This isn't the first time I've seen this sentiment displayed here on HN with regard to historic European civilization. What I haven't seen is a comparison to other ones. I'm particularly interested in Asian civilization.
I'd be interested in other places too, but I expect a wide variance by locality, trade, etc. I wouldn't expect, especially back then, England and Wales to be the same, or possibly not different regions of those countries. Groupings as large as 'Europe' and 'Asia' might not be meaningful.
Sure they had a “shorter workweek” but it also took women a full workday to wash the family’s clothes, hours of walking to get water for the day, and if you wanted something from the town over that was a 3 day trip.
So many everyday things we take for granted were incredibly difficult and involved a lot of manual labor and/or waiting around for hours and days.
I wonder how much of that leisure time came from being blocked and technology/communications imposing a maximum throughput. You couldn’t work faster even if you wanted to and so you leisured. “Hurry up and wait” as some like to say
PS: there’s also stories of medieval peasants in France basicalky hibernating over winter because if you didn’t sleep for 16 hours every day, you’d burn too much calories and starve[1]. I’m sure that was a very fun reason to have short workweeks
article basically ignores quality of life in exchange for "leisure". I could build a crude shelter and be homeless and basically achieve the same thing, turns out most people don't want that.
Fact is most people voluntarily opt in to capitalism because life is better, if you want something close to what the article talks about you can pretty easily move to an Amish community or try creating your own commune and try to convince people to join
Isn't that what a majority of us do when we reach adulthood? and though the answer is subjective, yes it's easy, fun, interesting...also if you are interested in freeloading I'd recommend it, sleeping rough, squatting, food gathering, skipping(from dumpsters) or just generally sharing resources is a lot of fun... my wake up came while squatting and transforming unused buildings...met a bunch of lovely people and learnt a lot from them..
Adam Smith points out too that most people only had one or two hand woven garments during their entire lives before the industrial revolution. Thus clothes were a far bigger deal back then than they are today. For example, in the Bible, if a person was incredibly upset, they would tear their clothes, and this was considered a huge deal.
You can't because if you don't organise production to maximise profits you'll be beaten by the competition that does. If you set up a commune and put aside time for democratic meetings and communal recreation, and make work easier and more pleasurable to do, then you'll produce less per hour worked. Companies that don't do those things will get the contracts. Also, you'll be selling into a market whose demand is dominated by the rich and the imperatives of capitalism.
> most people voluntarily opt in to capitalism because life is better
I think this takes a good point too far. The society around you is not opt-in, it's a very difficult opt-out. People generally follow the religion of their parents, the career path of their neighborhood, etc. Opting out of the current economy would be a major, radical sacrifice (of status, friends, family, resources, opportunity) that would require enormous vision and courage. And then what do you do for health care, for example? How do you raise kids?
Peasants in the industrial revolution faced starvation, IIRC, if they didn't move to the cities. Much of their opportunity for their former lives had been taken away.
Isn’t that their point? You can opt-out and give up the healthcare, education, ease of raising kids, grocery stores, etc, living life similarly to people of the past before all of those modern inventions. It would just be a horrible life, so nobody does it.
My understanding: They say people are making a rational, economic, opt-in choice. I'm saying people are making an almost inescapable choice not to opt-out, having nothing to do with the economics.
The biggest increases in quality of life comes from public health measure such as access to clean water, food and air. The next is protection from the elements with access to adequate clothing, shelter and fuel. After that I would argue that trust in the integrity of public institutions (rule of law) and security from the threat of violence and extortion. Then it would be access to education, basic health care to prolong life and reduce suffering.
Beyond that we have basic needs to feel that we are part of a family and community where we are loved and valued (belong) and where we can contribute (purpose).
While capitalism has excelled at improving productivity it doesn’t dictate that the gains in productivity necessarily will increase overall quality of life. I could, for example increase the productivity of food production in ways that may decrease overall public health. In that scenario capitalism would directly decrease quality of life.
I think the arguments on hacker news have mostly been due to a (US) system that has become extremely rigid in that there is less personal choice in how productivity gains may be spent by forcing people into very narrow specialties to maximize income.
In many cases that may result in overall lower quality of life if it impacts long term health or being part of a community.
Yeah I’d be curious to see how much of that short workday was because just staying alive was so much harder than today that you simply didn’t have time for more work.
Like when dinner takes 3 hours to prepare instead of 20 minutes, that’s quite a difference.
What dinner takes 3 hours....? if we're talking about the poor, realistically soup was a mainstay...here in Romania we have all kinds and then there's marmaliga, basically polenta, add salt and if you're hungry delicious... it does seem like rent, insurance, transport , investment for the future takes up a lot of "work" needs in the present, besides we've become incredibly vain, where the packaging is often worth more than the content...
We went to 10 to 12 hour days of back breaking labor, six days a week with no off season during the industrial revolution, so I don't think it's a physical limit that was being hit.
Not only was it incredibly labor intensive to process grain by hand, it was also caused the flour to be full of tiny rocks that would wear away one's teeth.
I'm curious about this argument. It was mentioned in some TED talk about the benefits of simple machines.
I might just be a change of pace, also a change of dependencies. Walking long is fine (people need daydream and wandering time, some dose of boredom). Washing your family clothes may be work but it's still better than doing what your boss doesn't want to do. Emotionally your a lot less invested in the latter yet you have to do it.
Hans Rosling argues that washing machines are magic because clothes go in and books come out. Women education, literacy rates, workplace participation etc directly correlates with automation in the home. The less time it takes to keep a family running, the more empowered women get in a society.
These are all cute words, but on my daily routine I see nothing of that sort. People are not especially empowered, power which I believe comes as much from emotional and human experience rather than words.
I can't imagine your daily routine. Education, literacy, and political empowerment constantly play a role in my life, the life of people around me, my society, my economy, etc.
One might say that education and literacy play a role in what we're doing right this moment ...
most people I ran at work into were not specially educated, nor empowered, they coast along trying to fit in their work waiting for a bit more money to spend on not super important stuff.
A tiny example about power, woman in charge of my office bowed down in excuses after a lawyer insulted her for his own mistake. This is the sort of power people still don't have and that no book will teach you.
now, to be fair, my experience is only that, if so I wish I could live in yours :)
> most people I ran at work into were not specially educated
We're talking about an historic timescale. If they are literate and have high school degrees, they are very well educated compared to pre-industrial people.
> woman in charge of my office bowed down in excuses after a lawyer insulted her for his own mistake. This is the sort of power people still don't have and that no book will teach you.
Those situations are stomach-turning to me. Books do teach people about that kind of power, how to get it and use it (unfortunately), and how to respond to it. Also, literacy and education led to that attorney's power (unfortunately).
I tend to think that higher education is not as interesting as it's said to be. And people who used to work hands on (woodwork, metal smith) had a lot of deep knowledge too, it just wasn't seen as evolved.
Frankly I don't think one book will ever prepare you to live the situations above. This is the kind of thick skin only real life can imprint in you. That girl probably knew everything she could have said, but biology took over, she made a large grin and let it slip. Social status for you. The same old song that has been played for ages. And mind you, that chief wasn't an angel, she unleashed on me a few times during my work. That's why I say people are not better today. All I see is tribal reflexes and fitting in the social tissue.
Now to be fair, I'm not the happiest dude on earth right now, so maybe I amplify the negativity of those situation. Still I'm not sold on the benefits of doing less thanks to modern technology.
> I tend to think that higher education is not as interesting as it's said to be. And people who used to work hands on (woodwork, metal smith) had a lot of deep knowledge too, it just wasn't seen as evolved.
It's not necessarily your fault, but I hear this trendy claim often, but nobody can support it. No one book can teach you everything and not every problem can be solved with knowledge, of course, and there are things we learn from experience, but the track record of learning from books is pretty unimpeachable - including, learning from other people's experiences. (And higher ed is much more than learning from books.) It's hard to imagine humanity without literacy.
Anyway, I'm not adding a heck of a lot at this point ...
I don't know, I learned about physics in HS and college, but nothing made me understand it better than actually interacting with materials (and it wasn't at school). Being faced with reality changes your depth of understanding IMO.
All in all I think our model of society is slightly fooling itself about a lot of things. It adds but it subtracts too.
I feel like lots of things about the way life used to be (and still is for many) is based on women not having agency (financial independence) and being physically weaker than men.
We are only beginning to find out what happens when women have full independence and children are not a necessary byproduct of sex, and it seems like cratering birthrates are at least one result.
A lot of the costs of birthing and raising children were paid solely by women, but benefited the whole tribe. Now that those costs can be made explicit, I wonder how tribes will chose to compensate women such that they are sufficiently incentivized to have at least replacement level of kids.
There are confounding factors in figuring supposed historic misery: Fewer clothes, washed less frequently, for example. Average life expectancy being pulled down by high infant and maternal mortality. That's obviously not good, but it also means that survivors lived longer than averages suggest.
The problem with child mortality is that birthing 8 kids is a lot more taxing on women’s lives than birthing 2. Maybe that doesn’t fall under work but it’s not quite leisure either.
I think you are right about this. Life may have had less of what we think of as "work" now.
The part that I think is interesting is, as we progressed technologically, where did that time non-conventional working time go? It used to take hours to clean your home, prepare food, etc. We have modern technology which made it easier. How are people spending that new "free" time?
I think the answer seems to be that technology has essentially freed more time for people to work for someone else. The "advancement" means you spend less time washing clothes, but more time flipping burgers or delivering food.
I think this points to something interesting about how much the lowest earners in a society get paid. While it is true that they get paid what the market will bear, the minimum value is always just enough to survive on. "Time saving" technology has effectively devalued their wages. The cost of staying alive is less than it was before. They must work more for the same outcome.
I'm someone who likes to think automation and technology can make people's lives better in the abstract, but... maybe technology alone cannot accomplish this
We have automatic dishwashers now. During WW1, a relative of mine was sent from the city to help on a farm.
After dinner, the family lined up all the platters and plates and put them outside, where a herd of hungry cats would lick them clean. Presumably they were rinsed afterwards, but nobody ever told me.
There are qualitative differences in results independent of time savings...
> I wonder how much of that leisure time came from being blocked
All evidence point to that being very high.
e.g. famine was regular and routine, before the capitalism and before the industrial revolution.
Humanity basically spent majority of the time before the capitalism and the modern agriculture fearing running out of food.
And, examples like de-collectivization of agriculture in China during their economic reform, or what happened in Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Decline_of_famine make it very clear "capitalism" played an important role in reducing / eliminating the famine.
So, articles like this is really misleading - it implies somehow life was better like this paragraph from the article:
> The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking.
The "feasting, drinking and merrymaking" was regularly followed by long periods of malnutrition and massive death.
I'm also very curious about job organization, and teaching.
You can work hard but in a beneficial environment (efforts are well chunked and rewarding physically and/or mentally) or you can work somehow less but in toxic settings (adversarial relationships, bad tooling, etc).
> And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall).
This goes against everything I've been taught, that the plebian class basically toiled endlessly, from Feudal Times to Industrial Revolution before labor laws to today's "multiple low-wage-jobs to survive".
EDIT: Also odd that the author doesn't point out that ~2040 hours is the yearly hours in a modern 40-hour workweek in the US, give or take a few holidays.
It's generally suspect when someone preaches that "this is what life is like in Feudal times", considering that spans 500 years and a whole continent. Likewise for the Industrial Revolution.
Before there were artificial lights and other things there really wasn’t much you could do when it was cold and dark.
Factory workers at the end of the 19th century definitely had a horrible life. They had to fight for 6day weeks and often had to work away hours a day under very dangerous and unhealthy conditions.
"Artificial lights" were a thing as far as pre-recorded history (and for rural illiterate peasant activities, much of middle ages is essentially pre-recorded history relying on oral tradition, artifacts and e.g. 18th century documentation of old-at-the-time practices instead of contemporary writing) - especially in northern areas where during winter months you get sunlight for a quite limited time, if you look at the medieval and earlier research of "evening work" i.e. various activities that can be done under candle light or the meager light from "wood-stick" (I don't know the proper English term, essentially very narrow pieces chopped off of firewood, placed in special holders to provide evening light for the many people for whom candles were too expensive). We have descriptions of "pre-light" rural work, of preparation activities for e.g. breadmaking that were done in the morning before the day enabled to do the proper work, and which had to be done earlier in order to not waste the scarce daylight hours on it. .
Artificial light is an important piece of social technology, and improvements to it had a big impact, but people have needed and used artificial light to sustain their non-daylight activities since pretty much forever; stone age communities did their social activities next to a fireplace in the dark. Like, today is going to be 9 hours of daylight for me, and for December-January there's going to be just 7 hours or so of daylight; people are not going to lie down for 17 hours, they do try to do the same things just with less light.
As far as I know there were lights but they were very limited. So you could do some things but it wasn't like today when work almost doesn't get interrupted at all when it's dark. At least that's what my grandmother told me. During her youth she lived on a farm without electric power and oil lamps were also too expensive to be used much. You also had to be very careful not to burn down your house.
Yeah even these days the friends I have that are active in the agricultural sector. Pretty much still work those hours where it peaks in the summer time and there is pretty much no activity latter half of fall and winter. Maybe except preparation for the next season and some maintenance on machines.
Fairly basic logic should indicate to you that it wouldn't have been possible for people to work as much. There was no manufacturing. The vast majority of people who worked, worked in agriculture. You cannot work in the middle of winter, you cannot work at night. I don't know how it would have been possible...and that is why people then lived in crushing poverty (it isn't comparable to anything that exists today, even third-world nations today aren't close to the poverty that existed then).
I think the surprising thing is that anyone would conclude that anything about feudalism was better. The reason why people didn't work long hours was because the economy was stuck in a Malthusian trap, and there wasn't enough productivity or work to actually feed people (apart from after mortality crises where close to a majority of the population died).
The only reason the argument is being made is so that it can support the OP's conclusion about work in the present. It has no real significance by itself, this isn't history (incidentally, this is why history is important...it is taught so badly in the US, so badly...but everyone makes these bizarre ahistorical comparisons, everyone looks at the past when trying to understand the present...it is unfortunate that we have the knowledge to inform the limits of this process, but people just ignore it).
I doubt anyone would really be happy returning to feudalism, but I imagine the goal of highlighting this stuff is to expand the sense of what is possible. It's easy to start thinking of the current state of affairs as some kind of immutable law of the universe and not a carefully negotiated political arrangement that can be altered as we see fit.
Again, this is exactly my point. This isn't history. This is specifically not what history is for. History does not inform that process because the past is not like the present. They are orthogonal. Attempting to inform your view of the present using the past is like trying to play baseball like football...it just doesn't make any sense.
