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Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

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Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#321

Post by BurningFrog »

atoav wrote: post #79
BurningFrog wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Poverty is usually measured relatively to the perceived average of your environment’s wealth because that is how poverty affects your life. No, that is how it affects your status . In every society, half the people are at or below average status, because math. That can never change. But 95+% of the people in the richest country have better material standard than the average people in the poorest. And even those in…

I didn’t come up with that definition of poverty, it is the definition used by UNICEF, UNDP (The United Nations Children's Fund) and the OECD. And there certainly is discussion about that definition, but other poverty definitions also fail to capture certain aspects of poverty (e.g. the World Bank’s poverty line). It isn’t status, when bith of your parents work full time and you still don’t get to eat on the last day…

First of all, I don't know why we're discussing the word "poverty". I talked about "30x the income", never mentioned "poverty".

But let's talk about the word.

By the UNICEF/UNDP/etc definition of "poverty", poverty can never be eradicated. There will always be people below average, as any math teacher can explain to you.

In a "Richistan" society comprised only of dollar millionaires and billionaires, the least wealthy millionaires will be living in "poverty".

> It isn’t status, when both of your parents work full time and you still don’t get to eat on the last days of the week. That is poverty.

...but now you've jumped to absolute poverty measures! Those "Richistan poor" could easily dine in fine restaurants every day.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#322

Post by alcover »

H8crilA wrote: post #195
vfc1 wrote: post #114

The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification. This explains the system of values that revolve around it, such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time. The servant was not expected to leave it…

Simple rules that work for me: a) don't take my work laptop home, no corp provided phone (if they insist I'd keep the phone at my work desk, where it belongs). b) work 40 hours on average per week. Just go home already! Helps if you're a late sleeper (like me), you can simply arrive later at work to compensate for the hours you've recently donated to your employer. This works very well for me, although I'm based in E…

I would argue not only that early rising is totally unnatural but also that lying in bed half awake - sleep researchers call this state "hypnagogic" - is positively beneficial to health and happiness. A good morning doze of half an hour or more can, for example, help you to prepare mentally for the problems and tasks ahead.

--The Virtue Of Idleness By Tom Hodgkinson

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#323

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

JackFr wrote: post #247
zulgan wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this is cultural as well, I(anecdotally) absolutely feel shame when I am about to leave a company, or even negotiate.

Back in the day, Merrill Lynch had a rep for hiring really green people on the cheap, doing a very good job training them up, and then not paying them according to their new value in the market. When you would leave, managers would often lay the guilt trip about "What you owe us..." (to which the proper response is the line from Goodfellas -"F * you. Pay me.") There was a sitewide IT town hall in NY when I was there…

Is that really what you want though? Ever wonder why all our schools are becoming job training centers?

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#324

Post by kingkawn »

CathedralBorrow wrote: post #251
ironic_ali wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask yourself why you feel these emotions, because the culture you're in had to have made you learn them. The companies you have worked for sure as hell do not care about you once you leave. Source: personal experience

All correct, but cultural things like these can't exactly be dispelled with logic.

Culture comes from people. Taking the reins of culture and leading it to new places is entirely natural

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#325

Post by bjourne »

aflag wrote: post #306
bjourne wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No worker would ever get hired if he or she were open with that they would leave the company the very instance a better offer came around. Companies, on the other hand, have no trouble hiring even when they admit that they'd fire you the very instance someone who can do the job for less pay comes around. Loyalty in the work place is a one-way street. It goes from the worker to the company but not the other way around…

That depends on demand/supply. Tech companies in cities with high demand for engineers have no problem hiring people who will leave as soon as something better shows up.

That is subtly different from what I wrote. :) I wrote that no one who were open about it would be unable to find a job. If you told your interviewer that your only objective is to maximize salary they would (rightly) treat you as a sociopath. A company whose only objective is to minimize salaries (and therefore maximize profits) is also a "sociopath" but that is somehow acceptable.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#326

Post by BurningFrog »

pandapower2 wrote: post #71
BurningFrog wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... we live twice as long as those people.

That's not really true. Once you exclude people who died in childhood the average life expectancy shoots up. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-b... In England and Wales around 1850 the life expectancy overall was around 40 because a lot of people died as children and dragged down the average. For someone that made it to 5 years old their life expectancy goes us 15 years to 55. People now defi…

> That's not really true. Once you exclude people who died in childhood the average life expectancy shoots up.

An entertaining use of the word "true".

Yes, if you exclude a lot of the data, the average changes :)

Sarcasm aside, that is an important point in average life span statistics, but doesn't change the point that preindustrial life was "Nasty, brutish and short", as the old saying goes.

Also, 1850s England was the richest place on earth, almost a century into industrialism. Already a vastly elevated existence compared to our "natural state".

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#327

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

raducu wrote: post #244
zulgan wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this is cultural as well, I(anecdotally) absolutely feel shame when I am about to leave a company, or even negotiate.

Funny because my todler is never ashamed to loudly demand what she wants, yet as adults we feel shame when we want to negotiate. It absolutely is cultural.

Does your toddler have control over their bowels? This stuff develops, but it's not always cultural.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#328

Post by flmontpetit »

noobermin wrote: post #308
rubber_duck wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time. Your entire post is overgeneralization and dramatizing to prove some poorly thought out hypothesis but this here is the most obvious example. When there is enough choice people change jobs all the time - the demand in my l…

While I have bones to pick out of OP, your post assumes your experience is the norm and not far away from the median.

For real. Being a software developer is probably the easiest and safest career you can have without being born into wealth.

edit: I should also mention having options is not really a blessing when they're all bad.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#329

Post by _7kf0 »

wickedsickeune wrote: post #110
manfredo wrote: post #42

> One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. This myth is typically defended by a comparison of the modern forty-hour week with its seventy- or eighty-hour counterpart in the nineteenth century. The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption is that the eighty-hour standard has prevailed for centuries. The comparison conjures up the dreary life of medieval peasants, toiling steadi…

Who said that we have to trade current life for pre-industrial? Learning from the advantages of pre-industrial life and applying them now, is the point of the article, not regression.

Seriously. How about our (humanity's) project becomes: make our modern lives the best easiest most awesome imaginable?

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#330

Post by msluyter »

ivanhoe wrote: post #219

It's comparing apples and oranges to compare medieval peasants life and modern office work. Even today in rural areas people work around the clock in and around the house to keep everything afloat and barely survive. Sitting on your butt for 10h a day and doing intellectual work seems hard only until you try to do some farming for a while - and modern farming is nothing compared to how hard it was back then, when you…

Almost certainly in the sense of physical hardship -- but perhaps not in terms of total working hours. Here's another more sprightly essay on the topic:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/medieval-peasants-vacation-m...

"Consider a typical working day in the medieval period,” said Schor. “It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent — called to halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also mid-morning and mid-afternoon refreshment breaks."

Additionally, the medieval calendar was also one of many official Church-going holidays which were always considered mandatory. In total, leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year.

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