Statistics about how much time medieval peasants spent working can be misleading, because a lot of what they spent their time on when they weren't doing fieldwork was still work, e.g. tending their own gardens, making implements and furniture, working on their houses. They had to make most of the things they used themselves. So when "work" was over they didn't go home and watch TV.
It's hard to be sure exactly what life was like for preindustrial agricultural workers, but the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh.
>the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh.
I don't find that evidence convincing for two reasons:
1. Many peasant farmers relied on a commons for food production which was being legislatively destroyed at that time ( See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure ). Factories got peasants who were being pushed off their land due to industrialization. Those peasants might not have opted to be factory workers if they had been able to live a traditional peasant life. Note that this same process was repeated when Mexico grew it's industrial base in the 1990's under NAFTA using Article 27 to destroy common land to create cheap factory labor( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agre... ).
2. People going to work in factories may not have be aware of how terrible the conditions were and once they found out they may not have been able to reverse the situation (starvation wages don't make for many options). In much the same way that sex-traffickers promise one job (working as a cleaner) and then once the person is under their power the traffickers force them to work as prostitutes.
That evidence would be convincing if peasants were enticed from working in the traditional arrangements by the lure of working in a factory; but as I understand it the situation was more complicated. Industrialization proceeded alongside the active dismantling of the feudal property system and the enclosure of formerly common land. A former peasant who became a factory worker may have gone through the intermediate step of being evicted from their land and becoming a vagrant.
Edit: wrote this comment before seeing the other reply, which makes almost exactly the same point
There's no real need to speculate about the lives of medieval peasants when similar comparisons could probably be made with many parts of the developing world today, in villages where most people - earning just above subsistence - spend most of the time doing very little, even when there are obvious minor home improvements they could be undertaking given sufficient motivation. As there's nothing they know of that they can do to earn more income or improve their social status in their current environment, they do spend a large proportion of their time watching TV, or playing board games, or snoozing in the shade. The leisure time is real, but so is the lack of real earning opportunity and the certainty of dying - probably prematurely - as poor as the day they were born. And if all their kids survive to adulthood, there'll be even less work to do but perhaps not enough land or other means of earning sustenance to go around...
The number of people willingly leaving those peaceful villages to work in appalling conditions for a couple of extra dollars a day in arguably futile pursuit of prosperity definitely outnumbers those moving in the opposite direction.
>but the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh
That's extremely innacurate. Workers had to be MADE to work into factories by force, often by laws and regulations destroying their agricultural and traditional occupations to make them fodder for the industry. In a lot of cases, the industrilization was made at gun point (USSR is an example, but it also holds for a lot of the limited industriliazation in the third world).
That is known (and has been documented) to have happened almost everywhere there was industrialization.
Perhaps given more time to tend our own gardens, make our own tools and furniture and work on our houses, we'd be a happier and more prosperous civilization.
> but the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed,
They may have needed the money but they sure didn't like it, at least here in the US. There was a large change of working for a wage, on a clock, compared to working on a farm or for a wage, and was a sizable violation of the Jeffersonian ideals of freedom. As to why people left, i dunno. There's probably a history research effort in it.
> a lot of what they spent their time on when they weren't doing fieldwork was still work, e.g. tending their own gardens, making implements and furniture, working on their houses.
It's certainly true that by and large we benefit from an industrial economy where we hire out ourselves for specialized labor and hire others to do things for us. It'd be something of a challenge to be able to furnish a modern household with a full-complement of typical goods without anything pre-made, and since goods are a lot easier to come by, both in variety and cost, people can afford to be selective about what kinds of self-crafting they'd prefer to engage in (or none at all).
On the other hand, tending your own garden, tooling around in the shop, making furniture, and working on home improvement projects are all activities apparently recreational enough that many seem to do them for fun even when it's easier to pop over to Ikea or otherwise hire it out.
I hear some people even seem to like build their own software for fun. :)
The labor you get to personally enjoy the fruits of -- that you can do to your own standards of need and satisfaction -- is a very different experience than work you're obligated to do as a cog in a institutional production arrangement.
And until most people have the option to pick how many days / hours out of the year they'd like to work as an employee, I don't think it's a settled question that the conventional balance we've got right now is optimal or necessarily superior to all past arrangements.