Absurd. "History" is not some kind of science done by weights and measures but the job of interpreting various things about the past into some sort of cohesive narrative. Of course the result of trying to recapture something about the past is often not very much alike -- I don't think the American Republic is really that much like the Roman Republic, despite consciously attempting to recreate it -- but the idea that that's "not what history for" is just not true as a descriptive statement. Perhaps you believe it should not be used that way, but if your only lens to look at things is the present, your imagination will be incredibly constrained.
The "cohesive narrative" stands alone. History exists only on its own terms. You cannot look at something that happened in history and say: we can do this because it happened then. It is not absurd, it is the basic aspect of how histography is taught in university (and btw, if you study politics...you will find the same idea, "path dependence"...you see parallels in every social science because it is a fairly common mistake made by people who haven't thought about the issue deeply...the "why don't you be like Denmark" meme is a classic of comparative politics).
I am not saying that the present is the only lens (again, you haven't even started to understand what I wrote). The point is that the present is the only present. The past can only be understood in it's own terms. You are not constrained in any way because the past provides only information about the past, not the present.
The past leads directly into the present, so how could that possibly be? When do you think it’s cut off? Does yesterday not suggest anything about today?
It can possibly be because that is what history is. It is the study of things which are not the present.
It is irrelevant whether yesterday is like today because history is not about yesterday. Again, if you are interested about this subject, I would read some books about historiography (EH Carr and Elton are two of the most important books of this last hundred years...but, again, I don't think you will find anyone arguing for the position you are taking because it so clearly is an attempt to justify a political position today...this isn't what history is, any political position today has to be justified in the terms of today...historical relativists do not take your line, no-one does, it makes no sense unless you have no idea what history is).
I can agree as far as the point that the past must be understood on its own terms and not in terms of contemporary categories, but if EH Carr and Elton truly believe the past has absolutely nothing to tell us about the present, they're about the only people on Earth, including academic historians, who think so. Looking them up suggests their ideas are rather controversial and not simply accepted as consensus ones either (and indeed rejecting the concept of "contingency" would put him out of step with pretty much every working historian I've listened to).
Isn’t history supposed to repeat itself and in that way tell us about the future? And isn’t history an insight into human nature and in that way illuminate modern issues?
I was taught that as well, in what retrospectively was blatant capitalist propaganda. That the only thing that has given us leisure was the efficiencies of capitalism, and the benevolence of capitalists.
Albeit my school district was really into right wing propaganda in general, describing the civil war as "the war of northern aggression" in its text books.
> That the only thing that has given us leisure was the efficiencies of capitalism, and the benevolence of capitalists.
This is the opposite of what you expect from one perspective. When a task becomes more efficient people want to put more time in it since they get more out of it. So the more efficient we make jobs the more people will want to work to get more and more stuff. There might be a cap to that, but as of yet we haven't reached it, even programmers making $500k a year still wants to work more even though they could easily spend most of their time not working.
There's a huge push for reduced work weeks. And even where it's not official a lot of those software engineers spend their work week on reddit, so I'm not sure your example checks out.
The industrial revolution did give us a lot more leisure time if you're willing to live with at the same standards as people back then did. But we don't find those standards acceptable.
The lack of leisure time peaked during the industrial revolution, as the article this thread is on highlights. Victorian era work houses weren't really known for amenities, even by feudal standards.
It's not "capitalist propaganda". There's a reason humanity moved in this direction, away from feudalism and subsistence farming. It sucks. More people today enjoy a higher standard of living than even the wealthiest could have dreamt of in the time period discussed in this article. Your life does not hinge on a good growing season or getting mysteriously sick with no cure. You don't have to know how to hunt, forage, clean a carcass, construct shelter or clothing, on and on and on. It's remarkable that people today can survive without knowing _anything_ about where the means for the survival came from.
Literally this article is about how on several important metrics, we don't overall have a higher standard of living.
People didn't move into the factories from the fields for the higher standard, they moved there because they never owned the fields, and the industrial revolution pushed them out with increased automation, so they moved to the only place that would employ them even though it was a step backwards in standard of living.
> Literally this article is about how on several important metrics, we don't overall have a higher standard of living.
Can you show where this is? All I can find is that by some estimates, some people spent less time doing certain things than they do today. That is not a "higher standard of living" unless you want a completely shallow and de-contextualized feel-good talking point.
Objectively improved standards of living over the 500+ year period in question: child mortality, caloric availability, adult literacy, crime, sanitation, understanding what _germs_ are... the list really goes on and on and on.
It's not a conspiracy. People voted with their feet on this one.
I'm curious where you are getting this alt-history. Do you have any academic or popular primary references? Who do you read for economic history that supports these conclusions?
The article in the thread does not discuss the mechanism by which populations migrated to factories!
Or are you reading a different article? Where are you getting these ideas that peasants were forced to move into the factory towns against their will, or that they considered themselves worse off for doing so?
I will give you some actual facts here (because you appear to be genuinely interested, I can only speak about England which industrialized first).
Urbanisation happened over a long period of time and was very far advanced in the UK (and in places like Belgium). Europe always used a far higher stock of capital (inc. animals) than in Asia but it was only when land began to be enclosed that you saw productivity really improve (it wasn't until the 1700s that European agricultural productivity really equalled places like China), and urbanization accelerate. It is also important to remember that the Industrial Revolution did not happen overnight, there was a period of proto-industrialization when work was "put out" by merchants, this was often in textiles and sometimes with capital/machines that workers owned in their own homes.
It was really in the late 18th/early 19th century that you saw levels of protest begin to rise, as factories started to grow, as workers began to get displaced into factories, and then as workers got displaced by children working in factories. This was a huge "thing" in politics throughout this period, although during the Napoleonic Wars laws were passed which clamped down on protest significantly (Chartism, the Luddites...this was probably the first example of cohesive "working class" political movement anywhere). Importantly though, the only cohesive example (that I know) of protest against agricultural improvement was the Swing Riots in the 1830s, which were localised.
To be clear, this is not because there were no protests but because the protests had happened two centuries earlier with enclosure. That was the main process that really led to agricultural productivity improving (combined with the mortality from the Civil War and migration to the Colonies decreasing the pressure on population). Mechanisation in agriculture wasn't really a factor until much, much later (there was very little need, labour was basically free and ample...the poor laws of the early 19th century were a huge wage subsidy for land owners).
The other stuff the guy you replied to said is way, way off...as I have said elsewhere, this is just feudal romanticism by people who don't understand the past but have their views about the present so just see what they want to see. The standard of living then was significantly below the level existing in every developing nation today. It is fair to say that the industrial revolution treated them no better (the riots I mention above bear that out, it wasn't automation but mechanisation and the introduction of child labour which mechanisation facilitated), but that ignores the massive political changes that occurred soon after (if you look at the UK, the stuff occurring in factories was a huge scandal...a lot of the "political economists" of the day who are famous today unf did not help, but it did get solved and living standards improved).
I am really interested in economic history, so I was aware of the enclosure period, but don't know much about it -- can you recommend some reading material to this and also the Swing Riots? (I know I can google, but books are better)
I can't provide any recommendations on enclosure. I studied it at university, and can't recall what books were recommended.
But if you search for stuff about agricultural productivity, you will find lots. I believe Gregory Clark and Robert Allen have written quite a bit about this.
No idea about the Swing Riots either. I have just read about it in other books. I think Luddism is more interesting. Afaik, there was no real persistent movement like it in agriculture.
Most of the time spent is preparing and harvesting. In between you watch things grow and maintain. When nothing is growing...at least, my in-laws in China...drink, gamble (mahjong, card games) and hang out with other villagers.
They all pooled their money together for some heavy machinery too...so even that has cut down a lot of time spent on prep & harvesting.
You could get jobs in the city when there's no farming to do, too. But you'd need a place to stay that doesn't eat up your wages. It's easy to do if you have family in the city already and just crash in their living room.
Another question to ask is what do you do when you're near retirement and too old to work? Well, you live with your kids and they take care of you with their income and chores. It's not like now where you're sent off to a nursing home and retirees need to be able to afford that.
> Most of the time spent is preparing and harvesting. In between you watch things grow and maintain. When nothing is growing...at least, my in-laws in China...drink, gamble (mahjong, card games) and hang out with other villagers.
So replace computers with agriculture and this xkcd really is timeless.
Yeah, cloth and bedsheets make themselves. Fabric just exist and don't need to be created. Animals don't need continuous care. Tools and houses don't need fixing. Candles appear from thin air. Wood cuts itself.
I’m no expert but my understanding is that the drive to industry in Britain, aided by the enclosures, significantly increased working hours, and worsened working conditions.
Leisure is the both the opposite of and an essential component to work. An anarchist group in the UK last century had their motto as "neither work nor leisure" which I found interesting.
Recreation is different than leisure. It's about re-creation and renewal, more like play.
Capitalism was also people working in the fields and trading their produce, after paying their tax to their lord, not unlike to our income tax.
There are definitely many trends that led us to work more and more. There are increasingly more and more people in the few places people with ambitions want to live in. That's more competition which gradually drives the cost down. If the wage is already low enough that it's unreasonable for someone to live on it, the working hours will go up.
The real modern culprit in my opinion is the mandatory education system which indoctrinate kids to become employees for life instead of helping them find a place in society and in the market by providing value as a small business.
With less employees around wages would go up, with more small businesses the capital would be spread more and not concentrated in the hands of a few.
It's not hard to understand who is benefitting from this system: whoever owns capital and need workers.
I'm sure there is plenty of overlap with people controlling the media and telling people what to think and want - and people in the government approving laws.
It's all in the name of efficiency. While efficiency is good to some degree, it comes at a cost of robustness. If you are working at 100% capacity, if anything goes wrong you are screwed!
A number of people I work with have official part time schedules, ranging from 50%-80%. Their expectations and compensation are adjusted correspondingly.
I wonder if you are running into this reaction because you are in a position (or applying for a position) where the expectations and compensation are calibrated to "full time" (~2000 hrs/year). Have you tried discussing a part time arrangement which might work better for you?
I didn't see it mentioned...why? What happened in the mid 19th century that labor lost the upper hand to "management"? If the tradition (of less work hours) dates so far back, what triggered its disappearance so quickly? And going forward, as if it never existed?
labor has actually gained strength, we have dramatically easier ways to become financially independent today than we had in the 19th century. in europe peasants used to be basically slaves under the "law". i think the only thing that got worse is propaganda, which is the fake culture of the elites. once you turn your head the other way things get better
For context: The article is an excerpt from the book, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure by Juliet B. Schor, published in 1991 (though maybe there are later editions). Here's a review:
"An important piece of evidence on the working day is that it was very unusual for servile laborers to be required to work a whole day for a lord. One day's work was considered half a day, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two "days-works." "
Presumably because in the other half of the day, they'd be working to harvest and grow their own food. I'm not sure what the difference is between working 8 hours, and getting enough money to buy food, and working 4 hours and then another 4 hours to make your own food.
First, if you are doing heavy work, like fixing roads, you usually can't do it all day. Neither can most draft animals. Second, the mid day meal was the big one, and there was usually a nap as well. People had to walk to work, and it would be hard to get everyone back at the same time.
Third, the Lord's inventory of tools was limited, so better to have two shifts of reasonably rested people than one double shift of exhausted people.
>> First, if you are doing heavy work, like fixing roads, you usually can't do it all day
Not sure if this is true. I worked at a building site labourer and I've seen people digging trenches all day. I'm also pretty sure in the poorer parts of the 3rd world people are toiling for 8 hours a day in manual/ox-assisted agricultural work.
This analysis is solely focused on the "job" aspects of pre-industrial life and includes almost none of the domestic considerations. I'm not sure if it would be fair to call all non-wage time "leisure". Once work was still over there were still things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc.
Although, I think it goes without saying that before affordable lighting and heating, we all underestimate how lazy winters were for the average peasant, whether idyllic or not (accounts I have read make it sound incredibly, incessantly dull).
And I think the best evidence we have that we are overrating the quality of pre-industrial leisure time is that people developed almost no leisure activities! Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! They supposedly had half a year of doing nothing, and perhaps singing and drinking was sufficient to fill the time, but you'd think they would show lots of other innovations. Or even steal the activities of the rich (organized sports)!
Instead you don't see leisure activities develop until the rise of the 40 hour workweek and the availability of consumer appliances.
Edit: I hope people understand that the argument the article presents is largely a romanticization of poverty.
>Music and dance
Music and dance is as old as humanity itself.
The peasantry could not afford to pay professional musicians but plenty of people knew how to dance and sing and enough people knew how to play instruments to have a jolly good time.
Occasionally, actors might come to town and put on plays and dramas.
>Decorative Arts
Decorative arts were applied to clothing, housing, religiously symbolic objects, etc.
Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of labor by sex.
>Sports
Sports, including martial arts were also practiced commonly.
There were many medieval tournaments allowing people to compete and demonstrate their physical skill in sports like running, log-tossing, or stick-fighting.
There were also team events such as kicking a stuffed leather ball.
Why would something people find fun enough to do as a hobby now not have been fun 500 years ago?
Compare it to say a modern profession like software engineering. Despite it being work, there's plenty of programmers who also enjoy programming and do it for fun on their own time as well as work.
Today's labor is different in that the individual is commoditized. You're indentured to your client, who then accrues a debt to be discharged in an agreed upon time with various contingencies appended, like showing up on time and regardless of completion of your given task (10 baskets/8h) you're nonetheless expected to put in your contracted time.
Basket weaving done in your home, with performance left to your own scruples, and a personalized schedule is leagues different than slaving away for someone else.
In temperate zones winters were times of diminished activity probably because things were centered around agriculture and some hunting. In winter though you got to chores you didn’t have time for in the plant and husbandry productive months: fence mending, spinning, textiles, fixing thatch, cleaning house, making preserves, storing grain and other produce, etc.
In the tropics it was midday when activities ceased because it was too hot.
That said, I disagree that people had little in terms of leisure. They had many more days long festivities where people got together and enjoyed some down time typically they coincided with planting, harvesting (more pagan related) and then religious dates.
I think they had Sundays off for religious reasons, but not sure how much choice peasants or farmers had given fields need clearing, seeds need planting, crops needed harvesting and animals needed caring, reproducing, feeding, butchering and preserving, irrespective of day of week.
Slacking on any of the above could result in starvation the coming Winter as well as possibly losing your animals as well. There was lots of interdependencies which were quite unforgiving.
