[HN Gopher] Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than t...
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Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)
Author : dihydro
Score : 333 points
Date : 2021-10-30 17:05 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (groups.csail.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (groups.csail.mit.edu)
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| 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.
| WhisperingShiba wrote:
| 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.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| > 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.
| penjelly wrote:
| this reminds me of a part of Sapiens where they discuss how
| agriculture actually ended up taking up more time then foraging
| for early settlers. They also mentioned how their nutrition and
| teeth suffered initially as well.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| 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.
| Remnant44 wrote:
| I mean, you know, except for the peasants..
|
| Being part of the merchant class in feudal times was a very
| high class outcome
| betwixthewires wrote:
| 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.
| zaidf wrote:
| >Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at
| all
|
| This statement is only true if you don't count slaves as people
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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.
| Swizec wrote:
| 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
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html
| ren_engineer wrote:
| 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
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > 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.
| californical wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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.
| karpierz wrote:
| Is it that easy to leave your community and way of life to
| live a very different life amidst strangers?
| ratsforhorses wrote:
| 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..
| [deleted]
| narrator wrote:
| 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.
| slv77 wrote:
| 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.
| gbronner wrote:
| Peace. Not having an army sell you into slavery or
| burn/steal all of your possessions is a precursor for
| capital formation
| Swizec wrote:
| "What have the Romans ever done for us"
|
| https://youtu.be/uvPbj9NX0zc
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| How much of the things Romans are credited with reached
| the lower classes or conquered people?
| Emma_Goldman wrote:
| 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.
| britch wrote:
| 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
| gbronner wrote:
| 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...
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| Aunche wrote:
| 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.
| Swizec wrote:
| 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.
| ratsforhorses wrote:
| 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...
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| Swizec wrote:
| Here's a great talk about clothes washing.
|
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| That's the TED talk I had in mind, I just forgot Hans'
| name.
|
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Education, literacy, political empowerment are not
| leisure.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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 ...
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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 :)
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > 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).
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > 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 ...
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| Zigurd wrote:
| 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.
| Swizec wrote:
| 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.
| drivebycomment wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| hintymad wrote:
| 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.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| > 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_.
| hintymad wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If work were leisure, you'd have to pay to do it, you wouldn't
| get paid to do it.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Even granting your point, many people work jobs which are
| tedious and/or physically tiring.
| varjag wrote:
| 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.
| kiloDalton wrote:
| I remember enjoying E.P. Thompson's take on "Time, Work-
| Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" in college. He has a lot
| of interesting commentary about how technology in the form of
| accurate timepieces played a role in our concept of labor. The
| article is here behind a paywall
| (https://www.jstor.org/stable/649749). Anyone with access to a
| search engine can likely find a free copy ;).
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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).
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| rglover wrote:
| When it comes to creative/mental jobs, the most productive form
| of work I've found is start when you're ready and work until you
| lose focus (forcing it is where diminishing returns kick in).
| Expect that to mean days where you work for 3 hours straight and
| days where you work for 14 straight (or days where you do 2 in
| the morning, stop for 3 hours, then do 3 in the evening) but
| don't throw a tantrum when that flexes.
|
| Employers would be blown away by how much better the output and
| quality of work would be if they just left people the hell alone
| (fire your managers). People would also focus less on petty BS
| because they'd be happy instead of acting like children clawing
| at an ideal that only exists in their head.
|
| Assume people are lazy idiots and you'll get a bunch of lazy
| idiots. Assume they're smart and generally well-intentioned: put
| your sunglasses on. You'll get the occasional clown (who you
| fire) but most will respect you for not treating them like
| cattle.
| koonsolo wrote:
| > if they just left people the hell alone (fire your managers)
|
| A great manager is at the service of their team, and so makes
| sure you don't have to deal with a lot of bullshit.
|
| But a "boss" manager is indeed a negative.
| GaryTang wrote:
| Homeless people are dramatically better off than our ancestors
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker
| News? You've been doing it a lot and we ban that sort of
| account.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| enzino wrote:
| 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
| zz865 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure getting married at 18 and looking after 12
| children will keep you busy enough.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > 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.
| hogFeast wrote:
| Where were you taught that?
|
| 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).
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| Aerroon wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| knownjorbist wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| knownjorbist wrote:
| > 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| Literally the whole article about work versus leisure
| over time.
|
| 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.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| 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?
| monocasa wrote:
| Literally the article this thread is on for one example.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| 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?
| dantheman wrote:
| The benevolence of technical progress and productivity
| increase and the successful allocation of resources.
| Jensson wrote:
| > 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Returning to farming without the terrible pompous inhumane
| feudal lords sounds good
| emodendroket wrote:
| It sounds profoundly unappealing to me but the leisure
| time has its charms.
| hogFeast wrote:
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| hogFeast wrote:
| You have missed the point totally.
|
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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?
| supperburg wrote:
| 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?
| karpierz wrote:
| 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.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Very true. Also: the last time I studied feudal times was in
| the US 10th grade... in the early 1980's.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| 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.
| fma wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't be snarky._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| Exactly spinning was a fulltime job.
| https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-
| did-t...
| loosetypes wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://xkcd.com/303/
| dragonelite wrote:
| 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.
| monkeydust wrote:
| 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.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| 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.
| Uehreka wrote:
| 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".
|
| Source (but you can find stuff like this everywhere)
| https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/historical-...
| kingkawn wrote:
| The famine was the fault of the British, not pre-industrial
| life
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| If it weren't for English colonization they wouldn't have been
| forced into such risky monocrop behavior.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Tena
| nts...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Pota
| to_...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Evic
| tio...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Food
| _ex...
| pfortuny wrote:
| Note that it was the very Irish who asked the English to come
| help them in one of their multiple internal wars...
| thinkingemote wrote:
| 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.
| kortex wrote:
| Making sure I'm understanding the semantic difference you are
| making:
|
| 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?
