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.
Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you
111–120 of 130 posts
Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Ski bum" is not an option for people that want to have economic security and maybe buy a mortgage and raise a family.
Economic security and a mortgage are mutually exclusive for most people. And raising a family is unrelated to both.
> Economic security and a mortgage are mutually exclusive for most people.
Oh wow no. For "most people", a mortgage represents the only means of escape from throwing all your money into a rental trap.
Having access to a mortgage represents a giant step up in economic security.
Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you
#113I was thinking about this the other day- why don't some start ups implement a 4 day workweek? That would be a huge incentive for me to join. 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.
dont treehouse do that?
http://ryancarson.com/post/21708810513/4-day-week
Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Factory workers were paid handsomely and competition for such jobs was fierce.
[citation needed] Also, "handsomely" is relative: if the quality of life of peasants plummeted due to enclosure until it was far below the QOL for factory workers and enclosure happened because of the industrial revolution, it would be disingenuous to say that the industrial revolution provided a handsome alternative to peasant life. The freedom of choice can be immensely powerful or worse than useless depending on c…
The initial stages of the industrial revolution were not so good for the workers. However, the mass production phase, did increase the standard of living.
The best example is "The five-dollar workday": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford
Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Do you have any citations about the USSR's industrialization at gun point? From what I know it was opposite - the peasants had been bound to their "kolhoz" (collective farm) and could not leave. It was implemented through internal passports[1], which were not issued to peasants. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolhoz#Kolkhoz_life_under_Stali...
From Wikipedia:
>The first Five-Year plan focused on the mobilization of natural resources to build up the country's heavy industrial base by increasing output of coal, iron, and other vital resources. Despite approximately 1,000,000 deaths this process was largely successful, and caused long-term industrial growth more rapid than any country in history.
>From 1921 until 1954, during the period of state-guided, forced industrialization, it is claimed 3.7 million people were sentenced for alleged counter-revolutionary crimes, including 0.6 million sentenced to death, 2.4 million sentenced to labor camps, and 0.7 million sentenced to expatriation.
>While undoubtedly marking a massive leap in industrial capacity, the first Five Year Plan was extremely harsh on industrial workers; quotas were difficult to fulfill, requiring that miners put in 16 to 18-hour workdays. Failure to fulfill the quotas could result in treason charges. Working conditions were poor, even hazardous. By some estimates, 127,000 workers died during the four years (from 1928 to 1932).
But you can find material on the forced industrialization in all historical books on the USSR.
Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you
#116Any 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…
>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…
My other gripe with it is that as a member of a non-hunter-gatherer society I value the fact that my diet is more interesting and varied than just mongongo nuts.
Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you
#117The 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.
Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you
#118Earlier 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…
Agree that there were multiple forces driving people into the factories. But there is a period of time between medivial peasants and the industrial revolution, and during that time a lot of things changed, economicaly and social.
Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_in_the_Soviet_Unio...
This what I said, peasants were forced to work in agriculture. They were not forced to work in factories, quite the opposite, they had been prevented from working in factories or anywhere else.
USSR needed both (agriculture expansion and industrilization).
So, apart from peasants, million other Russians were forced to work in industry, in horrible conditions, and millions died (and thousands were executed) in the process of increasing industrial production.
Re: Why a medieval peasant got more vacation time than you
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount of progress in knowledge and technology in the past 200-250 years or so (pretty much all of the Industrial Revolution) really is staggering. Take someone from 1750, drop him in the world of 1500, and things would have been pretty familiar. Move 250 years in the other direction and he'd be hard-pressed to make heads or tails of anything (assuming you're taking someone from a part of the developed world -- f…
I had a strange notion recently that if you were to drop the average person (not an Einstein or a Hawking) and dropped them into say the 1500s Europe. Most people think we'd be regarded as super smart and awesome. This comedian explains most people don't know crap[1], we only know the high-level. I think that even if we could find things we understand to teach it would be largely not viable (how much stuff around us…
Thanks to the Flynn effect, it is likely that most of us would be significantly better at abstract thought than the average person 500 years ago. Thanks to diet, we'd also mostly be out of shape giants.
We would, however, be sorely lacking on basic survival skills. Also, not knowing Latin would mark us as uneducated and not worth listening to.