In Catholic Europe it was culturally enforced apart from exceptional situations (like you have to harvest your grain and rain is coming). Sabbath literally means "Saturday" in many central-European languages, so celebrating on Sundays had no Jewish associations. In fact it was the opposite because Jews didn't observed Sundays, so you could be called "a Jew" for not observing Catholic holidays including Sundays.
Feeding animals didn't counted as work, just like nowadays people don't think cooking for your family or brushing your teeth is work.
> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!
The activities of the historical poor and working class are rarely recorded except in fiction written by the wealthy that contains poor or working class characters. Also, your best evidence is a lack of evidence.
Fair enough! But I think it would also be fair to say that if we shouldn't assume peasants had idyllic lives just because we compare their medieval timecards to our own.
The Cooperites of New Zealand have an even more secluded lifestyle, very religious, they seem to put on a lot of skits, plays, singing, things like dunk tanks for fun. There’s a lot of working and time for seriousness but they definitely seemed to have a good sense of humor and find time for fun. Plus working communally you’re always around other people socializing.
I think our modern lifestyle is astoundingly isolated compared to pre industrial people, even hunter gatherer cultures have hunting parties rather than a lone wolf hunter.
That's partly what I assume. I think our social side came from survival in harsh condition. Falsely comfy society remove the need to live together, while subjecting us to a strange chaos.
Some war veteran said they preferred the battlefield because even with the threat of death, the life in those times were closer, more intense. Now that's an extreme case but it's telling.
And even about art/leisure.. you don't need much to go deep. Singing, playing drums, dancing doesn't require anything modern. People had pigments or crude material to craft but still it's something.
This debate -- noble, enlightened savages vs. modern culture -- comes up again and again on the internet.
To me it seems to miss the point. Modern life is not something that was intentionally designed. We're talking about the emergent output of different complicated systems, with wonderful things and horrific things enabled by both.
Undoubtedly we've sacrificed some of the best aspects of the past for dubious gains. Undoubtedly we're better off in deep, fundamental ways. Meaningful self-actualization is harder than ever, because finding meaning is hard and we've studied the problem enough that fooling ourselves has gotten harder.
One of the problems with an increasingly global culture and economic system is the erosion of diversity. If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each. Instead, we get some semi-stable equilibrium that emerged by happenchance and the only path out towards something different seems to be by some kind of central planning or massive movement-- both of which have tended to make things worse in practice because of unintended consequences and institutional inertia.
How I see the last 200 years of progress was that past life was indeed harsh and chaotic (how do you handle potential deadly diseases popping anywhere without biological models.. not easy). Ensuring more food, more time for the mass was an obvious unstoppable benefit, but to a certain extent.
> One of the problems with an increasingly global culture and economic system is the erosion of diversity. If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each. Instead, we get some semi-stable equilibrium that emerged by happenchance and the only path out towards something different seems to be by some kind of central planning or massive movement-- both of which have tended to make things worse in practice because of unintended consequences and institutional inertia.
I'm not sure I fully get your paragraph (you write conceptually dense ideas) but I kinda see a globalized homogenization of cultures which seems impoverished.
> I'm not sure I fully get your paragraph (you write conceptually dense ideas) but I kinda see a globalized homogenization
Yes--- . The problem is that there are massive economies of scale and interconnection driven by trade and global markets. In turn, the large scale of the marketplace doesn't leave much room for labor or capital to not be allocated "optimally". In turn, the amount of ability any given entity (individual people, businesses, or even nation-states) have to experiment with significantly different systems is very limited.
For experiments on the smaller scale, there's a big chance they are not applicable to broader groups. And experiments on the larger scale (revolutions, massive policy changes, etc) tend to have unintended consequences and a massive body count.
We're in a stable-ish equilibrium, but it's completely unlikely we're near any kind of global optimum on material wealth, or quality of life, or any other given chosen axis.
> of cultures which seems impoverished.
This is an interesting one, too. There was a certain threshold of wealth reached just before industrialization which allowed a massive growth in cultural expression and we have wonderful things from many cultures that emerged then... that then, with global media and global trade we've been able to enrich further-- we've played off of and learned and enjoyed the riches (culinary, musical, artistic, literary, ....) thereof. But in so doing we've strip-mined this heritage and permanently weakened the nation-scale incubators of new ideas.
> If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each.
Wouldn't this result in exactly the global culture? A compromise by taking the “best” aspects from everyone minimizing everyone's unhappiness from that?
> Wouldn't this result in exactly the global culture? A compromise by taking the “best” aspects from everyone
Yes-- that's exactly what we've done: mostly selecting for efficiency. And now we're so locked into a local optimum of efficiency, diversity in business culture and mainline economic practices is difficult.
> minimizing everyone's unhappiness from that?
While capital markets try to optimize return on investment, and happiness is one component of economic preference that drives ROI... they hardly try and optimize happiness, per se. They are also relatively short-sighted, don't foresee all consequences and externalities, and tend to fall into local rather than global optima.
We could start by looking at their equivalents in developing countries. In many respects, they have it better than medieval peasants. They can obtain tools made by machines rather than days of artisan labour, have electric light in the evenings, usually have some level of education and access to some and the harvests aren't any more arduous. And yet curiously, the leisure time they get isn't widely envied, not necessarily even by the people who left the village for jobs in sweatshops...
they are, in some ways. Efficiency gains can mean you work less, but they more often mean you have less people doing the same work. Back then one peasant had much less land to cultivate, a third of all fields were fallowed each year, and 90% of the population worked in farming. Now it's more like 10% and in some countries even less than that.
The problem with being a peasant wasn't the hard work - it was the constant risk of starvation or sickness killing you and your family. So they optimized for lowering the risks instead of optimizing for better profits or more free time.
> even by the people who left the village for jobs in sweatshops
Sweatshops are harder work but less risks than farming.
I think we are seeing proof of what you are saying with the childcare cost crisis in most developed nations. A good proportion of early years childcare (and often later) was "free". Now that it is being transferred into wage labour in many countries with growing labour force participation amongst women, we are learning that this stuff was very costly. Similarly, all the household tasks then would take a full working day.
Also, they did have sports and games. Many of the games we play today have their origins in that period, but they weren't of the formal nature that we have today (and there were far more bloodsports). They had culture of a sort: theatre, singing, music. And they had more mass social events like festivals and market days (life today is far more atomized, back then this was a way for everyone to gather in a place and get business done). The rich didn't do organized sports either (as we conceive)...hunting of course was a huge pasttime.
The "innovations" of that period passed into irrelevance when the world changed. Our "innovations" will also pass into irrelevance too.
EDIT: btw, someone else has said that only the activities of the rich are recorded...this isn't right, there are lots of social history books which cover the leisure activities of workers in this period (if you Google social history or leisure history, you will find the period you are interested in).
>Similarly, all the household tasks then would take a full working day.
Not even close.
Try visiting a rural place that still lives in pre-20th century standards (not as hard as it sounds in Central Asia, Africa, etc. Heck, even in most of Europe it was the norm up around the 1950s in almost all rural areas, and in many places in Southern Europe it was quite the same up to the 1970s -- electricity and cars didn't come to lots of rural areas until that decade).
In any case, household tasks were an insignificant amount of the day.
(Also, contrary to the modern myth, both men and women worked. "Women not working" was a thing for richer families, in poor and rural households women worked just fine, in the same fields and tasks as men - and of course this continued in the industrial era, poor women working in factories was standard. Women "not allowed to work" was a rich-household's problem).
As for the kids, aside from school (where that was compulsory, since I include here the 20th century European rural experience), after quite a small age, like 3-4 they mostly roamed around playing and were taken care for by the whole community - not many struggling "parents without nunnies" or helicopter parenting there. And after getting around 10 or so they'd start helping with some chores too.
Kids in industrialized nations had it worse. In the 19th century to about 1930, from Paris and London to New York, there were 8-10-12 year old kids working in the chimneys, the factories, even the mines:
I have visited a pre-industrial villages in Eastern Europe and not once did I feel the urge to trade places. I have no idea what you are on about.
The hosts spent two hours preparing a hearth to cook bread for us. And they ended the meal with a plead for us to help them get visas to the West.
And you are vastly underestimating the child death rates where small children roam freely. Children in factories might have arguably been safer than on a farm.
We need to stop romanticizing other people's poverty.
>I have visited a pre-industrial villages in Eastern Europe and not once did I feel the urge to trade places.
Well, this is beside the point, this was about whether "household chores took the best part of the day". Not whether you would trade to rural living or not.
>The hosts spent two hours preparing a hearth to cook bread for us
So? I've roasted, cooked, etc. for decades, and it was never a big deal, nor you have to be over the wood-stove or grill for the whole time (when you do, the cooking is very fast, like with some meats). And if there are 3-4 persons in the household (as there always were, families lived with several children and grandparents where never far away), it's dead easy to have rounds keeping an eye on it and still be free to do whatever else.
>And you are vastly underestimating the child death rates where small children roam freely. Children in factories might have arguably been safer than on a farm.
You're vastly overestimating.
Kids restrained is modern helicopter parent hysteria. Kids generally roamed free up until the 70s in most places in Europe, and well into the 60s in most neighborhoods, even in cities like New York. It's not some medieval phenomenon, or something associated with "high child death rates". The ocassional kid could stil e.g. drown in a lake, like the ocassional kid today can be hit by a car. But that was not where "high child death rates" came from. Increased child death rates were indeed a thing, but were in birth or small age due to the lack of modern medicine (and most of it basic stuff, like cleaning hands, penicilin, etc, not high test medicine). In any case, not something particular to "kids roaming free".
I am not sure why you think you can compare to a rural place.
One, the number of children then was far higher, and there was no school.
Two, I don't think you understand that incomes were so low back then that they could not afford even basic machinery. The furniture that most people had was a few chairs, tables, and things to eat with. Even basic household machinery (for example, a mangle) that was common in pre-20th century rural society, didn't exist (these machines also weren't produced in large volume).
Three, no most women didn't work...I am not sure why and how you came to this conclusion. But women didn't commonly start working until proto-industrialisation. I think what may be confusing you is that women did work in agriculture during harvest times, this was not the case for most of the year.
Four, the definition of household tasks isn't even comparable. Household tasks included things like gardening which would only make sense in the context of a society with a non-existent market economy. Again, the comparison is...non-sensical, it makes no sense.
Five, you can just Google this. There are ample historical estimates of this kind of thing. It is not like this information is totally unknown.
I would suggest reading a book about social history rather than attempting to compare with some other period of history that you think you know better (your views of pre-20th century life are also not correct but that is a whole other story).
>Two, I don't think you understand that incomes were so low back then that they could not afford even basic machinery. The furniture that most people had was a few chairs, tables, and things to eat with. Even basic household machinery (for example, a mangle) that was common in pre-20th century rural society, didn't exist (these machines also weren't produced in large volume)
I don't need to "understand". I come from such a place, which was mostly like that until I was 10 or so well into the late 20th century. That's where my parents grew up too.
Being poor in monetary terms in such rural places means little (it's not the same as an equivalent poor in New York, which would be not having anything to it, no house, no shelter, and so on). Most of the living wasn't about paying for things with money.
>Three, no most women didn't work...I am not sure why and how you came to this conclusion. But women didn't commonly start working until proto-industrialisation. I think what may be confusing you is that women did work in agriculture during harvest times
Women worked fine, not just in rural places, but also in the cities, in all kinds of jobs, all the way to antiquity. The conceptions you have are all about richer families, not the average person. Of course in argiculture it was absolutely the norm that women worked. Women also worked in all kinds of jobs, from selling and serving in the agora in ancient Greece ("women at home" was for the richer families) to keeping shops and tarverns in the medieval times.
>this was not the case for most of the year.*
It wasn't "most of the year" for men, either. That's part of TFA's point to begin with.
>Four, the definition of household tasks isn't even comparable. Household tasks included things like gardening which would only make sense in the context of a society with a non-existent market economy. Again, the comparison is...non-sensical, it makes no sense.
Comparable to what? To the tasks you might know in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Phoenix, or wherever you grew up?
All these tasks (like gardening) and the for the most part "non-existent market economy" extended all the way into my childhood, and all earlier generation, in the parts I'm from, and many similar parts. They're still a big majority of what people do, though for the last 30-40 years they also have electricity.
Yes, people in my village (not any extraordinary example, most of Europe was alike) didn't have electricity (including fridges, microwaves, washing machines), money was small part of their life, and had gardens they ate from a lot of stuff (from olives and grapes, to potatoes and watermelon), including having farm animals. Well into the second half of the 20th century.
And they still had ample free time. Due to lack of modern entertainment, in a sense, boredom, and associated e.g. drinking, gossip, petty squables, etc. to pass the time, was more of an issue than lack of free time was.
>Five, you can just Google this. There are ample historical estimates of this kind of thing. It is not like this information is totally unknown.
Seriously, do some research yourself. Start from TFA, there are plenty of other sources on antiquity, middle ages, and the pre-industrial society.
I studied this at university. I have done the research. I am telling you do not (your only evidence is that you think it was like the place you grew up...seriously?).
Keith Wrightson is the basic textbook used on this subject (Omrod has written one about an earlier period). Pls, even for HN...this is wild, wild, wild levels of delusion.
>I studied this at university. I have done the research.
A, that settles it then. "your only evidence is that you think it was like the place you grew up...seriously?" -- no, my evidence is having lived that life and knowing people who did well until 30 years ago (and even after then, slowly changing).
But sure, an English academic of the peasant classes on that island would know more. He read books about the matter (but probably not Sahlins or ethnology on the leisure times of even primitive tribes. Not much for other political environments and warmer climates, e.g. southern europe either. And probably has never cooked on a wood stove, grew plants and fed chicken animals).
>Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!*
They had tons of fan of several forms, including fabulous festival seasons, and public holidays, complete with dancing, drunkdness, singing and music, and several other things besides...
The idea of those "pour people" comes from lorded over overworked peasants in feudal societies, a small part of global history.
Even so, the same poor people post industrialization had it worse -- for one, they were forced in many ways (including laws destroying their lands and livelihood) to work in factories, didn't chose it as a lifestyle improvement. And many put up a great fight in the process too
You comment reminds me of this article that I can't put my hands on, that explained that the generalization of washing machines actually increased work time in some situations, because with it came the expectation of wearing cleaner clothes.
It isn't clear. I'm sure I wash my clothes more than they did. I suspect dishes to them were rarely washed, while wash every use. Sure I have machines to do the work, but I suspect I spend more as much time, but im getting better quality results.
I think I use much more utensils, pans and plates than in those times. Cups too. Also I wear clean underpants everyday ( well, this is a small lie ).
I fix and change secondhand clothes, but I do have a sewing machine. Other things I fix were unfanthomable then, some fixes take weeks. My Selectric III for example.