| supperburg wrote:
| I am reading Jean Froissart's Chronicles. It is a fascinating
| first hand account of English royalty and wars in the 14th
| century. I think people should also consider the higher classes
| in those times because they seem to have worked continuously at
| killing each other. It's work none the less.
| dang wrote:
| 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._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Rendello wrote:
| 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?
| dang wrote:
| 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.
| Rendello wrote:
| Thanks, that disambiguates things nicely.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| They also didn't have access to computers, credit cards, and
| often were exploited via Corvee labor because they had no money.
| I'd trade working more for a convenient life as opposed to a
| relaxed but difficult one. People died of disease, famine, and
| war often. I mean why would you work hard knowing those major
| things are constantly knocking on your doorstep?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I disagree it's because of capitalism.
|
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| Capitalism isn't synonymous with trade.
| enzino wrote:
| 100%. good thing is the tide is changing, the main way they
| control society is through fiat money, and its going down
| throw63738 wrote:
| This is just not true. Working fields is back breaking labour.
| Old feudalism was similar to slavery.
| lettergram wrote:
| Ugh, alright so if you have a farm with animals it's a 7 day a
| week job. I'm having trouble believing they had a shorter work
| week generally. Now, if we're talking just laborers.. maybe, but
| the majority of people owned farms and animals in the pre-
| industrial world.
| k__ wrote:
| This is especially interesting when I think about all the
| discussions I had about bosses and recruiters.
|
| 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.
| roland35 wrote:
| 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!
| cyb_ wrote:
| 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?
| k__ wrote:
| I'm freelancing now.
|
| Only work 10h a week.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| firstplacelast wrote:
| I'd take a 0 hour day in the 21st century over a 10 hour day in
| the 21st century...I genuinely don't get the point of your
| comment.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| j56no wrote:
| we could have more spare time and use that to improve society,
| instead we're kept busy printing money
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| I saw an article years ago where the bones of colonial Americans
| were analysed. They found a lot of markers of major stress put on
| them. They also didn't live long.
| getbricked wrote:
| For a deeper dive, James Suzman the anthropologist wrote 'Work: A
| Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots'. Published
| in 2021. It's worth a read if anyone wants understand how the
| industrial revolution changed work patterns and (perhaps more
| importantly) how the agricultural revolution changed how people
| spend their time and how much leisure time people have had
| throughout human history
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| 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?
| 1121redblackgo wrote:
| The Industrial revolution and who owns the means of production.
| My machines, my tools, my rules. etc etc.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > What happened in the mid 19th century that labor lost the
| upper hand to "management"?
|
| Previously, didn't they work for aristocratic land owners? Did
| they ever have the upper hand?
| enzino wrote:
| 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
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Um.
|
| 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 .
| wolverine876 wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/business/9...
|
| I wonder what later research adds.
| didibus wrote:
| Tangentially, the physical labor jobs I had when younger never
| really tired me out the way that the
| mental/bureaucratic/political job I have now does.
|
| Physical work actually energized me, I mean this is all confirmed
| today as well, we know all the benefits exercise brings on well
| being.
|
| There's something about desk jobs that is frankly soul sucking
| and literally mentally draining in a way where when the day ends,
| it's as if you suffer from temporary depression. Even getting
| motivated to do things you want to do is hard, resorting to the
| laziest activity is often what happens, phone, social media,
| television. Sometimes I can't even get myself to play a video
| game and I love video games.
|
| And when the night comes, you'd think sleep is what you need, but
| that same day of desk job actually gives you insomnia, falling
| asleep is hard, and while you sleep it's as if all of that mental
| activity is still happening in your head from the work day.
|
| If physical labor work paid me as well and provided the same
| benefits, I'd probably switch back to it honestly.
| pugets wrote:
| While in college, my summer job each year was working for the
| city in manual labor. "Street specialist" was the job position.
| I experienced three summers of hot asphalt shoveling,
| vegetation removal, catch basin cleaning, and traffic flagging.
|
| I had a lot of fun working there, and so did most of the other
| guys who were my age. The job paid well and gave us more
| freedom than we were used to. But I noticed all of the guys who
| were aged 40+ had bad backs and were addicted to chewing
| tobacco. There's only so many OSHA-approved ways of paving a
| quarter mile stretch of road in one afternoon, and that can
| take a physical toll on someone's body over decades.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Age difference is important here. Physical labor jobs will work
| better for young people than old.
| ace2358 wrote:
| Here I sit, at my local farmers market working a stall.
| Looking around at the farmers and how hard they work, I don't
| know many young people that could keep up. Above a certain
| age and physical condition, maybe. But I know both men and
| women pushing late 50s that would put a lot of young people
| to shame.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Probably survivor bias here, you see a bunch of older fit
| people doing stuff you have a hard time with and you think
| damn, not realizing how many people have been pushed out of
| the career over the years due to physical constraints.
|
| Aside from that is the matter of physical characteristics.
| I am over 6 feet, naturally scrawny but bulky due to lots
| of strength training. There are many jobs in which I would
| not last because my body is not made for it.
|
| One of the worst jobs I ever had was making concrete walls
| that would be shipped around the west to make big
| buildings. We were working at a windy area, which would
| sometimes blow the walls around when moving etc. People
| died every now and then when accidents happened and they
| would get crushed by a wall. It was cold and physically
| grueling, much of the workforce were illegal immigrants who
| would call in sick almost once per week. At one point a
| foreman told me how much he appreciated how much I showed
| up for work - I was calling in sick once per month because
| I couldn't take it.
|
| There was guy there who had been doing the work for 20+
| years, he was in astounding shape. He was probably 5 feet
| tall, extremely wiry, and could walk along a thin concrete
| wall hanging 20 feet up in the air by two chains without
| hesitation and if need be walk onto another wall, pick up a
| tool, turn around and walk onto the hanging one to do
| something. We would watch him in awe of his abilities. But
| of course he had done 20+ years of training for this, and
| had the body type that made him a perfect fit for the job.
| The other guys who had been there for 20 years worked as
| hard as him, but they were less well suited to the job than
| he was.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| People underestimate how much experience and conditioning
| matter for all jobs. When I started working on an LTL dock,
| I was shocked by how easy it was for guys more than twice
| my age to do certain things compared to me even though I
| was younger, stronger, faster, etc...