You do not have to go back in time to find elements of answers. In China peasants live in very poor conditions far from the cities （and I can tell from experience that it is much harsher that what we can imagine before going there） and it is no surprise that they expect to get a better life working at Foxconn or other industries we like to call as sweatshops in the western media. That is the best real life example out there, and it is taking place much faster than in Europe at the time.
This is simply a result of the balance of power shifting ever further towards employers over the past few decades. What incentives does a short-term value maximizing employer have to give his employees paid vacation?
In addition, a perfect storm of automation, globalization and erosion of worker rights has severely reduced the bargaining position of employees worldwide.
Furthermore, by keeping the majority of the population fully occupied at all times, participation in the democratic process becomes an incredible burden. Thus, the political arena becomes a playground for those who can afford the luxury of free time.
It doesn't take a genius to see whom these factors benefit.
Well put, the relationship trends more and more asymmetric. Add in rhetoric designed to convince workers to buy into a system that exploits them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6240495
In general, employers have far more leverage over employee's lives than the individual employee has over the corporation's well being even though we sometimes pretend that it is symmetric and that the market is fair.
Employers optimize for maximum profit for "the shareholders." Somewhere along the line, morality is tossed out, and shortly afterward even legitimate long-term sustainability is also out (cultivating a strong workforce, valued for their talent rather than purely for their labor).
Add in the feedback loop of political apparatuses being appropriated for profit (lobbying) and the political arena is just another exploitable lever for amassing more resources by those with the resources to do so.
What I find interesting is how unusual it is for a higher-paid person now to negotiate part-time work.
I mean, I've done so at several points in my life, but it's not particularly easy. it's certainly possible, but you need to establish yourself as important to the business (for me, in the past, this has meant working full time for a while.) then do the negotiation, if you want to go half-time.
But usually? cutting down below 30 hours a week kills your benefits. Sometimes below 35. Even if you reasonably could afford to pay for health insurance, well, pre-existing conditions keep many of us from buying individual coverage (and individual coverage isn't nearly as tax advantaged as employer-paid coverage, and individual coverage isn't as secure as group coverage; it's much easier for an insurance company to later find a "pre-existing condition" that you didn't note.)
But that's the big question. The affordable care act is going to make it so that you can get health insurance on your own, even with pre-existing conditions, (though, I think, employer-paid insurance will still be tax-advantaged) - I wonder how this will effect the number of upper middle class people interested in working part-time.
Speaking of, if anyone wants a reasonable sysadmin contractor half time to 3/4 time, I'm available. I'm looking for around $100/hr, but am open to flat rate or other billing mechanisms. I've got a fairly high revenue business (rather more than you'd pay me even full-time) and as such would be happy to go corp to corp.
>But that's the big question. The affordable care act is going to make it so that you can get health insurance on your own, even with pre-existing conditions, (though, I think, employer-paid insurance will still be tax-advantaged) - I wonder how this will effect the number of upper middle class people interested in working part-time
I would be very surprised if there isn't a rush to the exits from people in their mid 50s if it looks like health care will be affordable. I know I'll be able to retire a full decade earlier if I can get health care for a few hundred bucks a month.
As to people working part time... I can see why people would want to (hell, I'd like to do that myself), but I don't think it's going to happen to any great extent. Employers don't like it because there are a lot of per-employee expenses (as opposed to per-hour). Two half-time employees cost more than one full time employee.
One thing to remember in all these discussions about working hours is that its one thing to work for yourself and another to work for someone else. I've done both. When you work for yourself you don't take much time off until things are going well, and its not a problem. I think the problem arises when people who own the business genuinely can't understand why everybody else doesn't want to put in the same hours that they do. It's about ownership. Doesn't mean that employees can't be very productive for 8 hours and then go home and do their own thing. e.g. take their kids to sport or music, contribute to voluntary organisations, work on a side project. Each to his own.
This comparison is probably nonsensical. Still, I think the part of the zeitgeist it's coming from is interesting.
No matter how rich we get as a society, very little of that wealth seems to be expressed as more leisure time. This is true comparing different decades (We got richer, still work lots) and its true comparing professions/socio economic classes (highly paid engineers & lawyers work just as much as call centre employees).
It is IMO, a failure. Its also very hard for an individual near the median to break out of it without being somewhat of an extremist.