The wild part is that a human being surviving in much of the world today has to know essentially nothing at all about how to survive in actuality. They just need to find a way to get money in one way or another.
> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!
They had some kind of holiday or celebration every month, often a few in one month. These were often similar to sports (for example Śmigus Dyngus where young boys run around the villages pouring water on girls they like as a pagan fertility custom). Or Noc Świętojańska where girls throw flowers into river and boys compete to get them and jumping over the campfires. Or Andrzejki where they danced whole night and played many kinds of "predict-the-future" games. Every wedding lasted a few days and after the midnight all guests played "wedding games" which were a combination of trivia, folk-song battles, guess what your partner thinks, and dexterity contests.
Each church had a saint patron or several of them, and on their days they had church market with traders from all around and various games and dances. Each person had a saint patron as well and their families celebrated on these "namedays". Every trade had their saint patron too, and they celebrated that. To this day it survived for farmers, miners, hunters and firefighters, but back then every possible job had its own holiday.
Basically the only time of year where there really was no entertainment was the 40-day fast (and even then there were exceptions - for example some villages to this day celebrate "half-fast-day" with various customs like painting walls of houses with water and calcium and dancing of course).
Also family back then was 20 people of all ages living near each other, not 4 like now. When a kid was born you had one party, another when it got baptized, another when it got first communion, then when it got confirmation, then when it married, built a house, bought some big animals and died. Add namedays each year and multiply by 20 people in extended family and you get every week busy.
That's just the stuff that survived to modern day in some form or another, there has been a lot more of this back then. Additionally every Sunday mass served partially as entertainment for peasants.
> example Śmigus Dyngus where young boys run around the villages pouring water on girls they like as a pagan fertility custom
Lupercalia always sounded like a good time to me. Who doesn’t want to strip naked and run through the streets whipping willing young women hoping to have their fertility increased?
They had their church, their taverns, brothels, and gambling. They were poorly educated and often illiterate. I think your expectations are unfairly modern.
> And I think the best evidence we have that we are overrating the quality of pre-industrial leisure time is that people developed almost no leisure activities
Dude, what? This is quite possibly the dumbest most ignorant ill-informed take I've seen today.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and we're trying for something different here.
I agree that many people today tend to over-estimate the 'simple' and 'idyllic' aspects of the average pre-industrial person's day to day existence and we should be careful to remember the stark differences as well as to discount the influence of fiction and history's focus on the extraordinary, influential, wealthy and powerful.
I've always thought it would be an interesting reality TV show concept to create a historically accurate medieval village populated with well-researched, role-playing actors and then to drop a small group of modern people into that context to see how they do. I suspect the reactions of those who over-estimated the idyllic-ness of the past would make for compelling reality TV fodder.
The issue with modern people is they don't even know how to put on the old clothes. They would be technologically-illiterate trying to use complex pre-industrial tech, and so would have a very hard time, much harder than the people of the time.
There have been a number of historical reenactment shows over the years. Continual this-is-hard reax would be a bit tiresome, so usually they include lots of success.
If you want struggle, and will accept some industrialization there was "Frontier House" from PBS.
Today after work is over I still have things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. today too. Instead of repairing a thatch roof I'm working on shingles, but the amount of labor needed around the home and in domestic life even today is seemingly endless and somehow fills to expand all available free time like a gas in a container.
The Hedonistic Treadmill. We're incredibly richer, but we are wired to always want something nicer.
We can wash our clothes so much easier but we insist on washing them after every wear. The net result is the same amount of time spent washing clothes (but they are always nicer).
I do my laundry once a week if not more frequently with a decently heavy load. I don't go down to the river, but I've lived in apartment complexes where the laundry room was a few hundred yards and several stories away. You still do some stuff on per clothing bases, like folding, ironing, special care like certain things being air dried on hangers or some other surface. Some stuff washed cold or hot even. Some people have to shlep their stuff to off site laundry businesses much a kin to a walk down to the the river. I'm sure back then you'd only be washing a handful of thin linen underclothing regularly, outerwear if at all. These people back then also probably weren't washing bedding. Some doctors say the modern beds, while comfortable, are worse for the spine than a firmer surface still used in some cultures.
> Today after work is over I still have things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. today too
But do you or your partner have to spend ~1200-2000 working hours/year spinning clothes for you and your household?
This was absolutely the norm in pre-industrial times. You couldn't just go down to the thrift store and buy a pair of jeans for $8.
When you clean, fix, wash and butcher, you have a dishwasher. You have a washing machine. You have a dryer. You have running water. You don't need to go down to the well, or to the river, to bring water up in buckets. You have electric heating - and you don't have to spend hundreds of hours a year chopping, seasoning, and splitting firewood, and then hauling it to your home. (And even if you do, you have far better tools to do it than were available back in the day.)
The nature of the work is different, but the amount of time spent doing work is still quite substantial even if we are mostly just operating machines. Plus other stuff has stayed the same, It hasn't gotten any faster to cook a piece of meat since that's limited by the laws of physics.
I’ve spent a bit of time in the rural areas of a developing country when I was younger visiting extended family. These were farmers that were fairly poor. In the summer months, lots of work, from dawn until dusk. But after the harvest until the next planting season there was no “work” to do. It was not fun.
People visited the same people (small village) and talked about the same things day after day. Days consisted of talking, doing chores around the house, eating and sleeping.
> I hope people understand that the argument the article presents is largely a romanticization of poverty
I think the opposite is the interesting factor here: late-stage capitalism has demonized the ‘grinding poverty’ and ‘unremitting hardship’ of these earlier ages, to keep our present-day noses to the life-destroying grindstone.
> I think the opposite is the interesting factor here: late-stage capitalism has demonized the ‘grinding poverty’ and ‘unremitting hardship’ of these earlier ages, to keep our present-day noses to the life-destroying grindstone.
Yet, no one chooses life of subsistence farmer if they are able to choose.
Really? Who has that choice available to them? I certainly don't - land tax necessitates profits (and $$$$$/acre to buy arable land in the first place!). The diggers and levelers certainly didn't seem interested in being forced off their land.
Enough arable land to feed family of 4 can be bought in USA for $14k (and you can buy it outside of US). Add $7k for next 50 years of property taxes.
You can also join Amish communities, if you are religious.
You won't have access to pre-modern supply chain, but you are probably eligible for social security and foodstamps, so you can exchange them for new scythe or something like that.
So they just sat around and were poor all day? All the rich culture being brought through the generations, it meant nothing?
I grew up on a farm. It was run pretty much by manual labour up until even the 30's and beyond. Even while tractors and various forms of farm automation became pretty commonplace by the 50's and 60's, they still used age old techniques for preserving hay by drying it on metal threads well into the 80's and sometimes even until the 90's.
My grandfather still used the scythe on his fields as long as he was healthy enough to work in 80's. He much preferred the ways of old, and never even bothered installing hot water, much less a water toilet or a shower, in his house. Yet they had time for a lot more holidays back then than we do today.
Sure, there was lighter kinds of work you could do while socializing, such as knitting or even baking bread. But then a large amount of people actually thoroughly enjoy doing those things, including woodworking or even hunting or fishing. Is it leisure or work? Well, it's hard to say when you're also dependent on it for survival.
These days the fantastic progress of "social media" is making sure I have to answer messages from my boss even on weekends. I don't really think of that as "progress"...
Don't a lot of people actually enjoy their coworkers and working, too?
I mean, I'm sure almost everyone including farmers had a list of things they'd rather do than work - but are the majority of people today really working jobs that just make them absolutely miserable?
One of my best friends is a cashier at Trader Joe's and - for the most part - she genuinely enjoys it. Only two of my friends HATE their jobs, and their desperately trying to find a new job. Almost all of my friends have lots of complaints about their jobs - but they also have a lot of things they like about it, too.
Why isn't there a grey area for modern work and leisure but there is one for old work?
This is clearly not true. They didn't have modern leisure activities, but they had a vast array of activities to keep them from getting bored when they weren't working or doing the arduous, nearly continuous preparation of meals.
> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!
No literature, sure, because they were illiterate (and it took the invention of the printing press to create a market for leisure books).
But no games/sports? How about boules, bowling, prisoners' bars, blind man's bluff, table games (chess, checkers, backgammon, alquerque, three-in-a-row, mill, the fox and geese, tablut), dice, card games, variations on golf, hand-ball, kick the can, cockfighting, cow-tipping, bull-baiting, a form of rugby, wrestling, fencing, racing, and an innumerable array of local games often surrounding festivals with cultural/spiritual significance? They also did activities like swimming, fishing, hunting, playing music, singing, story telling, dancing, even ice skating.
I'm tired from just listing them all!
The most common leisure activity for men was probably drinking in the tavern. This shouldn't be understated; this took up a lot of time. And it wasn't because they had nothing else to do, it's because drinking and socializing is often preferable to the above activities, even today. A lot of people today don't play any games at all, but spend hours every day sitting around shooting the shit over cans of Bud.
I'm not as familiar with womens' lives, but I imagine they had more responsibilities and less leisure time. Cooking, cleaning (such as it was), sewing/needlepoint, and raising children all takes considerable time, so they mightn't have had as much time for leisure. A lot of the above activities were also intended for men.
I don't want to completely write off progress, because there's been a lot of that and I don't envy medieval peasants, however I think there's a tradeoff.
They were bored most of the day waiting for the bocce-precursor or cock fight to begin, while we've got something to play with constantly that appears to give us anxiety and insomnia.
Boredom isn't usually fatal and may even protect against other problems.
Me neither, I think it's time for a review about some hidden principles we assume are good for us (constant availability of easy pleasures) but may not be.
Oral traditions, including fables and mythology, along with their mnemonic structures of repetition, reference, allusion, rhyme, meter, character, plot, etc., were early stores of knowledge and wisdom. Education for youth, knowledge of when to plant, how to spin, what natural resources (plants, animals, trees, minerals) were valued, skills in hunting, sailing, fishing, and war.
These were finally recorded in written form around the 6th century or so in much of Europe and Asia. Subsequent scholars (Idries Shaw who's 1970's World Tales is a collection of such stories being an exemplar) has found that the same stories occur again and again across cultures.
The etymologies of Zeus and Jupiter (*dyeu-peter- "Zeus Pater", literally Sky Father) are from Sanskrit, and similar / related names are shared and found across Eurasia.
Point taken about sitting around drinking still being an activity of choice!
But many of the listed activities were either only available for royals in the medieval period (fencing, racquet games, table games, a deck of cards in the 1300s was reportedly worth a small herd of sheep), or simply weren't recorded until that flurry of leisure innovations in the 1700s.
Perhaps this is all due to that pronounced rise in literacy that came at the same time. But I suspect literacy is one of the things that coincided with the huge material gains of normal people, and not unrelated.
> I'm not as familiar with womens' lives, but I imagine they had more responsibilities and less leisure time. Cooking, cleaning (such as it was), sewing/needlepoint, and raising children all takes considerable time, so they mightn't have had as much time for leisure. A lot of the above activities were also intended for men.
My understanding is that women would do most if not all of these activities in groups with other women and use it as an opportunity for talking.
Honestly I think the work-leisure dichotomy is kinda bust regardless. Do more years of education mean we have more leisure years than previous generations? Maybe the monks' prayer days should count as work.
In any case, before industrialisation, wage labour employment was a lot rarer. Peasants were mostly self employed, self sufficient and most work was defined differently. In a lot of cases, medieval people "owed" work as a tax or rent... They were expected to feed themselves.
My grandparents were born in mid 20th century Ireland. They grew most of their food, made most of their furniture, harvested fuel. Etc. They also had cash jobs, cash crops and such. But, a lot of the economy was non monetary subsistence even then. Hard to quantify the workweek, in a meaningfully comparable way to our lifestyles.
>>comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century
Those seventy hour industrial workweeks of the 19th century probably was" normative for domestic servants and other low class workers. They weren't expected* or sometimes even allowed to have families, homes or domestic duties.
IMO, instead of taking medieval "data" and defining it in our terms, we should understand their ways in their terms. Renaissance europe ran were "rights and privileges." Those related to being a maid, miner, landlord or artisan. There were guilds that had ranks. These things were referred to as your "station," "position," possibly even a class. Those things dictated a lot about your lifestyle, how much and what kind of work you did.
This brought to mind something from Bertrand Russell’s Nobel lecture (all of which is interesting, btw)
"I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day."
Even so, we're getting more educated than ever and with the advent of inflation, it's hard to say that collectively we're getting ahead of our ancestors.
Exactly my thoughts. Mere clothes washing was a full day activity. Go to the well, bring water. Chop wood for heating. Milk cow, tend to chickens. Fix the fence...
All this coupled with less then abundant available calories, and the slow paced work does paint a different picture.
Maybe they were not that relaxed, but slow paced work came from the necessary energy conservation?
> but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - 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.
Sounds like a typical day at a big tech company...
people also worked for themselves, which is intrinsically more rewarding. i use to order meat and baked goods from the butcher and baker, respectively. now it's the minimum wage employee that they hired to run the cashiers and the minimum wage employee they trained to work the machines.
Ask yourself, if it was so rewarding, why did we see urbanization associated with industrialization? People chose to leave those rewarding lives and move to cities and work in factories. People today choose to leave less stressful rural lives and move to cities to work professional jobs. It's so commonplace that its a cultural trope that rural people leave if they can.
What if work is leisure? Jack Welch used to mention that he couldn't wait to get back to office in weekends. I personally feel that large part of my work is really leisure: researching new algorithms, building POCs, writing whitepapers and narratives, having brainstorming meetings, and etc. I don't think I can get such meaningful activities outside of work, either. That's because the work gives real use cases that demand scale and efficiency, which drives my projects. To me, an activity is leisure if I want to do it and I have freedom to decide how to spend time.
Ownership of agenda is what underlines leisure, i.e. you're not doing something because you have to. Like sure, you may need to persist through an amateur chess tournament but it's something you were willing to expose yourself to.
With jobs there's really not that much leeway. You do things to make your boss and/or clients happy and ultimately your way of living depends on it. Sure it's possible to allocate time for fun activities at employer dime. However if they are too fun for everyone they are often referred as 'perks', highlighting that it's really a soft packaged form of compensation.
> I personally feel that large part of my work is really leisure
You're (we're) in a privileged position. Most jobs are drudgery: data entry specialists, cashiers, warehouse workers, assembly line workers, shop assistants. To them, every day at work is the same, and something different happening is a sign of things going wrong.
