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Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

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Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#171

Post by knownjorbist »

the-dude wrote: post #76
legitster wrote: post #26

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 f…

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.

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.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#172

Post by hogFeast »

coldtea wrote: post #83
hogFeast wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 co…

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).

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#173

Post by jrumbut »

agumonkey wrote: post #140
throwaway984393 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

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.

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.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#174

Post by wincy »

agumonkey wrote: post #147
legitster wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#175

Post by varjag »

legitster wrote: post #121
asdff wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today after work is over I still have things to clean, fix, prepare, butcher, etc. today too. Instead of repairing a thatch roof I'm working on shingles, but the amount of labor needed around the home and in domestic life even today is seemingly endless and somehow fills to expand all available free time like a gas in a container.

The Hedonistic Treadmill. We're incredibly richer, but we are wired to always want something nicer. We can wash our clothes so much easier but we insist on washing them after every wear. The net result is the same amount of time spent washing clothes (but they are always nicer).

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.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#176

Post by legitster »

throwaway984393 wrote: post #136
legitster wrote: post #26

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 f…

> 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 w…

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.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#177

Post by Ginden »

null_object wrote: post #119
legitster wrote: post #26

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 f…

> I hope people understand that the argument the article presents is largely a romanticization of poverty I think the opposite is the interesting factor here: late-stage capitalism has demonized the ‘grinding poverty’ and ‘unremitting hardship’ of these earlier ages, to keep our present-day noses to the life-destroying grindstone.

> I think the opposite is the interesting factor here: late-stage capitalism has demonized the ‘grinding poverty’ and ‘unremitting hardship’ of these earlier ages, to keep our present-day noses to the life-destroying grindstone.

Yet, no one chooses life of subsistence farmer if they are able to choose.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#178

Post by hogFeast »

emodendroket wrote: post #79
hogFeast wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, this is exactly my point. This isn't history. This is specifically not what history is for. History does not inform that process because the past is not like the present. They are orthogonal. Attempting to inform your view of the present using the past is like trying to play baseball like football...it just doesn't make any sense.

Absurd. "History" is not some kind of science done by weights and measures but the job of interpreting various things about the past into some sort of cohesive narrative. Of course the result of trying to recapture something about the past is often not very much alike -- I don't think the American Republic is really that much like the Roman Republic, despite consciously attempting to recreate it -- but the idea that…

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.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#179

Post by varjag »

burnafter184 wrote: post #153
varjag wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 sc…

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.

Re: Pre-industrial workers had a shorter workweek than today's (1991)

#180

Post by agumonkey »

wincy wrote: post #174
agumonkey wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 isolat…

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.

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