You could easily afford same vacation time - work only half a year, consume at the level of medieval peasant (no TV, no internet, no modern medicine, no car, no fancy foods or clothes, one clothes change a decade, no electricity, no running water, no sanitation/WC) - and you'll have plenty of money left to live the dream second half of the year. I'm sure if you forgo the modern civilization, you can get through pretty cheap. In fact, if you qualify for welfare, you could probably give up working altogether and still live better than medieval peasant (they had no free healthcare, free housing, no foodstamps and no free cell phones). So if you wanted, you could live much better that medieval peasant with 100% "vacation" time. Most people, however, want to live even better, so they work to make this "better" happen. Modern civilization doesn't fall from the sky, you know - people make it.
Of course, with no running water and sanitation, one clothes change in a decade, no car, and no internet connection or electricity you might be hard pushed to find and hold a job for even half a year in the modern era.
Anyway... I think this analysis is shortsighted, for a start, you can't forgo the modern civilization because you can't have a home and you can't leave it, and if you're in it, there's a cost... And it's understood that the right to have somewhere to live is essential but you can't leave the city and get to a piece of land, land is not produced anymore and it belongs to the rich, you can't buy it, you can't raise cattle or chicken and you can't plant, so, you'll die.
And then everything else comes after this. Also, lets be honest, the level of education you need to even start pondering this you can't get either, because by then you'd already have had to have eaten and lived somewhere, and maybe you have bills and you can be arrested.. Not such a viable option. Then it's also probably a big fallacy that people can really live off of welfare policy goods, I don't know how it is in the USA, but here in Brazil I'm pretty sure what you get is barely enough for you not to live like a wild animal in middle of 'modern civilization'
Those commenting here who haven't done so already should go read A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. It's a great primer on what life was actually like back then, and what is and isn't known about the details.
The discussion on enclosures and factories seems like a red herring, as that whole mess took off too late in the timeline to be considered Medieval. At the point at which enclosures were happening in a widespread way in (for example) the UK, the economy was transitioned into a state of fairly steady growth in wealth and life expectancy over the long term that would, via compound gains, form the foundation of the Industrial Revolution.
What surprises me here is that virtually all comments are about whether peasants really had many holidays.
And not about the current situation (+ the macho 'my hours are longer than yours' trap that most of the California Software world seems to be in...) that drains much of the possibility of having a life besides work.
One idea that crossed my mind when I still worked in the Vallley, was that the situation might be reversed by a 'Union' that only concerns itself with working hours. Leaving salaries up to everyone for themselves to negotiate as currently.
This would:
1) Allow people a coming-out in terms of favoring work-life balance. Which many people confessed to me in private, but did not dare say in front of their boss/team (has nothing to do with a lack of love for the job/project/company, even love itself you can't enjoy 10 hours a day 50 weeks a year, or that would be the length of billionaires honey-moons. Also what is wrong with loving your life and family/friends in addition to the job, and needing some time for that?).
2) Create a bargaining position and a public face for it.
3) Dispel myths of long-term productivity gains through longer hours. Especially in a creative industry like Software Engineering long hours reduce productivity (there are studies of this + the many self-evaluations on HN over the years of people being able to code consistently and productively 4 to 7 hours per day max).
This article statement, "His life was shadowed by fear of famine, disease and bursts of warfare. His diet and personal hygiene left much to be desired" explains why I don't want to go back to the life of my peasant ancestors.
The author's background, "Lynn Parramore is a senior editor at AlterNet, co-founder of Recessionwire, and founding editor of New Deal 2.0 and IgoUgo.com. She is the author of "Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture" and has taught cultural theory at NYU" suggests to me why I won't take this opinion piece kindly submitted here as a guide to current economic policy. Actually, today's economy in the United States offers unparalleled opportunities for each worker to make the worker's preferred trade-off among cash income and leisure time, especially if the worker is part of a family household of persons who agree to make different trade-offs from one another.
Other than adding the fear of famine, I'm not sure how different that is from today.
Fear of disease? Check. Both realistic (as in, the huge fraction with no/minimal health insurance or any dental at all). And unrealistic, like fearmongering politicians (as in, send lots of money to X or we'll all die of some made up thing)
Bouts of warfare, check. Both actual for kids in .mil, and imaginary daydreams of terrorism.
Inferior diet? Check.
The personal hygiene thing, I donno about. I'm not so foul but seems like many people are allergic to soap and water, and others who think smelling like an ashtray is a perfume.