Very true. Working in tech industry is an incredible privilege that I cherish and am amazed at. It's also why it pains me to see the K12 education system in the US has failed so many students who could have learned enough and been inspired enough to get into STEM fields.
half of them have supercomputers sitting around in their tents, so i'm tempted to agree with you. but they are treated like shit by their fellow humans. we literally produce enough food, even just in the usa, for 2/3 times our population. most of it gets wasted because of crazy socialist agricultural policies, to feed animals that will be incinerated instead of eaten, and so on. same goes for housing, and all other necessities. i think the homeless people are saner than the others, but they i don't think they're happy
Reminds me of Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) by Keynes Definitely worth a read. I also finished Trekonomics by Manu Saadia which was a good attempt at trying to explain the economics behind star trek, essentially a society where the economic problem (scarcity of resources) had been solved and people live to pursue personal goals rather than income.
I can speak to Irish history. Long considered one of the most poor and wretched places for common folk, the rural poor had numerous issues in Ireland. While they had dance and a lovely folk music, they also had starvation, disease, lack of political representation, and a lack of basic economic ladders. They did have plentiful turf to warm themselves, in contrast to many other poor folk in other areas of Europe. They also had the gulf stream, like Iceland and the UK, which kept their climate relatively warm for it's northerly location.
There's no better demonstration of the decimation of the rural Irish than the potato famine of the 1840s. It wasn't just one year, multiple years, their monocrop of the Irish Lumper potato, which had led the widespread growth in population, failed them due to fungal blight. It's estimate 5% or even 10% died of starvation in some rural areas. Moreover, millions more left in droves for the UK and USA, recognizing the crushing poverty and lack of food vastly outweighed their love of the land and culture.
In my estimation, the rural Irish had leisure time for the arts despite their poverty and destitution. The abundance of time didn't help, they were too poor to own many games and objects. Yet, through music and dance and writing, they kept their spirits alive and, by some cheer, were able to Banish Misfortune.
It was the economic system that was imposed upon the Irish that forced them into relying on a monoculture, too, and forced them to starve.
The Irish working class were forced into smaller and smaller subdivisions by English landlords[1], to the point that they could only rely on a potato monoculture[2] to sustain themselves. During the famine, those landlords evicted over half of a million poor and starving Irish people[3].
Those same Irish tenant farmers harvested crops during the famine that were then shipped and sold on the English market[4], while those that harvested them starved.
Good recounting, but I feel like any talk of the potato famine has to mention the role the English played:
> Charles E. Trevelyan, who served under both Peel and Russell at the Treasury, and had prime responsibility for famine relief in Ireland, was clear about God's role: "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated".
The submitted title ("Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure") broke the site guidelines. Please don't do that. The rule is:
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Hi dang, I have a question about this. A while back I posted "Code Checking Automation [video]", but I couldn't help but feel the original title was quite vague. The video itself is about QuickCheck and more specifically, property-based testing.
Would it have been kosher to add, maybe, "(QuickCheck)" or "(property-based testing)" to the end of the title to disambiguate, or did the original video authors screw themselves over with their vague original title?
It's ok if you do things like that for clarity. We might (or might not) edit it out if the post makes the front page - that's a judgment-call area*. But we wouldn't post a scolding for it. We only do that when the guideline was broken in an obvious or baity way.
For example, the OP was clearly editorialized when it didn't need to be—and in a baity way, which ended up lowering the quality of the thread. I'm sure that was unintentional, but the guidelines are intended to guard against that so we want people to be aware of them.
The title guideline is necessarily worded in a generic way. In practice there are lots of nuances, details, etc.
* One informal practice that works fairly well is that we often leave edited titles (assuming they aren't egregious) in place until/unless the submission makes the front page. At that point it is guaranteed a certain amount of attention, so the downside of reverting to the original title is lower, and we'll often do it then.
I would take a 10 hour day in almost any job in the 21st century over an 8-16 hour workday for a 14th century farm laborer mowing hay with a scythe or plowing behind a team of oxen. I get meal and rest breaks too, and even though they may get more days off than I do, what are they doing on those days off? Chopping wood? Thatching their roof? Hauling water from a well? The amount of labor done in a day by peasants in the European middle ages dwarfs everything but the extreme outliers of today.
The article is about how we work more today than people did before the industrial revolution, both in terms of average hours per day over a year, and days worked in a year.
My point is that you can't compare the life of an ordinary worker today to the life of an ordinary worker in the distant past, because the kind of work being done is so different. Working more hours and days today is easier than working fewer hours and days in the past.
Considering famines were common, 1/10 women died during child birth, infant mortality was absurdly high and most people stayed in the same town until they died, I prefer now.
A zillion consumer goods and things, so many we'll be here all day to name them all. Decent toothbrushes. Electricity. Umbrellas. Flashlights. Batteries. Pens and pencils. Deodorant. Postal shipping. GPS. Near instant global news. Inexpensive razors and razor blades. Scissors. Asprin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen. Grocery stores. Air conditioning, central heating. Mass, quality clothing options. Nearly every possible type of shoe. Automobiles, mass-transit, airplanes, motor powered boats. Well constructed homes. Extraordinary entertainment options, from lowbrow to highbrow. The global travel system. Dishwashers. Washers & dryers for clothing. Lawnmowers. Power tools, and relatively inexpensive mass manufactured tools in general. Safe, inexpensive tap water. Thousands of different kinds of tape, paint, paper. Cardboard. Inexpensive, quality glass and mirrors for nearly any purpose. Insert 4,572,927 other things here.
This article is a joke. Everything was much harder back then, everything was much worse back then.
We'll see if people adapt (or not) to deal better with social media in terms of altering how they consume / interact with it, given the experiences of the past decade. I think a huge percentage of people have pulled back from eg Facebook and commonly broadcasting their views there, or engaging in low value social conflicts via social media. The average person is not Tweeting their thoughts on a daily basis and is not going to.
I think it could take perhaps a few decades (~2010-2030) for a full cycle to take place of people - across multiple generations - experiencing social media across their lives over many years, to inform the next generations of social media's nature. There is still a lot yet to learn about how social media impacts us, shapes us, influences us, contorts us. That's all still being judged, regulated, pondered, debated, studied. Television and radio took decades to play out in terms of what manner they fit into society, how society would use / consume those things, what society would accept from those things, and how they would be regulated.
I feel like you've wasted 153 words while completely missing the point of the article, which isn't to advocate for a return to a pre-industrial era, but to ask why we have less free time today than we had then.
Not quite: the workweek described still sounds like at least 40 hours.
What the article says is that they had a shorter work week than many people did during the early/middle years of the industrial revolution. Modern day capitalism, while significantly flawed, seems to have moved on from that early horror: I have ancestors from ~100 years ago that died of black lung after spending decades of 60-70 hours/week in coal mines.
The author also ignores the time outside of "work" necessary to keep a household going. Time spent outside of the fields wasn't just idle time: everything from cooking to home maintenance was added labor that would eat away at those off hours more so than similar tasks today.
And sure, today some people still have no choice but to work long hours, and some people choose to do so, but I imagine that was the case in the supposedly more idyllic workers' environment described by the author as well.
We also shouldn't forget the conditions of work & life for the average person. Peasantry was certainly a big step above out & out slavery but freedom was still significantly curtailed. There was not for example universal freedom of movement. Absent approval by the local lord, a person was bound to the land they were born on. The quality of low/middle justice for what rights people did have was highly variable & subject to capricious whims at times. (Which isn't to say that's a completely solved problem today though)
All of which is to say that workday hours, even granting the author's central thesis (which I don't), are not the yardstick to use when measuring quality of life. At best it's just one data point in the constellation of factors involved.
Small time farmers in capitalist nations who did not serve a lord should have even more comfortable lives than peasants. According to this anti-capitalist narrative, it would be absolutely absurd for these people to abandon their their small farms and family to work in a crowded factory for longer hours and more dangerous conditions. And yet it happened anyways, suggesting that the life a a peasant wasn't as idyllic as the author seems to think it was.
The problem is that the more we automate, the supply exceeds demand in the labor market. That in turn allows employers to easily suck up the excess potential workers at low wages, and also makes further automation or even repairing the machines we got uneconomical.
Stagnant weak demands screws over big things like nuclear power plants and subways.
We need things like a UBI and further shrinking of the workweek (perhaps as an "automatic stabilizer" based on pop vs total working hours vs popuation!) in order to not stagnate technology and get back our free time.
I think we just have to rethink what being a good person is. Workers have way wayyy more power than people think, they just need unity and the ability to say 'Fuck you' to the systems and people that harm more than help.
And keep in mind; of course those systems and their people tell you that they help more than harm. UBI is totally not necessary. The market works with minimal intervention if people are able to live fearlessly.
> Workers have way wayyy more power than people think
Explain? Individual workers are quite weak. A lack of large scale workplaces in the service sector make organization hard. Overall weak demand and lack of competition makes "capital strikes" in response to worker unrest especially easy to pull off.
We are seeing more strikes now precisely to do stimulus checks making 2020 a better year on average for bottom quintile workers, and increased demand further making labor markets somewhat tight for the first time in 20 years.
Unions are a good start, so long as they don't think the path to victory is through legislation. Increasing the spirit of fearlessness and proximity to nature should be sufficient to make the society resistant to corruption. Stimulus was necessary and had many beneficial consequences for labor, but it should not be mistaken for liberation.
I should explicitly state this; I believe that government and corporate corruption is only a problem when you live far away from nature, which is the true universal law which governs this universe and our lives. For the longest time, I lost this sense of trust with nature, for various reasons, but I know its now time to take back our lives from the hell of society.
> so long as they don't think the path to victory is through legislation.
That is definitely true.
> Increasing the spirit of fearlessness and proximity to nature should be sufficient to make the society resistant to corruption.
It's good to be in nature, but it's important to distinguish between nature the soother of souls, and nature the means of sustinence. We can build trains to ferry people to and from great parks, but we are too numerous for people to all resist through subsistance agriculture or foraging.
> Stimulus was necessary and had many beneficial consequences for labor, but it should not be mistaken for liberation.
Of course not, but we need a "starter motor" to get the labor market tightness to give people the leverage to rebuild those bonds. unionize, and shrink the workweek enough (by norms and laws, that's a safer sort of labor law than NLRB-type appeasement) to keep the labor market tight.
> I should explicitly state this; I believe that government and corporate corruption is only a problem when you live far away from nature, which is the true universal law which governs this universe and our lives. For the longest time, I lost this sense of trust with nature, for various reasons, but I know its now time to take back our lives from the hell of society.
Unionizations and organizing more broadly are nothing if not societies within society. We can critique the whole, but if take up a primitivism which is against all advanced human structures we offer ourselves no hope and way out, and commit ourselves to a path towards the dystopias we can merely cynically take pride in predicting.
I want to believe that we have the technology available to make subsistence farming, water treatment and power generation available to huge numbers of people. The key factor to this is keeping the benefits of the internet, while moving away from the main body of society. I have hope that starlink or another technology will make this possible within my lifetime.
I'm sorry but I think that would be very dangerous to attempt until after the population declines (naturally, per current modeling).
I am all for trying to maximize technology advancement / alienating division of labor. (This is why I spend so much time on https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs/ to untangle our great open source commons and make even in it's totality it graspable!), but "everyone gets to be a farmer too" is like the hardest-to-achieve form of that, and a failed attempt could easily wipe out what nature remains.
I would much prefer to abolish all non-highly-intense agriculture and try to return as much and to parkland as possible. IMO it's no coincidence California, Korea, and Japan are all prosperous. Mountains containing developing to smaller areas greatly improve things. We need the political will to do same thing in the flat areas by fiat.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadSo many everyday things we take for granted were incredibly difficult and involved a lot of manual labor and/or waiting around for hours and days.
I wonder how much of that leisure time came from being blocked and technology/communications imposing a maximum throughput. You couldn’t work faster even if you wanted to and so you leisured. “Hurry up and wait” as some like to say
PS: there’s also stories of medieval peasants in France basicalky hibernating over winter because if you didn’t sleep for 16 hours every day, you’d burn too much calories and starve[1]. I’m sure that was a very fun reason to have short workweeks
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html
Fact is most people voluntarily opt in to capitalism because life is better, if you want something close to what the article talks about you can pretty easily move to an Amish community or try creating your own commune and try to convince people to join
I think this takes a good point too far. The society around you is not opt-in, it's a very difficult opt-out. People generally follow the religion of their parents, the career path of their neighborhood, etc. Opting out of the current economy would be a major, radical sacrifice (of status, friends, family, resources, opportunity) that would require enormous vision and courage. And then what do you do for health care, for example? How do you raise kids?
Peasants in the industrial revolution faced starvation, IIRC, if they didn't move to the cities. Much of their opportunity for their former lives had been taken away.
Beyond that we have basic needs to feel that we are part of a family and community where we are loved and valued (belong) and where we can contribute (purpose).
While capitalism has excelled at improving productivity it doesn’t dictate that the gains in productivity necessarily will increase overall quality of life. I could, for example increase the productivity of food production in ways that may decrease overall public health. In that scenario capitalism would directly decrease quality of life.
I think the arguments on hacker news have mostly been due to a (US) system that has become extremely rigid in that there is less personal choice in how productivity gains may be spent by forcing people into very narrow specialties to maximize income.
In many cases that may result in overall lower quality of life if it impacts long term health or being part of a community.
https://youtu.be/uvPbj9NX0zc
Indeed, prepping food was no cake walk. Grinding grains by hand is pretty hellish, and making edible flour from high-tanin acorns takes weeks.
Sane with spinning yarn.
Like when dinner takes 3 hours to prepare instead of 20 minutes, that’s quite a difference.
I might just be a change of pace, also a change of dependencies. Walking long is fine (people need daydream and wandering time, some dose of boredom). Washing your family clothes may be work but it's still better than doing what your boss doesn't want to do. Emotionally your a lot less invested in the latter yet you have to do it.
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_magic_washing_mac...
Hans Rosling argues that washing machines are magic because clothes go in and books come out. Women education, literacy rates, workplace participation etc directly correlates with automation in the home. The less time it takes to keep a family running, the more empowered women get in a society.
I understand his argument but I think it's a biased view, we assume modern leisure is better but I'm not sold on this.
One might say that education and literacy play a role in what we're doing right this moment ...
A tiny example about power, woman in charge of my office bowed down in excuses after a lawyer insulted her for his own mistake. This is the sort of power people still don't have and that no book will teach you.
now, to be fair, my experience is only that, if so I wish I could live in yours :)
We're talking about an historic timescale. If they are literate and have high school degrees, they are very well educated compared to pre-industrial people.
> woman in charge of my office bowed down in excuses after a lawyer insulted her for his own mistake. This is the sort of power people still don't have and that no book will teach you.
