rooms as day care in the US though.
In UK (before state mandated ages, ie 4yo) the level of care can be pretty grim, and it's often low skilled young women ([1]) - particular if you're poor yourself.
[1] because for some reason minimum wage is reduced for younger people, like young people don't need housing or food, I don't know ...
Funny, I did the same thing. Describing the Icelandic preschool system is the best way I have to blow my UK friend's minds.
"No matter where you live, your child is in the catching area for a nearby preschool and is automatically enrolled there. And it's by no means a child storage facility; the primary focus is on teaching children through play and at least half the staff have a master's degree in preschool teaching. And they're fully fed. Also, it's practically free."
I became a parent last year and all of my research indicates that 1 is way too young to send a kid away. The optimum age seems to be 3 years. It seems we have come to accept social norms that are not designed around the well-being of the child.
It's a tough question that we have struggled with with both our kids. At the end we've reached the conclusion that we need to balance between the needs of the child and the needs of the parent.
The first 2 months after the birth we were both home, then my wife stayed for another 9 months & finally I took 1 more month of parental leave (so in total it was 1 year before starting to acclimate him to daycare).
After almost a year at home my wife needed (mentally & socially) to return to work & if we could afford to live off of her salary alone I think I would have gladly stayed at home for another 6+ months (instead of just 1).
But I don't think our kids would have been better off overall if my wife stayed for another 2 years but would have done so only out of a feeling of obligation and suffering during that time (it is VERY isolating to be a stay at home parent, even when you have contact to other parents of young children & there is a real lack of intellectual stimulation despite there constantly being work to do).
I don't have all the answers but I think it's a tough question & the balance really depends on the kids and the parents - I believe there is no "1 size fits all" solution.
> there is a real lack of intellectual stimulation despite there constantly being work to do
My wife is taking more of a leading role with our 1 year old (maybe 70/30 between her and me ... also in Germany) and she gets her mental stimulation through voraciously reading about changing dietary requirements of children as they age along with general child developmental research. In fact it is leading us to a discussion about startup opportunities.
Im glad it works for you & it's great you were able to fit the situation to your advantage & interests. But different people have different wants and needs.
They are professional trained, it takes 4 years to get a "puériculteur/puéricultrice" diploma in a university or equivalent. You have also nursery assistant that works under the supervision but even that need formal training + hand-on experience.
It varies a lot from country to country, but to assume that nobody would like to work with small children or that, as a parent, you would let your children under the care of untrained people is strange for me.
It's the same in Asia. It's a great way to ensure entrenched cultural norms are passed across generations. This can be positive but I'd wager it's more likely negative especially considering the lives current grandparents led.
> How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their household and there are countries when it is mostly male parent that does the same with same effect.
I don't understand how this supposedly proves that e.g. male single providers could work only 4 hours a day instead of 8. Care to explain? As an argument against both parents working it would make more sense...
He is implying that in some countries only one spouse works 8 hours a day, and the couple/family have a fairly comfortable life. So presumably in these countries, both spouses could instead work 4 hours a day and they could still have the same comfortable life.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 349 ms ] threadhttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription
EDIT: These downvotes confuse me. It is a matter of fact that there exists an entire non-trivial linguistic school of thought which holds a belief completely incompatible with what GP just presented as more or less indisputable. GP's authoritative tone is unjustified, regardless of which camp you happen to agree with.
However, it's also important to keep in mind that there was also a lot of grinding poverty and near-starvation during the off-seasons.
A peasant family might not have been working during the winter, but its a bit misleading to view that period as "leisure time."
I think that historically the first job with the work ethic of more is better was the merchant.
I think the point the above poster is making is that "working hours" logged in these sources are very vague. Does the "175 days" in the English manor mean that these people had free time for the rest of the year? Or did the go and work second or third jobs to get by? Remember, only have the manor's records.
Not just France, suicide rates are up among farmers the world around
A couple of examples:
The U.S. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer...
India https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/31/suicides...