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| Not entirely true. Visit some east asian countries and you'll
| see the physical work is literally what keeps the elderly so
| physically fit and in good shape for very long.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I know you don't mean China, life expectancies in the
| villages where they have that kind of hard life is way
| lower than the cities. That hunched over Ayi still farming
| when she looks like she is 80 seems amazing, but then
| you'll find out she is only 55.
|
| Actually, I don't think this is true for any of the East
| Asian countries I've visited, it seems to be a romanticized
| myth of the west.
| dionidium wrote:
| This is the romantic side of physical labor. The downsides are
| evident to anyone who knows someone who has been in the trades
| for 25 years. They walk kind of funny, their knees and back are
| wrecked, and they've spent decades breathing in materials that
| have devastating effects given prolonged exposure.
|
| It's really tough on your body to do physical labor day-in,
| day-out over the course of a lifetime.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Couldn't that just be because you were young and now you're
| less so? A long career of physical labor definitely takes a
| toll on the body. Young people can just take a lot before it
| catches up.
| didibus wrote:
| That's possible and hard for me to know unless I were to try
| one of those jobs again at my age.
|
| It's true that physical labor can cause injury that can hunt
| you later in life. But also:
|
| > Sedentary lifestyles increase all causes of mortality,
| double the risk of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and
| obesity, and increase the risks of colon cancer, high blood
| pressure, osteoporosis, lipid disorders, depression and
| anxiety.
|
| So I'm not sure desk jobs are any better. They just create
| less obvious problems, where a shoulder pain from an old
| shoulder injury is easy to trace back to the cause, desk job
| injury caused from sedentary life style are hard to trace
| back but could be worse.
|
| Also, I'm talking about a bit of a different problem, which
| is not how it leaves you later in life, but how it makes you
| feel when the day is over. Feeling physically tired can
| almost be nice, you take a bath and it feels so good. And
| when you go to sleep you have this nice deep restorative
| sleep from the physical exhaustion. Your brain isn't tied up
| with work. And all that.
| aquanext wrote:
| This is me.
| go_elmo wrote:
| Thats too romantic - physical labour isnt funny when its
| repetetive and continuous, which most are. Also not using your
| head is frustrating / degenerative. What helps me most is
| keeping a balance, making mid day breaks for long runs outside
| or a nap does miracles. But I agree, it also needs mental
| relief to regenerate, but doing sports gives at least minimal
| breaks.
| quantified wrote:
| Citation or explanation of "most"? And was that the case pre-
| industrial revolution?
| didibus wrote:
| You're right, I think I need to be more specific, assembly
| line work in some factory might count as physical labor, and
| that might not be any better, I can't say as I've never had
| that job.
|
| I'm thinking more in terms of the article, construction work,
| farming, and the more pre-industrial kind of physical labor.
|
| For me specifically, it was construction work, bus boy,
| landscaping, janitorial work and military training. All these
| just involved constantly moving my body in various ways but
| also I'd say not in a repetitive at risk of RSI kind of way.
| So it really just felt like exercise.
| bserge wrote:
| Yeah, it was great. Until I fucked both of my knees and my
| back, and have been in pain ever since. It affected me
| mentally, as well lol.
|
| No one helped me, no one even thanked me.
|
| Take the mental work. At least you can always exercise
| enough to be spared them physical injuries.
| after_care wrote:
| Probably the most common pre-industrial job was farmer,
| which is super repetitive. Imagine a task like tilling with
| a hoe, which would be a very repetitive and strong swinging
| motion.
| rhexs wrote:
| Is your farming experience strictly from Harvest Moon?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| It's repetitive in the sense that one does the same thing
| many times but not in the sense that one does the same
| thing day in day out as there are many things to be done
| and they vary throughout the year.
| huffmsa wrote:
| Right, you're likely never going to hoe so many days in a
| row that you develop RSI.
|
| The guy who did develop it is likely the guy who invented
| the plow
| tcmart14 wrote:
| It's also a lot more complicated, at least now. While
| some tasks are repetitive, the activities rotate
| throughout the year. But it's even more than that. I
| worked for a farmer before joining the Navy, and talking
| with him was interesting. Incredibly intelligent guy who
| I believe could have went on to do anything in world if
| he wanted to. Why did he settle with farming? It was his
| family farm, he ran his own business, but the answer that
| struct me even more was this, he said, "I get to wear a
| lot of hats. I am an engineer, those tobacco barns, I
| designed them. I am a mechanic, my old IH tractor breaks,
| I fix it. I am a business man because I make deals with
| local restaurants to sell my produce. I am a scientist, I
| work with the state university on soil studies and have a
| plot dedicated to running experiments with the
| university." He listed some more but I can't remember
| them all. The point is, for him, being a farmer let him
| be everything he wanted to be.
| Retric wrote:
| I've done factory style extremely repetitive physical labor,
| it's almost meditative as you can kind of zone out. Manual
| labor generally means issues with injuries, age, and low pay.
| But I have had plenty of much worse office jobs.
|
| Personally my all time worst jobs was nothing to do for 3
| months at a stretch while sitting on a client site so I
| couldn't simply read a book.
| slibhb wrote:
| Exactly. When you do this sort of work, your mind can
| wander. Compare to programming where you can't get anywhere
| if your mind wanders.
|
| Of course it's hard on your body and it pays a lot worse.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| I've noticed I don't want to sit and play video games because I
| sit all day at that desk. The last thing I want to do is sit
| there more.
| wyldfire wrote:
| I don't know if I totally agree. At my (software) desk job, if
| I'm working on designing or investigating something it can be
| very exciting and engrossing. But there are definitely days
| where it feels like I'm just minding deadlines and priorities
| and schedules. Those can be very tiring.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| > Tangentially, the physical labor jobs I had when younger
| never really tired me out the way that the
| mental/bureaucratic/political job I have now does.