Those situations are stomach-turning to me. Books do teach people about that kind of power, how to get it and use it (unfortunately), and how to respond to it. Also, literacy and education led to that attorney's power (unfortunately).
Frankly I don't think one book will ever prepare you to live the situations above. This is the kind of thick skin only real life can imprint in you. That girl probably knew everything she could have said, but biology took over, she made a large grin and let it slip. Social status for you. The same old song that has been played for ages. And mind you, that chief wasn't an angel, she unleashed on me a few times during my work. That's why I say people are not better today. All I see is tribal reflexes and fitting in the social tissue.
Now to be fair, I'm not the happiest dude on earth right now, so maybe I amplify the negativity of those situation. Still I'm not sold on the benefits of doing less thanks to modern technology.
It's not necessarily your fault, but I hear this trendy claim often, but nobody can support it. No one book can teach you everything and not every problem can be solved with knowledge, of course, and there are things we learn from experience, but the track record of learning from books is pretty unimpeachable - including, learning from other people's experiences. (And higher ed is much more than learning from books.) It's hard to imagine humanity without literacy.
Anyway, I'm not adding a heck of a lot at this point ...
All in all I think our model of society is slightly fooling itself about a lot of things. It adds but it subtracts too.
We are only beginning to find out what happens when women have full independence and children are not a necessary byproduct of sex, and it seems like cratering birthrates are at least one result.
A lot of the costs of birthing and raising children were paid solely by women, but benefited the whole tribe. Now that those costs can be made explicit, I wonder how tribes will chose to compensate women such that they are sufficiently incentivized to have at least replacement level of kids.
The part that I think is interesting is, as we progressed technologically, where did that time non-conventional working time go? It used to take hours to clean your home, prepare food, etc. We have modern technology which made it easier. How are people spending that new "free" time?
I think the answer seems to be that technology has essentially freed more time for people to work for someone else. The "advancement" means you spend less time washing clothes, but more time flipping burgers or delivering food.
I think this points to something interesting about how much the lowest earners in a society get paid. While it is true that they get paid what the market will bear, the minimum value is always just enough to survive on. "Time saving" technology has effectively devalued their wages. The cost of staying alive is less than it was before. They must work more for the same outcome.
I'm someone who likes to think automation and technology can make people's lives better in the abstract, but... maybe technology alone cannot accomplish this
There are qualitative differences in results independent of time savings...
All evidence point to that being very high. e.g. famine was regular and routine, before the capitalism and before the industrial revolution. Humanity basically spent majority of the time before the capitalism and the modern agriculture fearing running out of food.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Decline_of_famine
And, examples like de-collectivization of agriculture in China during their economic reform, or what happened in Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine#Decline_of_famine make it very clear "capitalism" played an important role in reducing / eliminating the famine.
So, articles like this is really misleading - it implies somehow life was better like this paragraph from the article:
> The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints' andrest days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking.
The "feasting, drinking and merrymaking" was regularly followed by long periods of malnutrition and massive death.
You can work hard but in a beneficial environment (efforts are well chunked and rewarding physically and/or mentally) or you can work somehow less but in toxic settings (adversarial relationships, bad tooling, etc).
This goes against everything I've been taught, that the plebian class basically toiled endlessly, from Feudal Times to Industrial Revolution before labor laws to today's "multiple low-wage-jobs to survive".
EDIT: Also odd that the author doesn't point out that ~2040 hours is the yearly hours in a modern 40-hour workweek in the US, give or take a few holidays.
Factory workers at the end of the 19th century definitely had a horrible life. They had to fight for 6day weeks and often had to work away hours a day under very dangerous and unhealthy conditions.
Artificial light is an important piece of social technology, and improvements to it had a big impact, but people have needed and used artificial light to sustain their non-daylight activities since pretty much forever; stone age communities did their social activities next to a fireplace in the dark. Like, today is going to be 9 hours of daylight for me, and for December-January there's going to be just 7 hours or so of daylight; people are not going to lie down for 17 hours, they do try to do the same things just with less light.
Fairly basic logic should indicate to you that it wouldn't have been possible for people to work as much. There was no manufacturing. The vast majority of people who worked, worked in agriculture. You cannot work in the middle of winter, you cannot work at night. I don't know how it would have been possible...and that is why people then lived in crushing poverty (it isn't comparable to anything that exists today, even third-world nations today aren't close to the poverty that existed then).
I think the surprising thing is that anyone would conclude that anything about feudalism was better. The reason why people didn't work long hours was because the economy was stuck in a Malthusian trap, and there wasn't enough productivity or work to actually feed people (apart from after mortality crises where close to a majority of the population died).
The only reason the argument is being made is so that it can support the OP's conclusion about work in the present. It has no real significance by itself, this isn't history (incidentally, this is why history is important...it is taught so badly in the US, so badly...but everyone makes these bizarre ahistorical comparisons, everyone looks at the past when trying to understand the present...it is unfortunate that we have the knowledge to inform the limits of this process, but people just ignore it).
The "cohesive narrative" stands alone. History exists only on its own terms. You cannot look at something that happened in history and say: we can do this because it happened then. It is not absurd, it is the basic aspect of how histography is taught in university (and btw, if you study politics...you will find the same idea, "path dependence"...you see parallels in every social science because it is a fairly common mistake made by people who haven't thought about the issue deeply...the "why don't you be like Denmark" meme is a classic of comparative politics).
I am not saying that the present is the only lens (again, you haven't even started to understand what I wrote). The point is that the present is the only present. The past can only be understood in it's own terms. You are not constrained in any way because the past provides only information about the past, not the present.
It is irrelevant whether yesterday is like today because history is not about yesterday. Again, if you are interested about this subject, I would read some books about historiography (EH Carr and Elton are two of the most important books of this last hundred years...but, again, I don't think you will find anyone arguing for the position you are taking because it so clearly is an attempt to justify a political position today...this isn't what history is, any political position today has to be justified in the terms of today...historical relativists do not take your line, no-one does, it makes no sense unless you have no idea what history is).
Albeit my school district was really into right wing propaganda in general, describing the civil war as "the war of northern aggression" in its text books.
This is the opposite of what you expect from one perspective. When a task becomes more efficient people want to put more time in it since they get more out of it. So the more efficient we make jobs the more people will want to work to get more and more stuff. There might be a cap to that, but as of yet we haven't reached it, even programmers making $500k a year still wants to work more even though they could easily spend most of their time not working.
People didn't move into the factories from the fields for the higher standard, they moved there because they never owned the fields, and the industrial revolution pushed them out with increased automation, so they moved to the only place that would employ them even though it was a step backwards in standard of living.
Can you show where this is? All I can find is that by some estimates, some people spent less time doing certain things than they do today. That is not a "higher standard of living" unless you want a completely shallow and de-contextualized feel-good talking point.
Objectively improved standards of living over the 500+ year period in question: child mortality, caloric availability, adult literacy, crime, sanitation, understanding what _germs_ are... the list really goes on and on and on.
It's not a conspiracy. People voted with their feet on this one.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy to have ended up in a bad place systemically. We can 'conspire' to change it for the better though.
Or are you reading a different article? Where are you getting these ideas that peasants were forced to move into the factory towns against their will, or that they considered themselves worse off for doing so?
Urbanisation happened over a long period of time and was very far advanced in the UK (and in places like Belgium). Europe always used a far higher stock of capital (inc. animals) than in Asia but it was only when land began to be enclosed that you saw productivity really improve (it wasn't until the 1700s that European agricultural productivity really equalled places like China), and urbanization accelerate. It is also important to remember that the Industrial Revolution did not happen overnight, there was a period of proto-industrialization when work was "put out" by merchants, this was often in textiles and sometimes with capital/machines that workers owned in their own homes.
It was really in the late 18th/early 19th century that you saw levels of protest begin to rise, as factories started to grow, as workers began to get displaced into factories, and then as workers got displaced by children working in factories. This was a huge "thing" in politics throughout this period, although during the Napoleonic Wars laws were passed which clamped down on protest significantly (Chartism, the Luddites...this was probably the first example of cohesive "working class" political movement anywhere). Importantly though, the only cohesive example (that I know) of protest against agricultural improvement was the Swing Riots in the 1830s, which were localised.
To be clear, this is not because there were no protests but because the protests had happened two centuries earlier with enclosure. That was the main process that really led to agricultural productivity improving (combined with the mortality from the Civil War and migration to the Colonies decreasing the pressure on population). Mechanisation in agriculture wasn't really a factor until much, much later (there was very little need, labour was basically free and ample...the poor laws of the early 19th century were a huge wage subsidy for land owners).
The other stuff the guy you replied to said is way, way off...as I have said elsewhere, this is just feudal romanticism by people who don't understand the past but have their views about the present so just see what they want to see. The standard of living then was significantly below the level existing in every developing nation today. It is fair to say that the industrial revolution treated them no better (the riots I mention above bear that out, it wasn't automation but mechanisation and the introduction of child labour which mechanisation facilitated), but that ignores the massive political changes that occurred soon after (if you look at the UK, the stuff occurring in factories was a huge scandal...a lot of the "political economists" of the day who are famous today unf did not help, but it did get solved and living standards improved).
I am really interested in economic history, so I was aware of the enclosure period, but don't know much about it -- can you recommend some reading material to this and also the Swing Riots? (I know I can google, but books are better)
But if you search for stuff about agricultural productivity, you will find lots. I believe Gregory Clark and Robert Allen have written quite a bit about this.
No idea about the Swing Riots either. I have just read about it in other books. I think Luddism is more interesting. Afaik, there was no real persistent movement like it in agriculture.
They all pooled their money together for some heavy machinery too...so even that has cut down a lot of time spent on prep & harvesting.
You could get jobs in the city when there's no farming to do, too. But you'd need a place to stay that doesn't eat up your wages. It's easy to do if you have family in the city already and just crash in their living room.
Another question to ask is what do you do when you're near retirement and too old to work? Well, you live with your kids and they take care of you with their income and chores. It's not like now where you're sent off to a nursing home and retirees need to be able to afford that.
So replace computers with agriculture and this xkcd really is timeless.
https://xkcd.com/303/
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Recreation is different than leisure. It's about re-creation and renewal, more like play.
Leisure - rest/recovery. Restorative but not necessarily enriching
Recreation - fun, play, stimulating and enriching activities.
The implication that a life of work+leisure is basically just work and recharging so you can work more.
Yes?
Capitalism was also people working in the fields and trading their produce, after paying their tax to their lord, not unlike to our income tax.
There are definitely many trends that led us to work more and more. There are increasingly more and more people in the few places people with ambitions want to live in. That's more competition which gradually drives the cost down. If the wage is already low enough that it's unreasonable for someone to live on it, the working hours will go up.
The real modern culprit in my opinion is the mandatory education system which indoctrinate kids to become employees for life instead of helping them find a place in society and in the market by providing value as a small business.
With less employees around wages would go up, with more small businesses the capital would be spread more and not concentrated in the hands of a few.
It's not hard to understand who is benefitting from this system: whoever owns capital and need workers.
I'm sure there is plenty of overlap with people controlling the media and telling people what to think and want - and people in the government approving laws.
People would say I'm lazy, because I'm come to work at 11am or wanted to work from home.
Many even got angry and said I'm insolent for wanting to work like this, while the rest of the world simply does as they're asked.
I wonder if you are running into this reaction because you are in a position (or applying for a position) where the expectations and compensation are calibrated to "full time" (~2000 hrs/year). Have you tried discussing a part time arrangement which might work better for you?
Only work 10h a week.
Previously, didn't they work for aristocratic land owners? Did they ever have the upper hand?
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/business/9...
I wonder what later research adds.
Presumably because in the other half of the day, they'd be working to harvest and grow their own food. I'm not sure what the difference is between working 8 hours, and getting enough money to buy food, and working 4 hours and then another 4 hours to make your own food.
Third, the Lord's inventory of tools was limited, so better to have two shifts of reasonably rested people than one double shift of exhausted people.
Not sure if this is true. I worked at a building site labourer and I've seen people digging trenches all day. I'm also pretty sure in the poorer parts of the 3rd world people are toiling for 8 hours a day in manual/ox-assisted agricultural work.
Although, I think it goes without saying that before affordable lighting and heating, we all underestimate how lazy winters were for the average peasant, whether idyllic or not (accounts I have read make it sound incredibly, incessantly dull).
And I think the best evidence we have that we are overrating the quality of pre-industrial leisure time is that people developed almost no leisure activities! Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature! They supposedly had half a year of doing nothing, and perhaps singing and drinking was sufficient to fill the time, but you'd think they would show lots of other innovations. Or even steal the activities of the rich (organized sports)!
Instead you don't see leisure activities develop until the rise of the 40 hour workweek and the availability of consumer appliances.
Edit: I hope people understand that the argument the article presents is largely a romanticization of poverty.
>Music and dance Music and dance is as old as humanity itself.
The peasantry could not afford to pay professional musicians but plenty of people knew how to dance and sing and enough people knew how to play instruments to have a jolly good time.
Occasionally, actors might come to town and put on plays and dramas.
>Decorative Arts Decorative arts were applied to clothing, housing, religiously symbolic objects, etc.
Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of labor by sex.
>Sports Sports, including martial arts were also practiced commonly.
There were many medieval tournaments allowing people to compete and demonstrate their physical skill in sports like running, log-tossing, or stick-fighting.
There were also team events such as kicking a stuffed leather ball.
Sounds more like work tbh. Basket weaving may be a hobby now, but unlikely it was in 16th century.
Compare it to say a modern profession like software engineering. Despite it being work, there's plenty of programmers who also enjoy programming and do it for fun on their own time as well as work.
Why would it have been any different back then?
Basket weaving done in your home, with performance left to your own scruples, and a personalized schedule is leagues different than slaving away for someone else.
Subsistence farming is not leisure.
In the tropics it was midday when activities ceased because it was too hot.
That said, I disagree that people had little in terms of leisure. They had many more days long festivities where people got together and enjoyed some down time typically they coincided with planting, harvesting (more pagan related) and then religious dates.
When the French revolutionary government created a secular approximation of the church calendar, they only gave off 1 out of every 10 days.
Slacking on any of the above could result in starvation the coming Winter as well as possibly losing your animals as well. There was lots of interdependencies which were quite unforgiving.
So it seems that outside of religious holidays, people could have been expected to work every day.
Feeding animals didn't counted as work, just like nowadays people don't think cooking for your family or brushing your teeth is work.
The activities of the historical poor and working class are rarely recorded except in fiction written by the wealthy that contains poor or working class characters. Also, your best evidence is a lack of evidence.