Capitalism wasn’t a thing, and the society was fundamentally different. People were in caste like social strata and did what they were supposed to do, no more.
It's a hell of a thing when, as a cook, you can stand up from a good dinner you made and walk away from the mess knowing that your roommate Barry wants to have a quiet hour of not talking to anyone doing the dishes and tidying the kitchen because he has actually been looking forward to it and that's what gives him peace. The same peace I got from chopping vegetables and stirring pots.
I've even met someone who likes doing laundry! They wash and iron their own dress shirts despite being perfectly able to pay an inexpensive dry cleaner and describe it as "Cheaper than seeing a shrink".
Let's say you have 5 shirts a week. Step 1: When you do your white wash, throw in the shirts. Hang them up afterwards. Incremental cost: 2 minutes of your time... Step 2: When you do ironing, incremental cost of 5 shirts @ 3 minutes per shirt is 15 minutes... Probably less that your two trips to the dry cleaner. Plus, nil $ cost, no plastic wrapping to throw away, no use of dry cleaning chemicals.
3 mins? I iron my shirts, five a week, and it takes me 10-15 mins per shirt, depending on the shirt.
Additionally, if you’re not experienced, you don’t know how long something will take, and the indeterminate estimate is off-putting.
Correct?
Any additional insight into what's going on here? I'd love to wield this power to help myself love other things that I hate.
It's a a plain fact that there are far more feast days and ecclesiastical holidays than federal holiday. In America, you're lucky to get a guaranteed 10 days off.
And in the same way washing clothes or making dinner doesn't feel stressful in the way working for someone else does.
Firstly, what are you working in exchange for? Are you performing some kind of useful work for someone else, receiving nothing in exchange then going and being a hunter gatherer for some reason? Probably not.
>You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner
Money has existed for a very long time so purchasing food ready to eat isn't so far fetched assuming your life took you near a non-trivial population center. Bartering goods like food, clothing etc has existed for even longer.
>You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer, then an hour creating clothing, then an hour cooking, then an hour mending the hole in your roof, etc.
It reads as if you are assuming that a given individual is going to have to do everything, which doesn't seem to have been the norm for most humans. Most people didn't live alone. Instead of doing all of that maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer. Meanwhile someone else created clothing, someone else cooked, someone else mended the roof.
Its also worth noting that all of these jobs have a very well defined point of being done. It doesn't matter if it takes you 2 hours or 20 minutes to acquire food. Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.
You could be perfectly content (and more happy than most office drones with 1000x the stuff) with a couple of clothe articles, food and a basic home...
- a sense of meaning - a sense of purpose - the ability to influence their environment - community - companionship - love - sex
And those are not to be found in consumer goods, and would be a problem in 1200 as much as in 2019 (if not more so)...
Uh, sure? This is a complete non sequitur, as nobody is making the claim you're describing. If you actually read my full comment, I address this directly by saying that it's a much more reasonable argument that utility from all goods isn't equally distributed and the important ones haven't gotten easier to get at the same rate as the unimportant ones.
That doesn't mean that it's not incredibly factually inaccurate to think that access to consumer goods hasn't become mind-bogglingly higher
>Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.
You would salt and preserve the meat/fish and consume it in the future.
Imagine how you would live, if you could only buy metalworks from the store. Basically everything else you'd have to make yourself.
That is very environment specific.
Depending on when/where you are salt was expensive or extremely laborious to produce. Salting, smoking etc is itself laborious, can require special purpose equipment and can take weeks. Its entirely possible that the effort to obtain the supplies and equipment to preserve your surplus food exceeds the effort to simply obtain more food in the future.
There is a reason why salting/pickling/fermentation was common in places that had winters severe enough to impact the availability of food Vs anywhere closer to the equator. People did it when they faced a large chunk of the year when starvation was a serious concern.
(Not that there's anything great to come home dead tired from a 10 hour day at the office + commute, and then have the "amazing" convenience to "order food for dinner").