|
| Every single physical labor job person I speak to complains
| about back issues, being tired, or work significant overtime.
| They're all stuck and can't shift careers cause they're too far
| in.
|
| >There's something about desk jobs that is frankly soul sucking
| and literally mentally draining
|
| It sounds like you were either in the field for money or are
| just in a shitty company.
| creato wrote:
| Did you have older coworkers in your physical labor job? I did.
| Those people were not happy or healthy.
|
| I think you are looking back through tinted glasses. I also
| liked my physical labor job when I was young, but I also know
| it would be terrible when I was 40 or 50.
| didibus wrote:
| Oh ya I did, and I don't mean that I'd trade my job back for
| that now, you're treated like shit, you're not paid well, you
| get no benefits, safety protocols are always subpar.
| Obviously that's why I'm doing what I do now and didn't
| pursue those jobs as careers.
|
| What I remember though is the nature of the work didn't leave
| me exhausted, depressed and with insomnia when the day was
| over.
|
| So I'm imagining if those jobs paid just as well, had
| similarly good benefits, treated you with respect, I would
| definitely consider trying it out again, maybe I'm just
| forgetting how much crap your body can take when you're
| younger I admit, but I'd be curious to compare.
| quin3 wrote:
| Yea don't underestimate the impact of youthfulness here.
| I'd be willing to bet that the same work you do now
| wouldn't have the same impact it does today.
|
| Though I will say, working in UPS facility during college
| definitely left me exhausted most days. I was an athlete in
| good shape, but it was still a very taxing job. Kept me in
| good shape though, which certainly helped stave off any of
| the psychological impact of a sedentary office job due to
| physiological changes in my body.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I have a theory that we can eliminate 90% of the required labor
| in our economy with the following strategy:
|
| End "consumerism" behavior where every problem is perceived to
| have a solution in the form of a quick product you can buy -
| much of that is a psychological trick played by marketers and
| rarely solves the real problem.
|
| Take note of the goods and services we really need. Things like
| food, shelter, shoes, etc.
|
| Design machines which can produce those vital things in a fully
| automated or highly automated way. The point of this part is to
| reduce the marginal cost of one more item as close to zero as
| possible. This makes sharing easier as it becomes cheaper to
| share with one more person.
|
| Make those machines completely open source, designed for repair
| and long life.
|
| Create a system where people can acquire equal ownership shares
| in the machines they rely on. For any given machine those users
| work together to keep the machine operational and producing.
|
| Land must be held in common (the legal device used today would
| be a public land trust) and housing, farmland, and
| manufacturing space is allotted to people based on need. (Look
| at the public housing system in Vienna Austria as an example.)
|
| Develop a culture where getting rich is not the goal but making
| sure everyone has what they need is. This has worked in other
| human societies before so this should be possible.
|
| Then everyone shares the output of their machines with their
| other shareholders. Each person owns shares in many machines.
|
| Under this system, there is no ownership class which can suck
| up all the surplus value. Instead, every person receives the
| benefit of automation.
|
| In such a world I believe the average persons necessary working
| hours would be maybe 5 hours a week. We could spend our lives
| with friends and family, or reading and writing, painting or
| programming. Most of the necessary work would be done by
| volunteers who enjoy what they are doing. Work that people do
| not enjoy could be shared in rotation.
|
| It's all a voluntary and market based system but captures the
| main thrust of Marx's critique of capitalism - the problem with
| an ownership class sucking up all the surplus value in society.
|
| We could do this. End consumerism, make everything open source,
| share land, know when you have enough and work to serve others
| in your community.
|
| Anyway that's my theory.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| This isn't a dig against you, but isn't this just an
| idealized view of a communist society?
| BingoAhoy wrote:
| It's communism that reduces one of the notable downsides of
| communism, the social loafing aspect, due to reliance on
| machines instead of your fellow man for productive
| effort(labor equivalent).
| Chris2048 wrote:
| It's a little hand-wavey though.
|
| Who services the machines?
|
| Are the machines centralised in mass-manufacture-scales
| and products distributed (as they are now); or de-
| centralised but also less efficient (wrt manufacture and
| supply chain) as a result. What would the raw materials
| be, and how are they powered (given the carbon-crisis).
|
| I'd also ask what _specifically_ are the essentials.
| Food? Shelter? ok. What about healthcare?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I love that you are asking these questions. Indeed I
| think any writing meant to describe an entire economy in
| a few paragraphs will necessarily be a bit hand wavey.
|
| I did try to answer one of your questions: the machines
| are serviced by the members of the collective. In any
| plan for a society education must be considered. But much
| the same way that any halfway technical person can learn
| how to fix a 3D printer, these machines should be
| designed with repair in mind and along with open source
| designs there would be freely accessible repair guides.
|
| Production should be somewhat decentralized so there
| should be many places manufacturing motors etc. but when
| it comes to putting the machines together I'd expect that
| different collectives would focus on certain machines and
| they would trade with people near them. Remember that you
| can always fall back on "people use money to exchange
| goods and services" I'm just imagining a model where that
| isn't really the dominant way people manage their day to
| day survival.
|
| I am not sure that decentralization is less efficient.
|
| Getting the raw materials is one of the more serious
| questions. Generally falling back on non-automated
| things, firms should be cooperatively run. Also raw
| material consumption would arguably go down for
| westerners who move to this model, as there would be
| minimal waste and the machines would all be designed for
| repair.
|
| Health care is to me essential but these things would
| vary from region to region based on cultural ideals and
| material conditions.
|
| I am an engineer and I love to fix machines. I would
| rather spend my days fixing machines than working a
| corporate job to enrich a few executives. People who want
| to be Doctors or teachers often feel similarly. They need
| their material needs covered so they can do what they
| value most - helping others. I basically just think we
| can really streamline the whole production side of the
| economy and design things so everyone benefits and
| actually stops needing to work 40+ hours a week forever.