Well even amish people have modern lives compared to middle ages but you get the idea.
http://www.microbizz.nl/themanfrommicrosoft.htm
I think our modern lifestyle is astoundingly isolated compared to pre industrial people, even hunter gatherer cultures have hunting parties rather than a lone wolf hunter.
Some war veteran said they preferred the battlefield because even with the threat of death, the life in those times were closer, more intense. Now that's an extreme case but it's telling.
And even about art/leisure.. you don't need much to go deep. Singing, playing drums, dancing doesn't require anything modern. People had pigments or crude material to craft but still it's something.
To me it seems to miss the point. Modern life is not something that was intentionally designed. We're talking about the emergent output of different complicated systems, with wonderful things and horrific things enabled by both.
Undoubtedly we've sacrificed some of the best aspects of the past for dubious gains. Undoubtedly we're better off in deep, fundamental ways. Meaningful self-actualization is harder than ever, because finding meaning is hard and we've studied the problem enough that fooling ourselves has gotten harder.
One of the problems with an increasingly global culture and economic system is the erosion of diversity. If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each. Instead, we get some semi-stable equilibrium that emerged by happenchance and the only path out towards something different seems to be by some kind of central planning or massive movement-- both of which have tended to make things worse in practice because of unintended consequences and institutional inertia.
> One of the problems with an increasingly global culture and economic system is the erosion of diversity. If we had drastically different systems and experiences, we could try and marry the best aspects from each. Instead, we get some semi-stable equilibrium that emerged by happenchance and the only path out towards something different seems to be by some kind of central planning or massive movement-- both of which have tended to make things worse in practice because of unintended consequences and institutional inertia.
I'm not sure I fully get your paragraph (you write conceptually dense ideas) but I kinda see a globalized homogenization of cultures which seems impoverished.
Yes--- . The problem is that there are massive economies of scale and interconnection driven by trade and global markets. In turn, the large scale of the marketplace doesn't leave much room for labor or capital to not be allocated "optimally". In turn, the amount of ability any given entity (individual people, businesses, or even nation-states) have to experiment with significantly different systems is very limited.
For experiments on the smaller scale, there's a big chance they are not applicable to broader groups. And experiments on the larger scale (revolutions, massive policy changes, etc) tend to have unintended consequences and a massive body count.
We're in a stable-ish equilibrium, but it's completely unlikely we're near any kind of global optimum on material wealth, or quality of life, or any other given chosen axis.
> of cultures which seems impoverished.
This is an interesting one, too. There was a certain threshold of wealth reached just before industrialization which allowed a massive growth in cultural expression and we have wonderful things from many cultures that emerged then... that then, with global media and global trade we've been able to enrich further-- we've played off of and learned and enjoyed the riches (culinary, musical, artistic, literary, ....) thereof. But in so doing we've strip-mined this heritage and permanently weakened the nation-scale incubators of new ideas.
Wouldn't this result in exactly the global culture? A compromise by taking the “best” aspects from everyone minimizing everyone's unhappiness from that?
Yes-- that's exactly what we've done: mostly selecting for efficiency. And now we're so locked into a local optimum of efficiency, diversity in business culture and mainline economic practices is difficult.
> minimizing everyone's unhappiness from that?
While capital markets try to optimize return on investment, and happiness is one component of economic preference that drives ROI... they hardly try and optimize happiness, per se. They are also relatively short-sighted, don't foresee all consequences and externalities, and tend to fall into local rather than global optima.
they are, in some ways. Efficiency gains can mean you work less, but they more often mean you have less people doing the same work. Back then one peasant had much less land to cultivate, a third of all fields were fallowed each year, and 90% of the population worked in farming. Now it's more like 10% and in some countries even less than that.
The problem with being a peasant wasn't the hard work - it was the constant risk of starvation or sickness killing you and your family. So they optimized for lowering the risks instead of optimizing for better profits or more free time.
> even by the people who left the village for jobs in sweatshops
Sweatshops are harder work but less risks than farming.
I think we are seeing proof of what you are saying with the childcare cost crisis in most developed nations. A good proportion of early years childcare (and often later) was "free". Now that it is being transferred into wage labour in many countries with growing labour force participation amongst women, we are learning that this stuff was very costly. Similarly, all the household tasks then would take a full working day.
Also, they did have sports and games. Many of the games we play today have their origins in that period, but they weren't of the formal nature that we have today (and there were far more bloodsports). They had culture of a sort: theatre, singing, music. And they had more mass social events like festivals and market days (life today is far more atomized, back then this was a way for everyone to gather in a place and get business done). The rich didn't do organized sports either (as we conceive)...hunting of course was a huge pasttime.
The "innovations" of that period passed into irrelevance when the world changed. Our "innovations" will also pass into irrelevance too.
EDIT: btw, someone else has said that only the activities of the rich are recorded...this isn't right, there are lots of social history books which cover the leisure activities of workers in this period (if you Google social history or leisure history, you will find the period you are interested in).
Not even close.
Try visiting a rural place that still lives in pre-20th century standards (not as hard as it sounds in Central Asia, Africa, etc. Heck, even in most of Europe it was the norm up around the 1950s in almost all rural areas, and in many places in Southern Europe it was quite the same up to the 1970s -- electricity and cars didn't come to lots of rural areas until that decade).
In any case, household tasks were an insignificant amount of the day.
(Also, contrary to the modern myth, both men and women worked. "Women not working" was a thing for richer families, in poor and rural households women worked just fine, in the same fields and tasks as men - and of course this continued in the industrial era, poor women working in factories was standard. Women "not allowed to work" was a rich-household's problem).
As for the kids, aside from school (where that was compulsory, since I include here the 20th century European rural experience), after quite a small age, like 3-4 they mostly roamed around playing and were taken care for by the whole community - not many struggling "parents without nunnies" or helicopter parenting there. And after getting around 10 or so they'd start helping with some chores too.
Kids in industrialized nations had it worse. In the 19th century to about 1930, from Paris and London to New York, there were 8-10-12 year old kids working in the chimneys, the factories, even the mines:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/child-miners
The hosts spent two hours preparing a hearth to cook bread for us. And they ended the meal with a plead for us to help them get visas to the West.
And you are vastly underestimating the child death rates where small children roam freely. Children in factories might have arguably been safer than on a farm.
We need to stop romanticizing other people's poverty.
And if you think kids in factories were safer, you probably don't know much about how child work in factories functioned.
Well, this is beside the point, this was about whether "household chores took the best part of the day". Not whether you would trade to rural living or not.
>The hosts spent two hours preparing a hearth to cook bread for us
So? I've roasted, cooked, etc. for decades, and it was never a big deal, nor you have to be over the wood-stove or grill for the whole time (when you do, the cooking is very fast, like with some meats). And if there are 3-4 persons in the household (as there always were, families lived with several children and grandparents where never far away), it's dead easy to have rounds keeping an eye on it and still be free to do whatever else.
>And you are vastly underestimating the child death rates where small children roam freely. Children in factories might have arguably been safer than on a farm.
You're vastly overestimating.
Kids restrained is modern helicopter parent hysteria. Kids generally roamed free up until the 70s in most places in Europe, and well into the 60s in most neighborhoods, even in cities like New York. It's not some medieval phenomenon, or something associated with "high child death rates". The ocassional kid could stil e.g. drown in a lake, like the ocassional kid today can be hit by a car. But that was not where "high child death rates" came from. Increased child death rates were indeed a thing, but were in birth or small age due to the lack of modern medicine (and most of it basic stuff, like cleaning hands, penicilin, etc, not high test medicine). In any case, not something particular to "kids roaming free".
One, the number of children then was far higher, and there was no school.
Two, I don't think you understand that incomes were so low back then that they could not afford even basic machinery. The furniture that most people had was a few chairs, tables, and things to eat with. Even basic household machinery (for example, a mangle) that was common in pre-20th century rural society, didn't exist (these machines also weren't produced in large volume).
Three, no most women didn't work...I am not sure why and how you came to this conclusion. But women didn't commonly start working until proto-industrialisation. I think what may be confusing you is that women did work in agriculture during harvest times, this was not the case for most of the year.
Four, the definition of household tasks isn't even comparable. Household tasks included things like gardening which would only make sense in the context of a society with a non-existent market economy. Again, the comparison is...non-sensical, it makes no sense.
Five, you can just Google this. There are ample historical estimates of this kind of thing. It is not like this information is totally unknown.
I would suggest reading a book about social history rather than attempting to compare with some other period of history that you think you know better (your views of pre-20th century life are also not correct but that is a whole other story).
I don't need to "understand". I come from such a place, which was mostly like that until I was 10 or so well into the late 20th century. That's where my parents grew up too.
Being poor in monetary terms in such rural places means little (it's not the same as an equivalent poor in New York, which would be not having anything to it, no house, no shelter, and so on). Most of the living wasn't about paying for things with money.
>Three, no most women didn't work...I am not sure why and how you came to this conclusion. But women didn't commonly start working until proto-industrialisation. I think what may be confusing you is that women did work in agriculture during harvest times
Women worked fine, not just in rural places, but also in the cities, in all kinds of jobs, all the way to antiquity. The conceptions you have are all about richer families, not the average person. Of course in argiculture it was absolutely the norm that women worked. Women also worked in all kinds of jobs, from selling and serving in the agora in ancient Greece ("women at home" was for the richer families) to keeping shops and tarverns in the medieval times.
>this was not the case for most of the year.*
It wasn't "most of the year" for men, either. That's part of TFA's point to begin with.
>Four, the definition of household tasks isn't even comparable. Household tasks included things like gardening which would only make sense in the context of a society with a non-existent market economy. Again, the comparison is...non-sensical, it makes no sense.
Comparable to what? To the tasks you might know in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Phoenix, or wherever you grew up?
All these tasks (like gardening) and the for the most part "non-existent market economy" extended all the way into my childhood, and all earlier generation, in the parts I'm from, and many similar parts. They're still a big majority of what people do, though for the last 30-40 years they also have electricity.
Yes, people in my village (not any extraordinary example, most of Europe was alike) didn't have electricity (including fridges, microwaves, washing machines), money was small part of their life, and had gardens they ate from a lot of stuff (from olives and grapes, to potatoes and watermelon), including having farm animals. Well into the second half of the 20th century.
And they still had ample free time. Due to lack of modern entertainment, in a sense, boredom, and associated e.g. drinking, gossip, petty squables, etc. to pass the time, was more of an issue than lack of free time was.
>Five, you can just Google this. There are ample historical estimates of this kind of thing. It is not like this information is totally unknown.
Seriously, do some research yourself. Start from TFA, there are plenty of other sources on antiquity, middle ages, and the pre-industrial society.
Keith Wrightson is the basic textbook used on this subject (Omrod has written one about an earlier period). Pls, even for HN...this is wild, wild, wild levels of delusion.
A, that settles it then. "your only evidence is that you think it was like the place you grew up...seriously?" -- no, my evidence is having lived that life and knowing people who did well until 30 years ago (and even after then, slowly changing).
But sure, an English academic of the peasant classes on that island would know more. He read books about the matter (but probably not Sahlins or ethnology on the leisure times of even primitive tribes. Not much for other political environments and warmer climates, e.g. southern europe either. And probably has never cooked on a wood stove, grew plants and fed chicken animals).
They had tons of fan of several forms, including fabulous festival seasons, and public holidays, complete with dancing, drunkdness, singing and music, and several other things besides...
The idea of those "pour people" comes from lorded over overworked peasants in feudal societies, a small part of global history.
Even so, the same poor people post industrialization had it worse -- for one, they were forced in many ways (including laws destroying their lands and livelihood) to work in factories, didn't chose it as a lifestyle improvement. And many put up a great fight in the process too
My father had a 40 hr work week and did not do sports, neither did my mother.
You don't think that cleaning, cooking, fixing and doing dishes is a bit less work today than in pre industrial era?
I fix and change secondhand clothes, but I do have a sewing machine. Other things I fix were unfanthomable then, some fixes take weeks. My Selectric III for example.
They had some kind of holiday or celebration every month, often a few in one month. These were often similar to sports (for example Śmigus Dyngus where young boys run around the villages pouring water on girls they like as a pagan fertility custom). Or Noc Świętojańska where girls throw flowers into river and boys compete to get them and jumping over the campfires. Or Andrzejki where they danced whole night and played many kinds of "predict-the-future" games. Every wedding lasted a few days and after the midnight all guests played "wedding games" which were a combination of trivia, folk-song battles, guess what your partner thinks, and dexterity contests.
Each church had a saint patron or several of them, and on their days they had church market with traders from all around and various games and dances. Each person had a saint patron as well and their families celebrated on these "namedays". Every trade had their saint patron too, and they celebrated that. To this day it survived for farmers, miners, hunters and firefighters, but back then every possible job had its own holiday.
Basically the only time of year where there really was no entertainment was the 40-day fast (and even then there were exceptions - for example some villages to this day celebrate "half-fast-day" with various customs like painting walls of houses with water and calcium and dancing of course).
Also family back then was 20 people of all ages living near each other, not 4 like now. When a kid was born you had one party, another when it got baptized, another when it got first communion, then when it got confirmation, then when it married, built a house, bought some big animals and died. Add namedays each year and multiply by 20 people in extended family and you get every week busy.
That's just the stuff that survived to modern day in some form or another, there has been a lot more of this back then. Additionally every Sunday mass served partially as entertainment for peasants.
Lupercalia always sounded like a good time to me. Who doesn’t want to strip naked and run through the streets whipping willing young women hoping to have their fertility increased?
Dude, what? This is quite possibly the dumbest most ignorant ill-informed take I've seen today.
https://victorianweb.org/history/leisure1.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've always thought it would be an interesting reality TV show concept to create a historically accurate medieval village populated with well-researched, role-playing actors and then to drop a small group of modern people into that context to see how they do. I suspect the reactions of those who over-estimated the idyllic-ness of the past would make for compelling reality TV fodder.
There have been a number of historical reenactment shows over the years. Continual this-is-hard reax would be a bit tiresome, so usually they include lots of success.
If you want struggle, and will accept some industrialization there was "Frontier House" from PBS.
Otherwise, I recommend the "Tales of Green Valley" historical farm series and sequels for a well-informed English version. Here is the sequel "Tudor Monastery Farm" on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjgZr0v9DXyK9Cc8PG0Zh...
We can wash our clothes so much easier but we insist on washing them after every wear. The net result is the same amount of time spent washing clothes (but they are always nicer).
And setting on laundry is largely a fixed effort, whether you do one item or thirty. Most people don't do one at a time.
But do you or your partner have to spend ~1200-2000 working hours/year spinning clothes for you and your household?
