41–50 of 130 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a personal decision though, right? Some choose more leisure and others don't. Go talk to some ski "bums" or surf "bums" to see what I mean
"Ski bum" is not an option for people that want to have economic security and maybe buy a mortgage and raise a family.
And raising a family is unrelated to both.
We get weekends off -- so that's around ~100 days at least.
Well then, let's petition for a 3 day weekend. That'll give us the 150 of our medieval brethren. I propose we couch it in terms of equality legislation: Fridays for the Muslims, Saturdays for the Jews and Sundays for the Christians. This serves all Western monotheistic (Abrahamic) religions equally. In order to balance things out though we will need to raise hourly wages across the board by 20% because we'll be only…
The 20% is the amount by which your income would be reduced if you were paid 4/5ths as much as today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. I…
Sorry, but if you think that we have equivalent fear of disease then and now, you don't know what life was like then. How many people did you personally know who died of disease as a kid? I knew one. (Cancer.) But this was a period where people would have 8 kids in the hope that 2-3 of them would survive to adulthood. And disease was the big killer.
I lived without medical insurance for awhile in my 20s. Its not some picnic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 ).…
The question of the degree to which enclosure was responsible for the supply of factory workers is one people have debated for a century. The idea that it was was as you can imagine very popular with Marxist historians. Which doesn't make it false of course. But it does have the same neatness that drives urban legends, and in a place like HN we should be wary of this. There were in practice a bunch of forces that dro…
Agreed. To restate in less argumentative terms, the claim made that:
>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.
to be convincing must show that:
(1). there was a real alternative between peasant life and industrial life,
(2). that peasants made the choice with at least a decent understanding of what factory life was like.
1 is, as you state, debatable which weakens the claim (it certainly is not evidence in the affirmative). On 2 I don't have the expertise or the citations to state one way or the other, but I would love to see some evidence on either side before placing faith in the claim.
To generalize, I would say that any argument that "A is better than B, because lots of people from B prefer A" must at minimum meet the test that: it is a true choice, and that the people making the choice have enough information (informed consent). Additionally, I do not consider such arguments truly convincing, in and of themselves, even if they meet both tests because populations can make poor choices (cigarettes, electing bad politicians, buying an inferior product, etc).
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 l…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. I…
Sorry, but if you think that we have equivalent fear of disease then and now, you don't know what life was like then. How many people did you personally know who died of disease as a kid? I knew one. (Cancer.) But this was a period where people would have 8 kids in the hope that 2-3 of them would survive to adulthood. And disease was the big killer.
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 l…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 ).…
The question of the degree to which enclosure was responsible for the supply of factory workers is one people have debated for a century. The idea that it was was as you can imagine very popular with Marxist historians. Which doesn't make it false of course. But it does have the same neatness that drives urban legends, and in a place like HN we should be wary of this. There were in practice a bunch of forces that dro…
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 l…
> 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 l…
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolhoz#Kolkhoz_life_under_Stali...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but if you think that we have equivalent fear of disease then and now, you don't know what life was like then. How many people did you personally know who died of disease as a kid? I knew one. (Cancer.) But this was a period where people would have 8 kids in the hope that 2-3 of them would survive to adulthood. And disease was the big killer.
Now your whole family is merely bankrupt and homeless if you need medical care, unless you are one of the lucky fraction with insurance or live in a civilized country. I lived without medical insurance for awhile in my 20s. Its not some picnic.
There would be good years. There were also bad. For bad consider that during the 1300s the population of much of Europe dropped by half due to climate changing the carrying capacity. (The Black Death didn't help either.) Despite a reproduction rate that was much higher than todays.
I submit that your idea of "not some picnic" is MASSIVELY nicer than what was accepted as daily reality.