Following up on some of the comments here, I thought the submitted article was implausible because I have lived in a country that has gone from a poor, subsistence-peasant economy to a post-industrial wealthy economy in the lifetime of my in-laws who still live there. Nobody wants to go back to a peasant's life. It's just dumb to suggest that that would be a good trade-off.
On the issue of health risk, people have really got to learn from statistics that were shared here on HN earlier. Life expectancy has been increasing at ALL ages all over the developed world,
and correspondingly the risk of being seriously sick at any age has been steadily declining here in the United States and all over Europe and other developed places. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,
originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. We have no good reason to go back to peasant days, and no reason to take an article that is basically just made up as a basis for evaluating our current trade-offs of modern living.
Any article on quality of life in agrarian societies should also be contrasted to what life was like in pre-agrarian (hunter gatherer) societies. Jared Diamond wrote the most well known/accessible essay entitled [The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race](http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html):
> "Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"
Of course, that's sort of besides the point... Before the mid-70's productivity and median compensation were correlated, however for the past 40 years this has diverged. Since 1973, median hourly compensation grew 10.7% while productivity has increased by 80.4%[1]
Keyne's prediction in 1930 on the leisure society in the US would have been correct if the public had continued to share in society's gains. Instead these gains have been increasingly captured by the top centile. The share of income by the top 1% has increased over 120% since 1979 [2]. While the top 20% has also nominally increased (~30%) all the other quintiles have had a negative share as a result.
Now, knowing this, is there anything that can be done to reverse these trends? It seems that we've been locking in socio-economic mobility [3] and our entire government has entered "regulatory capture." [4][5]
>One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"
This sentence illustrates one of my main gripes with JD's "sunshine and happiness" view of hunter-gatherer societies. Hunter-gatherer lifestyle is fantastic for that small fraction of folks who live where there are plenty of mongongo nuts (so to speak). He sort of handwaves the majority, who are eking a bare subsistence out of the land, or worse, alternately subsisting and starving.
The frustrating thing to me is that this article simply shows that a medieval peasant got more vacation time than I do - but doesn't say anything at all about why, even though it's in the title.
The thing is that medieval concept of time was not linear. So we cannot really compare how medieval peasants perceived their leisure time with perception of the modern worker. It is like comparing cabbages with golf balls. They are both round, right?
I also strongly disagree with the author where it comes to fulfilment. In many cases work is more fulfiling than leisure. What would be really worthy to compare is average length and intensity of copulation, family sizes. But scientific approach has no methods for such s comparison. Yet.
"His diet and personal hygiene left much to be desired."
Does it means these poor people that happen to be our ancestors had a faint body odor surrounding them? Can we stop with this crasiness? We are animals, animals have "body odor", and it have been considered a good thing for a long time.
Every time I hear about personal hygiene I remember this American girl who was learning Chinese with me in a university in south China. She was there on the behalf a sort of NGO and her goal was to "teach Chinese personal hygiene". She was talking about "spreading the use of perfume and deodorant" and such things.
So now we have no more colonization, but we still have missionaries, and hygiene missionaries. And they still do harm.
(Because yes, abuse of perfumes and deodorant IS harmful in many respects)
So, to come back OT, it is ok to wonder if middle-age peasants had more free time, and if their life was pleasant (I guess it was not), but please let our own crasiness out of the discussion.
We are the anti body age, anti-body hair, anti-body odor, shaved-porn-age (which is anti-sex), etc. We have our crasiness too. It is very optimistic to believe we are less crasy than the Middle-Age. And God knows Middle-Age was crasy...
In Guns Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond, I don't recall the exact quote but it is stated that the advent of agriculture with its seasonal work gave those in command a labor pool to use for fighting armies during the low-agriculture work seasons.
[+] [-] pg|12 years ago|reply
It's hard to be sure exactly what life was like for preindustrial agricultural workers, but the most convincing evidence that it was very hard was that early mines and factories were easily able to recruit all the workers they needed, despite working conditions we know to have been harsh.
[+] [-] EthanHeilman|12 years ago|reply
I don't find that evidence convincing for two reasons:
1. Many peasant farmers relied on a commons for food production which was being legislatively destroyed at that time ( See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure ). Factories got peasants who were being pushed off their land due to industrialization. Those peasants might not have opted to be factory workers if they had been able to live a traditional peasant life. Note that this same process was repeated when Mexico grew it's industrial base in the 1990's under NAFTA using Article 27 to destroy common land to create cheap factory labor( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agre... ).