| BingoAhoy wrote:
| I think your vision makes sense. It might not be optimal
| currently but as A.I., automation, and other technologies
| advance (Fusion fingers-crossed) I can see it becoming
| plausible and even desirable over the "pure-ish"
| capitalist economy we currently have.
|
| Just to showcase some of the automation prototypes that
| makes me a hopeful believer:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE https://www.t
| heguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/14/weedkill...
| https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/PlayStation-s-
| sec...
|
| 3-d printed homes too
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Thank you. I should say that critically, this scheme is
| not dependent on advancement in technology. It does take
| advantage of the fact that computers can perform labor
| for free, but there are examples of the elimination of
| hunger and equitable distribution of food without using
| any advanced technology. Specifically the Sikhs in India
| [1] serve over 1 million free meals a day in facilities
| all over India, and in Vienna Austria housing is built by
| the city and distributed equitably [2].
|
| Advanced technology changes what is possible, but we can
| do this without advanced technology. 3D printed homes for
| example don't really solve the problem as framing a home
| isn't expensive: it's the land and finishing the home
| that cost the most.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/qdoJroKUwu0
|
| [2] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd
| _articl...
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I mean yes I do call it libertarian communism, tho I often
| leave that part out since people will be totally onboard
| until you mention the name. But also it's a specific scheme
| that has the goal of lowering the marginal cost of living.
| And it's totally voluntary which is not true for all
| schemes for communism.
| clairity wrote:
| ...and/or idealized socialism. i agree that consumerism is
| an issue, but the solution isn't 'end consumerism', as
| that's just completely unrealistic. it'd be more realistic
| to think of ways to redirect our esteem-giving activities
| toward people who produce real and essential goods, and the
| rest would balance out much better as a result. that's
| diametrically opposed to our corrent system of giving
| esteem to the wealthy, which is why this approach is also
| very difficult, but not impossible.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say ending
| consumerism is completely unrealistic?
| clairity wrote:
| just zoom out and really look at the scope of the issue:
| 7+ billion people in the world want stuff. there's a huge
| matching problem between the want and the stuff, and a
| huge geographic/wealth/information asymmetry as well.
| there's going to be a lot of friction and waste in that
| huge, inefficient matching process (e.g., 30-40% of US
| food goes into the trash, 30-40% of stuff is returned to
| retailers). to achieve your goal, you'd have to be able
| to control (aka coerce) a majority of those people to
| want only an arbitrarily narrow set of "acceptable"
| things. that's just not tenable, even in a small, remote
| country.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| You and I view this very differently. First of all,
| getting people goods that they need is not consumerism.
| Consumerism is the idea that buying a new car or a Pepsi
| will make you feel better. Or that doing so will make you
| "cool". So for example most car manufacturers come out
| with a new model every year and then push the idea that
| buying a new model is an indicator of success. But I
| claim we would be better off if cars were more similar
| year to year so that replacement parts were more common
| year to year. This would make repair easier and lower
| waste. The problem is not getting people cars (well, cars
| in particular are a contentious example...). The problem
| isn't getting people goods they need. Is that the
| companies who make those goods use psychological tricks
| to convince us we need to upgrade even when our thing is
| working. And they design their products with the upgrade
| in mind and it all leads to more waste.
|
| To be honest it's difficult for me to describe what I
| mean when I say consumerism. But getting people goods
| they need is not in and of itself consumerism.
| Consumerism is like the military industrial complex. It
| creates problems to feed a bloated production machine
| that consumes more and more because it benefits those in
| charge of the whole thing. And so consumerism leads our
| culture to believe the person with the new watch is cool
| and we all believe we must work day in and day out to
| compete in an endless game of consumption.
|
| That is very different than, say, manufacturing
| electrical transformers and cabling so a new town can
| have electricity. In the middle the line is not clear but
| we can focus at first on the extents.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Isn't ending consumerism essential to avoid running out
| of resources.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I'd say so yes.
| clairity wrote:
| probably not. it's hard to consume lots of stuff _en
| masse_ by most of the population. in the developed world,
| we 've already largely moved to service economies and
| have less than replacement population growth, and so in
| that sense we've "maxed out" on consuming stuff. that's
| not to say that we're doing a great job at being
| efficient and frugal in what we consume, but that running
| out of resources isn't that big of a problem (for the
| foreseeable future).
| malthuswaswrong wrote:
| The way "esteem" is distributed today is if you produce
| something I want I "esteem" you by buying it. If you
| don't produce anything I want I "disrespect" you by doing
| absolutely nothing to you. I don't give you anything, I
| don't take anything away from you. I simply smile, nod,
| and move on with my life.
|
| Seems like you want to take freedom of association away
| from the rest of humanity and put it into your own hands.
| It's hard for me to imagine a mentality that is more
| self-centered and more selfish than that.
| bluejellybean wrote:
| > I have a theory that we can eliminate 90% of the required
| labor in our economy with the following strategy:
|
| Until we had extremely advanced robotics, endless land, and
| infinite energy/resources, this will never become reality,
| even then, I have an endless amount of vanity uses of human
| labor/resources and I could trivially think up. By way of
| example, if it were the case in which money no issue for me
| personally, I could choose to then have constant military
| parades wherever I go, and I shall choose to go anywhere on
| my 10000 acre plot of gold and diamond covered land.
|
| > End "consumerism" behavior where every problem is perceived
| to have a solution in the form of a quick product you can buy
| - much of that is a psychological trick played by marketers
| and rarely solves the real problem.
|
| This is a quick way to a very poor quality of life. I've been
| poor, desperately needing basic household items and yet
| unable to obtain them, it's much, much better from a quality
| of life perspective to have problems solved with trivial
| tools that I buy off the shelf. That said, anyone is free to
| choose this life, buy less things, and retire slightly
| earlier than our peers. The reality is that cost of most
| consumer spending purchases is not what at the root cause of
| preventing people from retiring early, 'stuff' is damn cheap
| today.