You can still see it in societies that don't have our lifestyles. Go to a blue zone like in Ikaria (where people live in much longer age than average, often reaching 90-100). People tend to their farms some time of the season, do things leisurely, take noon naps, stay up late with friends to eat and drink (late as in, 2-3 am is not uncommon), and so on. Giving less fucks seems a major factor in those "blue zones" (I've also researched a similar one in Italy).
Heck, several french farmers have told me how their grown children in supposedly fancy city jobs (programming, banking, etc) work twice as much as they ever did, and still have a less enjoyable lifestyle.
And with no use of "hired hands" in the sense of large "factory-like" farms.
It's true there are skilled workers that love what they do, and their jobs allow them to exert influence -- so they are motivated to work long hours (versus, say, a worker assembling widgets on a factory line).
Something about that dichotomy of the people who have the luxury of choosing how much to work, writing about how we work longer, is something I find interesting. The management class of workers are the ones who have the most influence on the working hours of an organization's individual contributors.
Seriously. Read the mandate at the feds website and process it literally.
If you have a fixed amount of land to farm, there's only so much work you can do. If you give the king or the bishop your excess crops, there's only so much motivation to work.
I am absolutely loving the random shade we're throwing at people that came before us, as if they were some sort of savages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_economy
Of course they had slaves, but then so did we..
I'm glad I live and work in Norway where the average is between 1300 and 1500 hours a year.
So the extra effort is worth it!
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-b...
In England and Wales around 1850 the life expectancy overall was around 40 because a lot of people died as children and dragged down the average.
For someone that made it to 5 years old their life expectancy goes us 15 years to 55.
People now definitely have a higher life expectancy but the difference isn't as vast as some might assume.
An entertaining use of the word "true".
Yes, if you exclude a lot of the data, the average changes :)
Sarcasm aside, that is an important point in average life span statistics, but doesn't change the point that preindustrial life was "Nasty, brutish and short", as the old saying goes.
Also, 1850s England was the richest place on earth, almost a century into industrialism. Already a vastly elevated existence compared to our "natural state".
What is true is that many children died young. Beyond that they lived almost as long as we do.
If they had modern medicine then the numbers would have equaled out. Heck, with their superior diet they may have lived even longer.
So the question is, do we need to work long hours to have modern medicine?
If any population lived like that today, their lives would certainly be called nasty, brutish and short.
And, as I said, modern medicine might fix that.
Modern medicine is great, but it turns out to not add that many years to our life spans. Mostly money does. Or more likely, the healthy lives money buys.
Put in other words, it's much better to not get sick than to have great health care!
(I'm not just bullshitting here, this is what the data shows (not that I have any links with proofs to show (so feels free to not believe this :)))
You can be 100 times as rich as some poor soul in a third world country and still be so poor in your own society that you are constantly struggling, fighting for survival, skipping meals and inheriting that struggle to your kids who are born into them without much chances of getting out.
This could be because the poor soul can maybe life decently within their society off a hundreth of the cost you have (sometimes you even just need to be a good hunter and be able to build some shelter).
The average societal wealth definition of poor used in sociology is not without critics of course, but you can ask yourself if 30 times the income buys 30 times as much rent today and helps you to sustain 30 times as many families (all costs and benefits considered). The income gap between rich and poor is higher today than it ever was under any industrial rule — I wish I’d be able to share your optimism, but considering the average top manager’s salery (including bonuses for failing upwards and fucking shit up) my optimism about the altruistic nature of today’s wealth distribution seems to vanish just a little too quickly..
No, that is how it affects your status.
In every society, half the people are at or below average status, because math. That can never change.
But 95+% of the people in the richest country have better material standard than the average people in the poorest.
And even those in today's poorest countries have better material standard than preindustrial people.
But we still have the same percentage of losers...
And there certainly is discussion about that definition, but other poverty definitions also fail to capture certain aspects of poverty (e.g. the World Bank’s poverty line).
It isn’t status, when bith of your parents work full time and you still don’t get to eat on the last days of the week. That is poverty.
But let's talk about the word.