2. People going to work in factories may not have be aware of how terrible the conditions were and once they found out they may not have been able to reverse the situation (starvation wages don't make for many options). In much the same way that sex-traffickers promise one job (working as a cleaner) and then once the person is under their power the traffickers force them to work as prostitutes.
[+] [-] cia_plant|12 years ago|reply
Edit: wrote this comment before seeing the other reply, which makes almost exactly the same point
[+] [-] notahacker|12 years ago|reply
The number of people willingly leaving those peaceful villages to work in appalling conditions for a couple of extra dollars a day in arguably futile pursuit of prosperity definitely outnumbers those moving in the opposite direction.
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
That's extremely innacurate. Workers had to be MADE to work into factories by force, often by laws and regulations destroying their agricultural and traditional occupations to make them fodder for the industry. In a lot of cases, the industrilization was made at gun point (USSR is an example, but it also holds for a lot of the limited industriliazation in the third world).
That is known (and has been documented) to have happened almost everywhere there was industrialization.
[+] [-] DanI-S|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sown|12 years ago|reply
They may have needed the money but they sure didn't like it, at least here in the US. There was a large change of working for a wage, on a clock, compared to working on a farm or for a wage, and was a sizable violation of the Jeffersonian ideals of freedom. As to why people left, i dunno. There's probably a history research effort in it.
[+] [-] wwweston|12 years ago|reply
It's certainly true that by and large we benefit from an industrial economy where we hire out ourselves for specialized labor and hire others to do things for us. It'd be something of a challenge to be able to furnish a modern household with a full-complement of typical goods without anything pre-made, and since goods are a lot easier to come by, both in variety and cost, people can afford to be selective about what kinds of self-crafting they'd prefer to engage in (or none at all).
On the other hand, tending your own garden, tooling around in the shop, making furniture, and working on home improvement projects are all activities apparently recreational enough that many seem to do them for fun even when it's easier to pop over to Ikea or otherwise hire it out.
I hear some people even seem to like build their own software for fun. :)
The labor you get to personally enjoy the fruits of -- that you can do to your own standards of need and satisfaction -- is a very different experience than work you're obligated to do as a cog in a institutional production arrangement.
And until most people have the option to pick how many days / hours out of the year they'd like to work as an employee, I don't think it's a settled question that the conventional balance we've got right now is optimal or necessarily superior to all past arrangements.
[+] [-] alexeisadeski3|12 years ago|reply
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-13/how-average-america...
[+] [-] ekianjo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] asdfdsa1234|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mordor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] engrenage|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hydralist|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FD3SA|12 years ago|reply
In addition, a perfect storm of automation, globalization and erosion of worker rights has severely reduced the bargaining position of employees worldwide.
Furthermore, by keeping the majority of the population fully occupied at all times, participation in the democratic process becomes an incredible burden. Thus, the political arena becomes a playground for those who can afford the luxury of free time.
It doesn't take a genius to see whom these factors benefit.
[+] [-] aznjons|12 years ago|reply
In general, employers have far more leverage over employee's lives than the individual employee has over the corporation's well being even though we sometimes pretend that it is symmetric and that the market is fair.
Employers optimize for maximum profit for "the shareholders." Somewhere along the line, morality is tossed out, and shortly afterward even legitimate long-term sustainability is also out (cultivating a strong workforce, valued for their talent rather than purely for their labor).
Add in the feedback loop of political apparatuses being appropriated for profit (lobbying) and the political arena is just another exploitable lever for amassing more resources by those with the resources to do so.
[+] [-] lsc|12 years ago|reply
I mean, I've done so at several points in my life, but it's not particularly easy. it's certainly possible, but you need to establish yourself as important to the business (for me, in the past, this has meant working full time for a while.) then do the negotiation, if you want to go half-time.
But usually? cutting down below 30 hours a week kills your benefits. Sometimes below 35. Even if you reasonably could afford to pay for health insurance, well, pre-existing conditions keep many of us from buying individual coverage (and individual coverage isn't nearly as tax advantaged as employer-paid coverage, and individual coverage isn't as secure as group coverage; it's much easier for an insurance company to later find a "pre-existing condition" that you didn't note.)