|
| > Take note of the goods and services we really need. Things
| like food, shelter, shoes, etc. Hmm, I've heard this line of
| thinking before, it leads to living in abhorrent conditions.
| I mean, nobody really 'needs' a 2000 sqft living space, why
| not just put people in a 20 sqft area instead? Nobody really
| 'needs' carpet or nice decor, lets build with nothing but
| cheap concrete. Yeah, let's push for living like prisoners!
| Thanks, but no thanks, I'm fine with working a little extra
| to avoid the extremes of this line of reasoning.
|
| > Design machines which can produce those vital things in a
| fully automated or highly automated way. The point of this
| part is to reduce the marginal cost of one more item as close
| to zero as possible. This makes sharing easier as it becomes
| cheaper to share with one more person.
|
| Like we've been doing? How do you think everything is so
| cheap to begin with?
|
| > Make those machines completely open source, designed for
| repair and long life. You're free to spend your time making
| this and even doing it, but it's wasted effort at this point,
| we already have extremely efficient 'open source', long-life
| and 'easy' to repair machines. Visit the US patent site and
| look at the plethora of old machines that you could go build
| today if you so pleased.
|
| > Create a system where people can acquire equal ownership
| shares in the machines they rely on. For any given machine
| those users work together to keep the machine operational and
| producing.
|
| Or I could just buy shares of a manufacturing company, and we
| can use that money along with the revenue generated by the
| machines use to create goods, to keep the machine
| operational. What you're describing already exists.
|
| > Land must be held in common (the legal device used today
| would be a public land trust) and housing, farmland, and
| manufacturing space is allotted to people based on need.
|
| So who, exactly, is getting to decide how to use this land?
| Because I need about 100 acres to be happy and live on. In
| your system, would I be allowed to own that? Or would I still
| be stuck needing to live in a cell? What about 1000 acres?
| What about 10000 acres? Why should some group of people or
| laws prevent me from doing so? Groups of people already get
| together and prevent me from doing what I want with my land,
| why would I want even more people in power over me?
|
| > Develop a culture where getting rich is not the goal but
| making sure everyone has what they need is. This has worked
| in other human societies before so this should be possible.
|
| Or we could just let individuals make up their own choices on
| how they want to live and consume life. Those that want to
| become rich will, those who want to dick around all day
| drawing pretty pictures or writing poetry will do that. Much
| like we already have. People create a social hierarchy, even
| if we got rid of money, there are still going to be people
| that attempt to be at the 'top' socially. How do you deal
| with that in your system?
|
| > Then everyone shares the output of their machines with
| their other shareholders. Each person owns shares in many
| machines.
|
| You're just playing with words and wealth redistribution.
| Companies are income producing machines, and the business
| units are the companies individual machines of production.
| Each unit shares their output by feeding it into the
| shareholders already. Each person who decided to buy a share,
| gets that combined output.
|
| > Under this system, there is no ownership class which can
| suck up all the surplus value. Instead, every person receives
| the benefit of automation.
|
| And here it is, saw this one coming. This system fails each
| time it's implemented, from one reason or another. How does
| your system handle doctors? What about lawyers? There are no
| machines there, are they expected to not be allowed to
| benefit? This is a question that more generally extends to
| service style roles where there are no machines present,
| those people don't 'benefit' in the way you're describing
| from this system. In western reality of course, they benefit
| by being able to purchase items that were historically
| extremely expensive to produce, for essentially nothing. The
| multi-thousand dollar chair, made from the hands of a skilled
| wood worker becomes a $100 and affordable for all. Also under
| your system, I don't have a way to retire, I have no hope but
| to work. If I can't own anything, and thus I can't own to be
| ahead, I am stuck, forever a slave to these machines.
|
| > In such a world I believe the average persons necessary
| working hours would be maybe 5 hours a week. We could spend
| our lives with friends and family, or reading and writing,
| painting or programming. Most of the necessary work would be
| done by volunteers who enjoy what they are doing. Work that
| people do not enjoy could be shared in rotation.
|
| In such a world, I know the average person would become a
| slave to whomever is on top calling the shots, they would
| work endlessly to supply more and more to wealth to a few
| people on top. Be it a dictator or an elite political class,
| I want my life ruled as little as possible from those people.
|
| >It's all a voluntary and market based system but captures
| the main thrust of Marx's critique of capitalism - the
| problem with an ownership class sucking up all the surplus
| value in society.
|
| Except it's not exactly voluntary if I can't own anything
| that would allow me to stop working altogether, I'm still
| stuck being a slave to the state. There still exists a power
| structure that both capitalism and marxist systems have.
|
| > We could do this. End consumerism, make everything open
| source, share land, know when you have enough and work to
| serve others in your community.
|
| Thanks, but no thanks. I would rather buy what I feel I need
| than have you telling me what I actually need. I've been
| around people long enough to know that sharing land is about
| the last thing I want. People fuck up public places and there
| is no incentive to clean other peoples shit up. We already
| decide when enough is enough, it's just that most of us will
| always want more, welcome to the human condition. I work to
| serve myself, and my work is paid for by providing value to
| my community already.
|
| >Anyway that's my theory.
|
| I don't mean to poke at you personally, don't take it that
| way. But this is an awful theory that will lead to more human
| suffering. If YOU want to live this way, by all means, please
| do! Just don't suggest 'we' should do it together.
| bserge wrote:
| Lot of good points, but the modern rich are your
| dictators/etc.
|
| The current system is quite fine, as you noted, sadly it
| just doesn't _actually work_ much because it 's
| highjacked/corrupted by the rich.
|
| It can't even make them pay taxes properly _anymore_ (used
| to work better in the past).
| matrixcubed wrote:
| I would entice you to read Manna by Marshall Brain.
| snerbles wrote:
| The positive "alternative" presented at the end seems like
| a friendly veneer over the same dystopia.
|
| Having an AI referee permanently embedded in my spine ready
| to cut motor functions at the first detected bad behavior
| sounds almost as hellish as the first scenario in that
| story.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I've come across it but I don't read much. Most of my
| learning comes from audio lectures.