By the UNICEF/UNDP/etc definition of "poverty", poverty can never be eradicated. There will always be people below average, as any math teacher can explain to you.
In a "Richistan" society comprised only of dollar millionaires and billionaires, the least wealthy millionaires will be living in "poverty".
> It isn’t status, when both of your parents work full time and you still don’t get to eat on the last days of the week. That is poverty.
...but now you've jumped to absolute poverty measures! Those "Richistan poor" could easily dine in fine restaurants every day.
There’s no inherent reason why relative low status has to turn into slavery in practice, that’s a choice made by society.
The question of absolute material wealth is still relevant and interesting, but it is mostly a different question.
You're a god moron, status matters and if you don't think it does you need to have your status and health reduced so you can feel what it's like to be on the receiving end.
I nowhere said that I don’t see that definition without problems or that I wholeheartedly stand behind it. Another definition used by the World Bank is the poverty line, which fails to capture other aspects of poverty (e.g. two parents with full time jobs unable to pay the rent in a rich society).
The definitions of poverty are a huge topic in sociology and economy and if you feel they misrepresent reality, go ahead and make a better one.
For me, the marginal value of a dollar diminishes pretty quickly, so the extra effort typical of the American schedule is definitely not worth it to me.
My point was more that if you choose to work an extra hour, you're vastly more rewarded for it now.
And I guess that's one reason people do it.
I would have shared that guess, but clearly that's not how we humans operate.
Maybe we just like to work!
Or maybe we really like to be richer than others. We're primates after all, and primates really care about their place in hierarchies...
What are you basing that on? I mean, the article is about as far as you can possibly get from "all else equal".
Humanity is stupendously rich, by the standards of all previous generations, and yet most of us work like crazy, certainly including many of the richest ones.
Or maybe we're talking about slightly different things?
https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/978019087...
Many industries would probably suffer negligible losses (and maybe gains) by transitioning to 20 hour work weeks.
If every office worker had their schedule cut to a 20 hours a week, I strongly suspect that only 10 hours of work would actually get done. It's just too much of the low efficiency is culturally ingrained on every level from the cultural to the organizational. It would probably take a generation for things to change.
But that would cut into C-suite bonuses and dividends.
I beg to differ. I think, the mixture of work items as you describe is solely motivated on fear that employees may produce less if not under 8hours control in open plan office. The fear however may not have anything to do with the reality.
In the freelance world, this is name of the game: recruiters want people to work as much per week as possible for this reason, freelancers want to work as little as possible (that improves their skills quicker by working on many things at same time, plus provides job security of having 3-4 clients at same time so they are unlikely to all fire at same time).
Some kinds of coding do benefit from lack of interruption, so that's can be an argument for very focused work. But one way coding is different than, say, factory work or service work, is that our errors accumulate. It takes just seconds to put a bug in, but hours or days to take it out again. So anybody working long enough to get tired will very quickly hit diminishing returns. There's a nice presentation on this from a while back: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...
I also have come to be suspicious of the "hyperfocus for many hours to get large amounts of state into my head" approach to coding. Code I have to be extremely clever to write usually ends up being a giant pain in the ass to maintain. These days I think it's better to use things like unit tests, pair programming, and very frequent releases to get things done.
Let's compare apples to apples. Office jobs didn't exist in the medieval period, but labor jobs still exist today.
Have you ever actually done any labor work? Probably not.
Hours spent working is hardly the same thing as quantifying human toll. Most people in agrarian society subsisted on a near-starvation diet, to the point where most women would not get their period until their late teens and early 20s. If you go to a civil war museum you might be surprised at how small the uniforms are - lower diets pushed average heights down by several inches. Antibiotics were non-existent so infections were lethal at drastically higher rates than they are today. Mortality between the ages of 0-20 averaged ~50%, and life expectancy at 20 was usually in the 40s or 50s. Due to this high mortality rate, the births per woman required to form the replacement rate was 6-8 (this is counted of the women that survive to adulthood, raw BPW is about half that). This meant that women effectively had to spend most of their adult lives bearing and caring for children, a big reason why agrarian societies are overwhelmingly patriarchal. Rates of literacy and education did vary, and were as high as 40% in some agrarian societies, but were still far lower than the >90% rate we see in most countries today. And I'm not even going to dig into the can of worms that is the amount of slavery that occurred in agrarian society that was displaced by industrialization.