This was absolutely the norm in pre-industrial times. You couldn't just go down to the thrift store and buy a pair of jeans for $8.
When you clean, fix, wash and butcher, you have a dishwasher. You have a washing machine. You have a dryer. You have running water. You don't need to go down to the well, or to the river, to bring water up in buckets. You have electric heating - and you don't have to spend hundreds of hours a year chopping, seasoning, and splitting firewood, and then hauling it to your home. (And even if you do, you have far better tools to do it than were available back in the day.)
People visited the same people (small village) and talked about the same things day after day. Days consisted of talking, doing chores around the house, eating and sleeping.
I think the opposite is the interesting factor here: late-stage capitalism has demonized the ‘grinding poverty’ and ‘unremitting hardship’ of these earlier ages, to keep our present-day noses to the life-destroying grindstone.
Yet, no one chooses life of subsistence farmer if they are able to choose.
You can also join Amish communities, if you are religious.
You won't have access to pre-modern supply chain, but you are probably eligible for social security and foodstamps, so you can exchange them for new scythe or something like that.
I grew up on a farm. It was run pretty much by manual labour up until even the 30's and beyond. Even while tractors and various forms of farm automation became pretty commonplace by the 50's and 60's, they still used age old techniques for preserving hay by drying it on metal threads well into the 80's and sometimes even until the 90's.
My grandfather still used the scythe on his fields as long as he was healthy enough to work in 80's. He much preferred the ways of old, and never even bothered installing hot water, much less a water toilet or a shower, in his house. Yet they had time for a lot more holidays back then than we do today.
Sure, there was lighter kinds of work you could do while socializing, such as knitting or even baking bread. But then a large amount of people actually thoroughly enjoy doing those things, including woodworking or even hunting or fishing. Is it leisure or work? Well, it's hard to say when you're also dependent on it for survival.
These days the fantastic progress of "social media" is making sure I have to answer messages from my boss even on weekends. I don't really think of that as "progress"...
I mean, I'm sure almost everyone including farmers had a list of things they'd rather do than work - but are the majority of people today really working jobs that just make them absolutely miserable?
One of my best friends is a cashier at Trader Joe's and - for the most part - she genuinely enjoys it. Only two of my friends HATE their jobs, and their desperately trying to find a new job. Almost all of my friends have lots of complaints about their jobs - but they also have a lot of things they like about it, too.
Why isn't there a grey area for modern work and leisure but there is one for old work?
This is clearly not true. They didn't have modern leisure activities, but they had a vast array of activities to keep them from getting bored when they weren't working or doing the arduous, nearly continuous preparation of meals.
> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!
No literature, sure, because they were illiterate (and it took the invention of the printing press to create a market for leisure books).
But no games/sports? How about boules, bowling, prisoners' bars, blind man's bluff, table games (chess, checkers, backgammon, alquerque, three-in-a-row, mill, the fox and geese, tablut), dice, card games, variations on golf, hand-ball, kick the can, cockfighting, cow-tipping, bull-baiting, a form of rugby, wrestling, fencing, racing, and an innumerable array of local games often surrounding festivals with cultural/spiritual significance? They also did activities like swimming, fishing, hunting, playing music, singing, story telling, dancing, even ice skating.
I'm tired from just listing them all!
The most common leisure activity for men was probably drinking in the tavern. This shouldn't be understated; this took up a lot of time. And it wasn't because they had nothing else to do, it's because drinking and socializing is often preferable to the above activities, even today. A lot of people today don't play any games at all, but spend hours every day sitting around shooting the shit over cans of Bud.
I'm not as familiar with womens' lives, but I imagine they had more responsibilities and less leisure time. Cooking, cleaning (such as it was), sewing/needlepoint, and raising children all takes considerable time, so they mightn't have had as much time for leisure. A lot of the above activities were also intended for men.
I think we might consider them dull because we're not living their lives but maybe these were denser and fuller times than what we do today.
It's also possible that having harsher conditions half a year, made simple games and gatherings deeply satisfying.
They were bored most of the day waiting for the bocce-precursor or cock fight to begin, while we've got something to play with constantly that appears to give us anxiety and insomnia.
Boredom isn't usually fatal and may even protect against other problems.
>No literature, sure, because they were illiterate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_literature
(I know you mentioned storytelling in passing, but that rather downplays it. Oral literature was a big deal.)
These were finally recorded in written form around the 6th century or so in much of Europe and Asia. Subsequent scholars (Idries Shaw who's 1970's World Tales is a collection of such stories being an exemplar) has found that the same stories occur again and again across cultures.
The etymologies of Zeus and Jupiter (*dyeu-peter- "Zeus Pater", literally Sky Father) are from Sanskrit, and similar / related names are shared and found across Eurasia.
https://idriesshahfoundation.org/books/world-tales/
https://www.etymonline.com/word/Jupiter
Also once the sun goes down, the work stops -- nobody aint cookin once they cant see the food, not even washing up
But many of the listed activities were either only available for royals in the medieval period (fencing, racquet games, table games, a deck of cards in the 1300s was reportedly worth a small herd of sheep), or simply weren't recorded until that flurry of leisure innovations in the 1700s.
Perhaps this is all due to that pronounced rise in literacy that came at the same time. But I suspect literacy is one of the things that coincided with the huge material gains of normal people, and not unrelated.
My understanding is that women would do most if not all of these activities in groups with other women and use it as an opportunity for talking.
In any case, before industrialisation, wage labour employment was a lot rarer. Peasants were mostly self employed, self sufficient and most work was defined differently. In a lot of cases, medieval people "owed" work as a tax or rent... They were expected to feed themselves.
My grandparents were born in mid 20th century Ireland. They grew most of their food, made most of their furniture, harvested fuel. Etc. They also had cash jobs, cash crops and such. But, a lot of the economy was non monetary subsistence even then. Hard to quantify the workweek, in a meaningfully comparable way to our lifestyles.
>>comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century
Those seventy hour industrial workweeks of the 19th century probably was" normative for domestic servants and other low class workers. They weren't expected* or sometimes even allowed to have families, homes or domestic duties.
IMO, instead of taking medieval "data" and defining it in our terms, we should understand their ways in their terms. Renaissance europe ran were "rights and privileges." Those related to being a maid, miner, landlord or artisan. There were guilds that had ranks. These things were referred to as your "station," "position," possibly even a class. Those things dictated a lot about your lifestyle, how much and what kind of work you did.
"I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day."
Maybe they were not that relaxed, but slow paced work came from the necessary energy conservation?
Sounds like a typical day at a big tech company...
Being part of the merchant class in feudal times was a very high class outcome
This statement is only true if you don't count slaves as people
With jobs there's really not that much leeway. You do things to make your boss and/or clients happy and ultimately your way of living depends on it. Sure it's possible to allocate time for fun activities at employer dime. However if they are too fun for everyone they are often referred as 'perks', highlighting that it's really a soft packaged form of compensation.
You're (we're) in a privileged position. Most jobs are drudgery: data entry specialists, cashiers, warehouse workers, assembly line workers, shop assistants. To them, every day at work is the same, and something different happening is a sign of things going wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There's no better demonstration of the decimation of the rural Irish than the potato famine of the 1840s. It wasn't just one year, multiple years, their monocrop of the Irish Lumper potato, which had led the widespread growth in population, failed them due to fungal blight. It's estimate 5% or even 10% died of starvation in some rural areas. Moreover, millions more left in droves for the UK and USA, recognizing the crushing poverty and lack of food vastly outweighed their love of the land and culture.
In my estimation, the rural Irish had leisure time for the arts despite their poverty and destitution. The abundance of time didn't help, they were too poor to own many games and objects. Yet, through music and dance and writing, they kept their spirits alive and, by some cheer, were able to Banish Misfortune.
The Irish working class were forced into smaller and smaller subdivisions by English landlords[1], to the point that they could only rely on a potato monoculture[2] to sustain themselves. During the famine, those landlords evicted over half of a million poor and starving Irish people[3].
Those same Irish tenant farmers harvested crops during the famine that were then shipped and sold on the English market[4], while those that harvested them starved.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Tenants...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Potato_...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Evictio...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Food_ex...
> Charles E. Trevelyan, who served under both Peel and Russell at the Treasury, and had prime responsibility for famine relief in Ireland, was clear about God's role: "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated".
Source (but you can find stuff like this everywhere) https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/historical-...
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Would it have been kosher to add, maybe, "(QuickCheck)" or "(property-based testing)" to the end of the title to disambiguate, or did the original video authors screw themselves over with their vague original title?
For example, the OP was clearly editorialized when it didn't need to be—and in a baity way, which ended up lowering the quality of the thread. I'm sure that was unintentional, but the guidelines are intended to guard against that so we want people to be aware of them.
The title guideline is necessarily worded in a generic way. In practice there are lots of nuances, details, etc.
* One informal practice that works fairly well is that we often leave edited titles (assuming they aren't egregious) in place until/unless the submission makes the front page. At that point it is guaranteed a certain amount of attention, so the downside of reverting to the original title is lower, and we'll often do it then.
My point is that you can't compare the life of an ordinary worker today to the life of an ordinary worker in the distant past, because the kind of work being done is so different. Working more hours and days today is easier than working fewer hours and days in the past.
Considering famines were common, 1/10 women died during child birth, infant mortality was absurdly high and most people stayed in the same town until they died, I prefer now.
Running water is also nice .
A zillion consumer goods and things, so many we'll be here all day to name them all. Decent toothbrushes. Electricity. Umbrellas. Flashlights. Batteries. Pens and pencils. Deodorant. Postal shipping. GPS. Near instant global news. Inexpensive razors and razor blades. Scissors. Asprin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen. Grocery stores. Air conditioning, central heating. Mass, quality clothing options. Nearly every possible type of shoe. Automobiles, mass-transit, airplanes, motor powered boats. Well constructed homes. Extraordinary entertainment options, from lowbrow to highbrow. The global travel system. Dishwashers. Washers & dryers for clothing. Lawnmowers. Power tools, and relatively inexpensive mass manufactured tools in general. Safe, inexpensive tap water. Thousands of different kinds of tape, paint, paper. Cardboard. Inexpensive, quality glass and mirrors for nearly any purpose. Insert 4,572,927 other things here.
This article is a joke. Everything was much harder back then, everything was much worse back then.
I think it could take perhaps a few decades (~2010-2030) for a full cycle to take place of people - across multiple generations - experiencing social media across their lives over many years, to inform the next generations of social media's nature. There is still a lot yet to learn about how social media impacts us, shapes us, influences us, contorts us. That's all still being judged, regulated, pondered, debated, studied. Television and radio took decades to play out in terms of what manner they fit into society, how society would use / consume those things, what society would accept from those things, and how they would be regulated.
What the article says is that they had a shorter work week than many people did during the early/middle years of the industrial revolution. Modern day capitalism, while significantly flawed, seems to have moved on from that early horror: I have ancestors from ~100 years ago that died of black lung after spending decades of 60-70 hours/week in coal mines.
The author also ignores the time outside of "work" necessary to keep a household going. Time spent outside of the fields wasn't just idle time: everything from cooking to home maintenance was added labor that would eat away at those off hours more so than similar tasks today.
And sure, today some people still have no choice but to work long hours, and some people choose to do so, but I imagine that was the case in the supposedly more idyllic workers' environment described by the author as well.
Other aspects of these claims of a more leisurely life are refuted here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulati...
We also shouldn't forget the conditions of work & life for the average person. Peasantry was certainly a big step above out & out slavery but freedom was still significantly curtailed. There was not for example universal freedom of movement. Absent approval by the local lord, a person was bound to the land they were born on. The quality of low/middle justice for what rights people did have was highly variable & subject to capricious whims at times. (Which isn't to say that's a completely solved problem today though)
All of which is to say that workday hours, even granting the author's central thesis (which I don't), are not the yardstick to use when measuring quality of life. At best it's just one data point in the constellation of factors involved.
Stagnant weak demands screws over big things like nuclear power plants and subways.
We need things like a UBI and further shrinking of the workweek (perhaps as an "automatic stabilizer" based on pop vs total working hours vs popuation!) in order to not stagnate technology and get back our free time.
And keep in mind; of course those systems and their people tell you that they help more than harm. UBI is totally not necessary. The market works with minimal intervention if people are able to live fearlessly.
Explain? Individual workers are quite weak. A lack of large scale workplaces in the service sector make organization hard. Overall weak demand and lack of competition makes "capital strikes" in response to worker unrest especially easy to pull off.
We are seeing more strikes now precisely to do stimulus checks making 2020 a better year on average for bottom quintile workers, and increased demand further making labor markets somewhat tight for the first time in 20 years.
I should explicitly state this; I believe that government and corporate corruption is only a problem when you live far away from nature, which is the true universal law which governs this universe and our lives. For the longest time, I lost this sense of trust with nature, for various reasons, but I know its now time to take back our lives from the hell of society.
Yes
> so long as they don't think the path to victory is through legislation.
That is definitely true.
> Increasing the spirit of fearlessness and proximity to nature should be sufficient to make the society resistant to corruption.
It's good to be in nature, but it's important to distinguish between nature the soother of souls, and nature the means of sustinence. We can build trains to ferry people to and from great parks, but we are too numerous for people to all resist through subsistance agriculture or foraging.
> Stimulus was necessary and had many beneficial consequences for labor, but it should not be mistaken for liberation.
Of course not, but we need a "starter motor" to get the labor market tightness to give people the leverage to rebuild those bonds. unionize, and shrink the workweek enough (by norms and laws, that's a safer sort of labor law than NLRB-type appeasement) to keep the labor market tight.
> I should explicitly state this; I believe that government and corporate corruption is only a problem when you live far away from nature, which is the true universal law which governs this universe and our lives. For the longest time, I lost this sense of trust with nature, for various reasons, but I know its now time to take back our lives from the hell of society.
Unionizations and organizing more broadly are nothing if not societies within society. We can critique the whole, but if take up a primitivism which is against all advanced human structures we offer ourselves no hope and way out, and commit ourselves to a path towards the dystopias we can merely cynically take pride in predicting.
I am all for trying to maximize technology advancement / alienating division of labor. (This is why I spend so much time on https://github.com/nixos/nixpkgs/ to untangle our great open source commons and make even in it's totality it graspable!), but "everyone gets to be a farmer too" is like the hardest-to-achieve form of that, and a failed attempt could easily wipe out what nature remains.
I would much prefer to abolish all non-highly-intense agriculture and try to return as much and to parkland as possible. IMO it's no coincidence California, Korea, and Japan are all prosperous. Mountains containing developing to smaller areas greatly improve things. We need the political will to do same thing in the flat areas by fiat.