| malthuswaswrong wrote:
| >Take note of the goods and services we really need. Things
| like food, shelter, shoes, etc.
|
| I assume someone must be in charge of determining what
| products are essential and what products are frivolous
| consumerism. I assume you have someone in mind for the job.
| Yourself perhaps?
|
| I'm a big girl. I can make my own decisions on what is
| essential and what is frivolous in my own life.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| No. You've completely misunderstood. This is a free market.
| People decide for themselves what is essential. When a lot
| of people in a region buy certain machines which they
| considered essential, that region will have an abundance of
| those goods. It happens organically. I am 100% opposed to
| authoritarian control and there is always someone who makes
| this quip without bothering to actually consider what I
| have written.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Anyway that's my theory
|
| Not really. It's called communism, and it's been tried many
| times.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Who has tried a voluntary form of communism focused on the
| use of automation to lower material costs of living?
| rsj_hn wrote:
| You cannot have "voluntary communism". The point of
| communism is to ban certain things -- e.g. make it
| illegal for private people to own capital. The entire
| definition requires that it be involuntary.
|
| In capitalism, there are worker-owned companies living
| side by side with privately and publicly held firms.
| People can go off and create their own communist utopia
| and share their wealth. You cannot go off and create a
| capitalist utopian community in a communist system.
|
| Because capitalism doesn't ban ownership structures
| (except for anti-trust against monopolies). It doesn't
| care about the outcome, it cares about the free choice.
| Economic liberalism -- for all its faults -- really is
| based on the principles of free association, enforcement
| of contracts, and voluntary trade. You can argue that the
| outcomes don't capture externalities, but you can't argue
| that they are involuntary.
|
| Communism, OTOH, cares only about outcomes -- is this
| distribution of resources _fair_ -- and does not care
| about free choice at all. This is because you have to
| forcefully take stuff from one person to give to another,
| and forcefully ban someone from running their own for-
| profit business. Of course communism couldn 't do that
| _perfectly_ -- there was always a black market of people
| who bought and sold for a profit. But they risked prison
| time for that, and sometimes were sent to Siberian labor
| camps.
|
| Under capitalism you can create a contract in which
| people voluntarily pool resources and then distribute
| them according to some rule, say everyone gets a fixed
| payout irrespective of their position in the company.
| Therefore the economic system in which a group of people
| can _choose_ to collectively own property is called
| "capitalism".
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > This has worked in other human societies before so this
| should be possible
|
| Which ones?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Many indigenous cultures. The Iroquois native Americans
| might be one example. There was no notion that a minority
| got rich off the labor of others.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Servicing village sized tribes in relatively plentiful
| biomes, vs nation-level populations (serviced by
| machines) seem to be very different things.
| dnissley wrote:
| Any that definitely supported some form of individual
| rights? As a total weirdo it frightens me to think that I
| might have been born into a society where my differences
| may have caused me great suffering at the hands of
| tradition.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Same as today. Very little.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow? In today's society a lot of people
| suffer because they are different. Disabled people for
| example, who would have been cared for in indigenous
| cultures. Yes the Iroquois supported individual rights.
| They just had a culture where whatever you did, you kept
| the needs of others in mind and did what you could to
| help. You were still an individual.
| quin3 wrote:
| While true, without advancements in modern healthcare,
| many of the disabilities people go through life with
| today would result in a much earlier death. Cystic
| fibrosis for example is to this day incredulously
| expensive to treat but with a much greater life
| expectancy than during the heyday of the Iroquois.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I believe we can to some extent have both: a culture that
| supports all people and also produces high end medical
| equipment. The point of mentioning other cultures is to
| point out that human nature allows it.
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| a tangent: I remember reading that historically, Chinese
| doctors were paid by the healthy people in order to keep
| the community healthy, and a sick person would not pay
| until they recovered. I would compare it to insurance,
| but that's not really the same, it would be of doctors
| were the insurance providers, but the current model just
| makes a third party really rich and incentivises the
| doctors to wish general cough and cold on the community
| (I'm not saying that doctors are evil, just that the
| current system doesn't make sense to me) I'd love to hear
| an opposing view, and why you think that way. cheers,
| have a great day yall
| malthuswaswrong wrote:
| And how did those indigenous cultures fair when they came
| in contact with Western systems of resource collection
| and distribution?
|
| How can a system be both agrarian and strong enough to
| survive contact with non-agrarian systems? How do you
| stop 10 people from secretly working hard and producing
| an extra ration of gruel right under your commie nose?
| lindseymysse wrote:
| Well, we just watched the greatest military in the
| world(tm) scuttle out of Afghanistan with its tail
| between its legs, so we know that a primarily agrarian
| society CAN resist a militaristic society as long as its
| prepared.
|
| Pre-Colonial American societies were decimated by the
| biological warfare of the Europeans first. Now America
| turns its taste for biological warfare on itself. But,
| anyway, I digress.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > There was no notion that a minority got rich off the
| labor of others. Northern Iroquois
| Slavery https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790
| tiefquart wrote:
| I feel that. I'm quite open and creative but writing poems and
| bringing 10 different music instruments to a novice+ level
| won't pay my bills.
|
| So I studied some STEM and worked in a field that interests me.
| But working in consulting brought me to a burnout in just under
| 2 years. I quit and now have a chill desk job, but even now - I
| often can't motivate myself and I see no point in sitting 8
| hours at a desk, when I can work in 2 bursts of 30mins a day
| and get all the things done that a urgent.
|
| So what then? I google stuff, look at my phone and chat with
| the one nice guy at work. Apart from social communication, all
| that time feels so WASTED.
|
| And then at home you crave to go online and sit at your desk
| again, but this time it's a gaming desk. So because it's your
| hobby its cool - ?. No, honestly it drains your energy as well
| because it's no contrast to your work setting.
|
| Fuck I need a cabin in the woods with a garden and a 15 hour
| remote job, I guess.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one without motivation to work but make
| it look like I do :)
| eggsmediumrare wrote:
| I have a feeling there are many of us, but some are too
| afraid to admit it.