Capitalism may have a higher demand in terms of hours worked in explicit employment, but I doubt many today would genuinely trade life in a capitalist country for life in a pre-industrial society.
A society that continuosly sustains high degrees of poverty under that definition, usually needs a narrative for why the poor people deserve to be poor and why the rich people deserve to be rich. Centuries ago (depending on the place) this might have been still been religion: you have been born into a poor life and those in the lead have been born as leaders and there is nothing you can/ought to do about it.
Today individualism takes that function: you are responsible for beeing poor, even if you have been born into it. But you can become a billionaire if you want — it is just very hard. This means also those who are billionaires must have worked very very hard and so deserve their wealth.
Rich people usually inherit their wealth tho, which makes a fool of the whole narrative and suggests who profits from it.
Beeing poor means to struggle to make ends meet every day and despite optimization efforts fail to do exactly that every now and then. You can have a hundred times the absolute wealth of someone in a different society and still be poorer than them in that you struggle for survival, while they do okay for the society thwy are in.
This doesn't seem right to me. Would you rather live as a middle class person, say 50th percentile in terms of wealth, in medieval Europe (which, despite being middle class still means 50% child mortality, little or no education, no effective medicine, etc.) Or a lower class person today - say 20th percentile by wealth. The latter is making $18,000 a year which will be tough to get by. But I'd still take that over any sort of pre-industrial life without hesitation.
This is called the 'just world hypothesis' and is behind may of our victim blaming impulses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
You are projecting the circumstances of Northern Europe. But this is a tough place to get by. So is Northern China etc.
On the other end of the spectrum on some islands in Indonesia people need no more then 7 days of work per year to put a food on a table (from sago palm).
Naturaly people would rather live where resources are abundant and living is easy.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Indonesia
My whole point is that you can still find places where living in preindustrial capitalism is fairly easy due to abundance of Nature. There were many more places like this ages ago maybe not like this particular example but without much hardship. Mediterraneans comes to mind. Thats it.
http://indonesiaetc.com/
Any my point is, no you can't. No preindustrial society lives "fairly easy", at least not unless you have a very different conception of "fairly easy" living. Even in the pre-industrial Mediterranean, people lived on near-starvation diets and routinely died of easily treatable illnesses. Average adult male height was bewteen 5'2" and 5'4" in the ancient Mediterranean, based on skeletal evidence. Child mortality was in the 50% range. Most women had no opportunities besides child-rearing and domestic work. No amount of natural abundance can replace antibiotics and industrialized goods like contraceptives, communication, medicine, etc.
If you have the conception that living off the abundance of Nature is at all easy, I highly suggest you dig deeper into this subject. During the 1960s to around the 1980s this idea that the state of nature is idyllic was popular. But as data on the lives of pre-industrial and pre-agricultural societies became more available all but the most ardent supporters of naturalistic idealism arrived at the conclusion that pre-industrial society is a lot worse than life in an industrialized society. Violence, and inability to provide for basic necessities is drastically lower in industrialized societies than it was in preindustrial societies.
I'd wager that when looking at countries with roughly the same level of industrialization, whether humans view fellow humans as something more than mere resources is linked to a certain set of attitudes.
I'd guess that reduced working hours are positively correlated to pluralism and pacifism, and perhaps negatively correlated to religiousness.
The more you think that life ought to be lived a certain way, the more likely you are to see work as a savior from straying from that way.
Looking at countries that have severely mistreated minorities, natives or remote people might also reveal a correlation, the more so the less this is part of the public consciousness.