But that's the big question. The affordable care act is going to make it so that you can get health insurance on your own, even with pre-existing conditions, (though, I think, employer-paid insurance will still be tax-advantaged) - I wonder how this will effect the number of upper middle class people interested in working part-time.
Speaking of, if anyone wants a reasonable sysadmin contractor half time to 3/4 time, I'm available. I'm looking for around $100/hr, but am open to flat rate or other billing mechanisms. I've got a fairly high revenue business (rather more than you'd pay me even full-time) and as such would be happy to go corp to corp.
Will work for expansion capital.
[+] [-] tsotha|12 years ago|reply
I would be very surprised if there isn't a rush to the exits from people in their mid 50s if it looks like health care will be affordable. I know I'll be able to retire a full decade earlier if I can get health care for a few hundred bucks a month.
As to people working part time... I can see why people would want to (hell, I'd like to do that myself), but I don't think it's going to happen to any great extent. Employers don't like it because there are a lot of per-employee expenses (as opposed to per-hour). Two half-time employees cost more than one full time employee.
[+] [-] discreteevent|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|12 years ago|reply
No matter how rich we get as a society, very little of that wealth seems to be expressed as more leisure time. This is true comparing different decades (We got richer, still work lots) and its true comparing professions/socio economic classes (highly paid engineers & lawyers work just as much as call centre employees).
It is IMO, a failure. Its also very hard for an individual near the median to break out of it without being somewhat of an extremist.
[+] [-] alexeisadeski3|12 years ago|reply
Some choose more leisure and others don't.
Go talk to some ski "bums" or surf "bums" to see what I mean
[+] [-] smsm42|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makomk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Buzaga|12 years ago|reply
Anyway... I think this analysis is shortsighted, for a start, you can't forgo the modern civilization because you can't have a home and you can't leave it, and if you're in it, there's a cost... And it's understood that the right to have somewhere to live is essential but you can't leave the city and get to a piece of land, land is not produced anymore and it belongs to the rich, you can't buy it, you can't raise cattle or chicken and you can't plant, so, you'll die.
And then everything else comes after this. Also, lets be honest, the level of education you need to even start pondering this you can't get either, because by then you'd already have had to have eaten and lived somewhere, and maybe you have bills and you can be arrested.. Not such a viable option. Then it's also probably a big fallacy that people can really live off of welfare policy goods, I don't know how it is in the USA, but here in Brazil I'm pretty sure what you get is barely enough for you not to live like a wild animal in middle of 'modern civilization'
[+] [-] exratione|12 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century...
The discussion on enclosures and factories seems like a red herring, as that whole mess took off too late in the timeline to be considered Medieval. At the point at which enclosures were happening in a widespread way in (for example) the UK, the economy was transitioned into a state of fairly steady growth in wealth and life expectancy over the long term that would, via compound gains, form the foundation of the Industrial Revolution.
[+] [-] wybo|12 years ago|reply
And not about the current situation (+ the macho 'my hours are longer than yours' trap that most of the California Software world seems to be in...) that drains much of the possibility of having a life besides work.
One idea that crossed my mind when I still worked in the Vallley, was that the situation might be reversed by a 'Union' that only concerns itself with working hours. Leaving salaries up to everyone for themselves to negotiate as currently.
This would:
1) Allow people a coming-out in terms of favoring work-life balance. Which many people confessed to me in private, but did not dare say in front of their boss/team (has nothing to do with a lack of love for the job/project/company, even love itself you can't enjoy 10 hours a day 50 weeks a year, or that would be the length of billionaires honey-moons. Also what is wrong with loving your life and family/friends in addition to the job, and needing some time for that?).
2) Create a bargaining position and a public face for it.
3) Dispel myths of long-term productivity gains through longer hours. Especially in a creative industry like Software Engineering long hours reduce productivity (there are studies of this + the many self-evaluations on HN over the years of people being able to code consistently and productively 4 to 7 hours per day max).
Just an idea that crossed a mind.
[+] [-] valtron|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tokenadult|12 years ago|reply
The author's background, "Lynn Parramore is a senior editor at AlterNet, co-founder of Recessionwire, and founding editor of New Deal 2.0 and IgoUgo.com. She is the author of "Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture" and has taught cultural theory at NYU" suggests to me why I won't take this opinion piece kindly submitted here as a guide to current economic policy. Actually, today's economy in the United States offers unparalleled opportunities for each worker to make the worker's preferred trade-off among cash income and leisure time, especially if the worker is part of a family household of persons who agree to make different trade-offs from one another.