| t-3 wrote:
| Agreed. Another great thing about physical labor (to me at
| least) is that you can avoid most of the forced social
| interactions, politicking, and drama that happens in offices.
|
| Go in to work, put in my headphones, do repetitive task, go
| home. It's simple, keeps me in shape, and doesn't make me
| loathe myself or my hobbies. If I were skilled and smart enough
| to get jobs that were more interesting/less evil than setting
| up corporate infrastructure, administering Windows, or churning
| out spyware, maybe I would have a different perspective, but
| I'm not.
| chromaton wrote:
| Read The Undefeated by George Paloczi-Horvath. He's a 20th
| century writer who lived through the tail end of the feudal
| system in Hungary. The lives of the peasants were not great. They
| were mal-nourished and lived at the whims of their lords.
| cwwc wrote:
| I wonder if there are good comparative studies on the amount of
| middle management these days compared to the past
| gadders wrote:
| "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.
| gbronner wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| ajuc wrote:
| > 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 Smigus Dyngus where young boys run around the villages
| pouring water on girls they like as a pagan fertility custom).
| Or Noc Swietojanska 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.
| User23 wrote:
| > example Smigus 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?
| ajuc wrote:
| It's still celebrated in many Slavic countries, but
| nowadays it's mostly boys playing war with water pistols
| and water balloons :)
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| > people developed almost no leisure activities!
|
| 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.
| tsegratis wrote:
| Having lived in semi agrarian societies, can confirm for
| women too
|
| Also once the sun goes down, the work stops -- nobody aint
| cookin once they cant see the food, not even washing up
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe these simple time passing rituals were enough to enjoy
| their winters.
|
| 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.
| jrumbut wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| ScarletEmerald wrote:
| >> Common people had almost no sports, no games (beyond
| precursors to Bocce or backgammon), no literature!
|
| >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.)
| Forge36 wrote:
| It has never occurred to me before your comment that
| literature could include oral stories. Thanks for adding
| that!
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| User23 wrote:
| > 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.
| 5faulker wrote:
| 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.
| grawprog wrote:
| https://about-history.com/what-did-peasants-do-for-entertain...
|
| >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.
| varjag wrote:
| > Embroidery, pottery, basket weaving, carpentry, leatherwork
| and woodcarving were common skills, often with division of
| labor by sex.
|
| Sounds more like work tbh. Basket weaving may be a hobby now,
| but unlikely it was in 16th century.
| grawprog wrote:
| 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.
|
| Why would it have been any different back then?
| watwut wrote:
| We consider programming work. Overwhelming majority of it
| is pure work.
| notahacker wrote:
| There are plenty of people who don't enjoy programming.
| Now imagine they all have to do it too.
| [deleted]
| burnafter184 wrote:
| 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.
| varjag wrote:
| A remarkable attempt to redefine one out of work, but in
| both cases your activity is means to an end (of
| survival).
|
| Subsistence farming is not leisure.
| [deleted]
| netcan wrote:
| 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.
| mrandish wrote:
| 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.
| sportslife wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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...
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| legitster wrote:
| 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).
| varjag wrote:
| Except you don't wash them, you load and unload the
| machine. That's substantially less work (literally, in
| Joules) no matter how you dice it.
| vkou wrote:
| > 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.)
| chrjxnandns wrote:
| I think my spouse spends that much time navigating online
| shopping and searching for deals for clothes
| asah wrote:
| Yes! Also pre-industrial work was a lot more physical labor,
| which requires more "rest" time.
| lgrialn wrote:
| 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."
| yibg wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| It's worth noting that for all the festival days, they did
| not have our modern idea of a "weekend" either.
|
| When the French revolutionary government created a secular
| approximation of the church calendar, they only gave off 1
| out of every 10 days.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| I guess it depends on the era or region of Europe, but it
| seems "Sabbath-keeping" was not always assumed - it
| having Jewish connotations.
|
| So it seems that outside of religious holidays, people
| could have been expected to work every day.
| ajuc wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe we could find people living in similar conditions,
| say like the amish (or maybe more niche groups) and see
| what they created.
|
| Well even amish people have modern lives compared to middle
| ages but you get the idea.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Indeed! They even have Windows!
|
| http://www.microbizz.nl/themanfrommicrosoft.htm
| wincy wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| > 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| 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...
| ajuc wrote:
| > and the harvests aren't any more arduous
|
| 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.
| null_object wrote:
| > 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.
| Ginden wrote:
| > 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.
| t-3 wrote:
| 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.
| Ginden wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| hogFeast wrote:
| Quite right.
|
| 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).
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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:
|
| https://allthatsinteresting.com/child-miners
| hogFeast wrote:
| 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).
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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.
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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".
| watwut wrote:
| Which part of that comment makes it sound great?
|
| And if you think kids in factories were safer, you
| probably don't know much about how child work in
| factories functioned.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| They had their church, their taverns, brothels, and gambling.
| They were poorly educated and often illiterate. I think your
| expectations are unfairly modern.
| coldtea wrote:
| >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
| kebman wrote:
| 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"...
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| 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?
| new_guy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://victorianweb.org/history/leisure1.html
| dang wrote:
| Please make your substantive points thoughtfully, without
| name-calling or personal attack.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| kingkawn wrote:
| Robbing him of his strawman
| dang wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| the-dude wrote:
| I clean, cook, fix & do the dishes in 2021. Once in a while, I
| prepare something.
|
| My father had a 40 hr work week and did not do sports, neither
| did my mother.
| knownjorbist wrote:
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| > I clean, cook, fix & do the dishes in 2021. Once in a
| while, I prepare something.
|
| You don't think that cleaning, cooking, fixing and doing
| dishes is a bit less work today than in pre industrial era?
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| the-dude wrote:
| 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.
| abyssin wrote:
| 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.
| Aunche wrote:
| 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.
| zeptocosm wrote:
| > 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...
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