My boss congratulated me for the offer, said it's a pity that I leave AND spoke with HR so that I do have a shorter period of notice (otherwise I would have had problems). All on the same day. While accompanying me on my way out he said that especially with students, he invests in people. The doors are always open and he would be glad to see me there again. In fact, he recommended a former student worker to join another company before graduation in order to have a better looking CV. Im kinda blown away by this non-selfish (in a company's view) behaviour and strongly consider to rejoin at some point.
Only stupid companies get angry at employees lured away by others.
The beauty of capitalism is that it rewards such altruistic behavior - in that you may rejoin them in the future.
Actually, it is true. Treating your customers, employees and associates results in them wanting to do business with you, which increases profits. Treat them badly, they go away and deal with someone else.
Put simply, you aren't going to go the extra mile for someone you hate.
Both bosses were good bosses and sounds like your boss was a good manager too.
I'm Israeli & spent the last 6 years living in Germany. I lived in Austria for 8 years before that. Israel is quite a dog-eat-dog hyper-capitalism kind of economy, maybe not to the wild extent of the US but definitely closer to it than to Germany & Austria (the two countries have very similar culture/attitudes in this particular area).
While there are plenty of asshole bosses here, the kind of attitude common in hyper-capitalist countries is not comparable. Even the assholes will not dare publicly espouse the kind of Libertarian anti-working-class vitriol in a Berlin working place (or even outside of it).
How often did you hear your German boss say that the state should not offer welfare as it's just supporting laziness? Or that "taxes are theft"? That whatever work "the free market" doesn't directly support via consumers spending money should not exist (e.g. publicly funded theatre)?
Libertarians are not anti-working-class.
No. Libertarians are against any sort of class system (i.e. legal privileges for certain groups). They are neither anti-rich nor anti-poor. Of course, there are libertarians who are jerks, but that isn't what Libertarianism is about. Also, most people only hear about Libertarianism from non-Libertarians, hence they only hear negative things about it.
Libertarianism is mainly about people being free to choose, and being responsible for their choices, as long as they aren't hurting others in the process.
Milton Friedman's book "Free to Choose" is a good introduction if you're interested in more.
Vis a vis classism, if you refuse to regulate and allow everyone to be "free to choose", you are essentially advocating a dog-eat-dog world where people with money and power consolidate more and more of it. This is "feudalism" and it generally results in a raw deal for the poor.
That's conflating Anarchists with Libertarians. Libertarians are not Anarchists.
Feudalism is something different altogether.
Unless with "libertarians" you are referring to ancaps, this is just false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#Rise_of_anarchi...
At some point you have to acknowledge the irony at refusing to see Libertarianism as anti-poor ideology, while simultaneously pointing people to a man who worked (and trained others to work with at the University if Chicago) far right dictators like Pinochet.
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/6i0vsr/milton_f...
(Ironically, you say Libertarian Friedman supported far right dictator Pinochet and the other reply says Libertarianism is for no government at all. Clearly something is amiss with these two criticisms of Libertarianism.)
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-chicago-boys-in-chile-...
If you have any evidence of advocacy for repression in any of Friedman's lifetime of his books, articles, or lectures, I'd like to see it.
I already pointed you to one of Allende’s chief advisors identifying Friedman as providing the direct, ideological grounding for the Chilean coup, so I’m not sure what more evidence you want. What Friedman said in his speeches and wrote in books is not the sum total of his work and ideology. There’s also what he did, who he allied himself with, etc. He was remarkably consistent in denouncing his detractors as part of a “communist conspiracy,” while at the same time being remarkably callous about things like the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Tiennamen Square massacre. So I find appeals to him as some undaunted supporter of “freedom” specious at best.
Something from Friedman himself, not filtered through hearsay. Friedman has a very large body of work you can draw from. If he's a fascist, you should be able to find it in that work.
Again, on the one hand you have someone who fled Chile and was murdered by the Pinochet regime and someone who flew into give speeches and pal around with the junta. I’m sorry if I weigh the account of the former more than that of the latter.