[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
Fear of disease? Check. Both realistic (as in, the huge fraction with no/minimal health insurance or any dental at all). And unrealistic, like fearmongering politicians (as in, send lots of money to X or we'll all die of some made up thing)
Bouts of warfare, check. Both actual for kids in .mil, and imaginary daydreams of terrorism.
Inferior diet? Check.
The personal hygiene thing, I donno about. I'm not so foul but seems like many people are allergic to soap and water, and others who think smelling like an ashtray is a perfume.
[+] [-] tokenadult|12 years ago|reply
On the issue of health risk, people have really got to learn from statistics that were shared here on HN earlier. Life expectancy has been increasing at ALL ages all over the developed world,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
and correspondingly the risk of being seriously sick at any age has been steadily declining here in the United States and all over Europe and other developed places. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,
http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...
originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. We have no good reason to go back to peasant days, and no reason to take an article that is basically just made up as a basis for evaluating our current trade-offs of modern living.
[+] [-] engrenage|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bobdvb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhl|12 years ago|reply
> "Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"
Of course, that's sort of besides the point... Before the mid-70's productivity and median compensation were correlated, however for the past 40 years this has diverged. Since 1973, median hourly compensation grew 10.7% while productivity has increased by 80.4%[1]
Keyne's prediction in 1930 on the leisure society in the US would have been correct if the public had continued to share in society's gains. Instead these gains have been increasingly captured by the top centile. The share of income by the top 1% has increased over 120% since 1979 [2]. While the top 20% has also nominally increased (~30%) all the other quintiles have had a negative share as a result.
Now, knowing this, is there anything that can be done to reverse these trends? It seems that we've been locking in socio-economic mobility [3] and our entire government has entered "regulatory capture." [4][5]
[1] http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs-compens...
[2] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequalit...
[3] http://www.ibtimes.com/us-social-mobility-casualty-income-in...
[4] http://i.imgur.com/PVpFY.png
[5] http://www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm?piece=10...
[+] [-] dunmalg|12 years ago|reply
This sentence illustrates one of my main gripes with JD's "sunshine and happiness" view of hunter-gatherer societies. Hunter-gatherer lifestyle is fantastic for that small fraction of folks who live where there are plenty of mongongo nuts (so to speak). He sort of handwaves the majority, who are eking a bare subsistence out of the land, or worse, alternately subsisting and starving.
[+] [-] Vivtek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ommunist|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbog|12 years ago|reply
Does it means these poor people that happen to be our ancestors had a faint body odor surrounding them? Can we stop with this crasiness? We are animals, animals have "body odor", and it have been considered a good thing for a long time.
Every time I hear about personal hygiene I remember this American girl who was learning Chinese with me in a university in south China. She was there on the behalf a sort of NGO and her goal was to "teach Chinese personal hygiene". She was talking about "spreading the use of perfume and deodorant" and such things.
So now we have no more colonization, but we still have missionaries, and hygiene missionaries. And they still do harm.
(Because yes, abuse of perfumes and deodorant IS harmful in many respects)
So, to come back OT, it is ok to wonder if middle-age peasants had more free time, and if their life was pleasant (I guess it was not), but please let our own crasiness out of the discussion.
We are the anti body age, anti-body hair, anti-body odor, shaved-porn-age (which is anti-sex), etc. We have our crasiness too. It is very optimistic to believe we are less crasy than the Middle-Age. And God knows Middle-Age was crasy...
[+] [-] ef4|12 years ago|reply
Medieval peasants died from their lack of hygiene.
[+] [-] yaddayadda|12 years ago|reply
- brushing one's teeth (minimizing decay and tooth loss)
- properly washing one's hands (minimizing the spread of disease)
- having toilet facilities (http://www.satoilet.co.za/projects/)
http://www.wordnik.com/words/hygiene
[+] [-] socialist_coder|12 years ago|reply
Yes, it's less productive, but with 33% more weekend think about how happier the employees would be.
I would love to try this with my startup once we get into the profitable stage.
[+] [-] maxinem|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexeisadeski3|12 years ago|reply
Just sayin...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-13/how-average-america...
[+] [-] michael_michael|12 years ago|reply