51–60 of 130 posts
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…
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.
Should be tagged [opinion]. This is not a news piece.
There's not opinion in the piece. Just numbers. Perhaps you meant to tag your comment "don't agree".
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…
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.
> "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...
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 ).…
Factory workers were paid handsomely and competition for such jobs was fierce.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's not opinion in the piece. Just numbers. Perhaps you meant to tag your comment "don't agree".
It's published with an "Opinion" heading right at the top. The whole piece is clearly advocating an opinion that more leisure time is a good thing, for one.
There's a disagreement on the issue?
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 cen…
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
We live in a more individualistic world than before, but customs are still a big determinant of how we live. The custom among professionals is working 9-5+. I'm saying its a pity customs haven't evolved to take better advantage of our modern wealth.
But, I'm talking about the median. People with kids. Median salaries. etc. There are lots of example of individuals and subcultures that do optimise for leisure time. The 10-4 job for the accounts receivables guy that can do so much more work in a 6 hour day than his pre-computer predecessor did in a week.
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, sev…
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.