Besides, do you really believe someone could talk with Pinochet for 45 minutes and thereby turn him into a monster? It's not credible. It's more likely Pinochet used Friedman for propaganda value, and stroked Friedman's ego. People who run governments tend to be users and tend to be masters at stroking ego.
I once had a conversation with a Senator whom I despised. He was incredibly charming in person. I can easily see falling under the spell of someone like that.
Frankly, you don't like libertarianism, which is your choice, but if this 45 minute conversation with Pinochet (for which no transcript exists) is all you have, it isn't much of anything.
I still think it's ironic that libertarianism's detractors claim it's both about no government at all and oppressive, authoritarian regimes. Clearly both positions can't be right, and likely neither.
Libertarians are anti-parasite, and that is what the civil servants and their state TV are afraid of.
But people still believe the propaganda.
Excuse me? My grandma was a slave worker in Germany. Kidnapped from the streets of Warsaw and forcefully moved to Southwest Germany to work for a rich farmer.
It happened in the main part from 1939-1945, with a total of 8 million people enslaved at one point or another.
On the other hand, US slavery went on for three centuries, with a peak number of 4 million slaves and also about 8 million affected in total.
The time scale is why I think there is a major difference, both in terms of life years stolen as well as in terms of possible social and cultural adaptation or accustomizaton to slavery, the latter being the point of the OP.
For example in the UK don't post a first class letter on Friday as work is deliberately kept back to ensure there is OT at the weekend.
The basis of the American work ethic is in dreaming. Clearly, you've chosen to disregard the centuries of European, African, Oriental and S./Central American slavery, ritual sacrifice, imperialism and almost constant war and subjugation.
But, you know - the intentional racism instilled by the English must be the lingering driver of American commerce and ambition.
In the 1940s a woman would typically spend 62 hours a week in housework.
Nowadays women typically spend 15 hours in housework and 45 hours in paid work. So the same ballpark, really, and not a dramatic expansion.
No, they've got markedly better because of child labor laws. Kids during pre-industrial revolution time periods didn't just go of to daycare, football camp, elementary school... they did as much work as they were capable alongside their parents.
In fact, this still happens to some extent even in the United States on family owned farms. Once you're old enough to handle chores, you're out there mucking stalls or feeding horses/chickens/pigs, then when you're older and more capable you are driving equipment, mending fence, replacing fence posts, moving hay, servicing equipment.
For an easy look at this, just do a Google dive into FFA (Future Farmers of America). 670k kids across the country doing their various farming activities with the motto "Learning to Do, Doing to Learn, Earning to Live, Living to Serve"
Did they just laze around like the men did in this fantasy?
The whole idea is garbage, getting water can take half a day for men or women, is that not work?
If you're stuck starving and have malnourished kids, which was common, is that work or leisure?
If you start working hard at 13, does that count towards your hours that mostly only adults have to do in modern society?
Many people live in conditions pretty close to serfdom/pre industrial today, go tell them they work less.
And I'm telling them another thing: for me it seems in America everybody is working. The president, the millionaire, the middle and lower classes. Nobody does the `healthy meaninglessness`.
Of course all these are friendly provocations. What surprises me is the cognitive dissonance they cause.
http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
Why on earth is it that people aren't allowed to make the same optimization (greatest income with least effort) without being called lazy?
They didn't exactly have a choice with the food. It's needed if you genuinely spend a hard day working. People used to make drinks for laborers containing things like molasses here in the US.
I admit we've lost the afternoon nap, but I'm not sure why. It does happen elsewhere. The China office at previous job worked long hours and all napped at their desks in the afternoon.
How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their household and there are countries when it is mostly male parent that does the same with same effect. Yet, there is not much difference in their capability to provide, it seems in cases of both types of countries the system settled and regulated itself.
Commute as a portion of work time....
4 hrs work: 25%
5 hrs work: 20%
6 hrs work: 16.7%
7 hrs work: 14.3%
8 hrs work: 12.5%
Considering you don't get paid for your commute, there is a natural incentive to work more hours.
Why keep an arbitrary "40h" standard? Productivity has increased 100x from when it was established, what keeps it is busywork...
Not just America. We have elections coming up in Saxony (a state in East Germany), so I watched a 2-hour interview with the current MP from the conservative party (the same party as Angela Merkel). When it came to the topic of UBI and automation, he adamantly refused to consider any policy that would move away from the 40-hour work week. He meant that there were so many challenges ahead of us, we couldn't afford to lose any of our precious working hours. His mantra seems to be "Work harder, not smarter".
Bavarian here. Your MP is a nutjob, as is Söder and the rest of the conservatives. The point is that conservatives (as well as the FDP and the AfD) focus primarily on the needs of the businesses which means keeping to old Prussian traditions no matter what.
#NotMyMP. I just happen to live here.
When working similar to the Basecamp guys it's even the other way around.
Write problems down and give people time to chew on them. Everyone adds his thoughts and refining the idea will lead to better results than a two hours meeting.
If anything, it's an improvement over the in-office because instead of interrupting someone at work, we politely message someone (or the team) about doing a quick call once it's convenient for them.
That's shifting the goalposts a little. Why would they need to have "a lot of other economic opportunities" anymore than tons of jobs (restaurant staff, retail employees, factory workers, truckers, etc) have?
I wouldn't say 'professionals', in the United States daycare workers can expect to make a little more than minimum wage to start and might get up to 10-11$ an hour for dealing with the maximum number of kids allowed by law all day.
And unless you're talking some elite, gotta get on a waiting list and pay 30 grand a year to send one kid, anyone that passes a background check can get a job in daycare.
They don't earn great wages but they are not indentured servants either.
As I said wages are not great but they are not that far from the median. My wife (teacher in a music school) doesn't earn more than a kindergarten teacher, the advantage is mostly in economies of scale (1 teacher per 6-7 pupils vs 1 mother per 1-3 offspring).
Cause when they leave, they get jobs that earn more money.
I assume they earn less money they would otherwise, because those who left found better paid jobs without much problems.
I've heard horror stories about featureless cinder block rooms as day care in the US though.
[1] because for some reason minimum wage is reduced for younger people, like young people don't need housing or food, I don't know ...
"No matter where you live, your child is in the catching area for a nearby preschool and is automatically enrolled there. And it's by no means a child storage facility; the primary focus is on teaching children through play and at least half the staff have a master's degree in preschool teaching. And they're fully fed. Also, it's practically free."
enjoy what they do
> so
other people can do other jobs that the aforementioned women benefit from, such us public hospitals, roads, railroads, public transport etc. etc. etc.
FTFY, dear American friend
The first 2 months after the birth we were both home, then my wife stayed for another 9 months & finally I took 1 more month of parental leave (so in total it was 1 year before starting to acclimate him to daycare).
After almost a year at home my wife needed (mentally & socially) to return to work & if we could afford to live off of her salary alone I think I would have gladly stayed at home for another 6+ months (instead of just 1).
But I don't think our kids would have been better off overall if my wife stayed for another 2 years but would have done so only out of a feeling of obligation and suffering during that time (it is VERY isolating to be a stay at home parent, even when you have contact to other parents of young children & there is a real lack of intellectual stimulation despite there constantly being work to do).
I don't have all the answers but I think it's a tough question & the balance really depends on the kids and the parents - I believe there is no "1 size fits all" solution.
My wife is taking more of a leading role with our 1 year old (maybe 70/30 between her and me ... also in Germany) and she gets her mental stimulation through voraciously reading about changing dietary requirements of children as they age along with general child developmental research. In fact it is leading us to a discussion about startup opportunities.
It varies a lot from country to country, but to assume that nobody would like to work with small children or that, as a parent, you would let your children under the care of untrained people is strange for me.
Have you ever heard about public schools?
They are a thing in Europe.
have you ever heard of family?
Kids usually have four grand parents (sometimes less, sometimes more)
I don't understand how this supposedly proves that e.g. male single providers could work only 4 hours a day instead of 8. Care to explain? As an argument against both parents working it would make more sense...