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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)

#41

Post by dcolkitt »

quietthrow wrote: post #31
mbell wrote: post #13

Meh, I think this lacks perspective. Maybe you 'worked' less in that era in the sense that you provided a smaller portion of your time to a third party for pay. But, you worked more overall. You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner; You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer,…

May be same could be said of your perspective and the comment thereof. It’s all relative. Your idea of you and you working is totally relative too. You are nothing but a collection of cells which never stop working until they all do together. By that logic nobody ever had free time.

To make it more concrete, I strongly suspect that pre-industrial people did not have any leisure equivalent activity to the five hours a day that the average American spends watching TV.

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

#42

Post by manfredo »

> 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 steadily from dawn to dusk. We are asked to imagine the journeyman artisan in a cold, damp garret, rising even before the sun, laboring by candlelight late into the night.

Hours spent working is hardly the same thing as quantifying human toll. Most people in agrarian society subsisted on a near-starvation diet, to the point where most women would not get their period until their late teens and early 20s. If you go to a civil war museum you might be surprised at how small the uniforms are - lower diets pushed average heights down by several inches. Antibiotics were non-existent so infections were lethal at drastically higher rates than they are today. Mortality between the ages of 0-20 averaged ~50%, and life expectancy at 20 was usually in the 40s or 50s. Due to this high mortality rate, the births per woman required to form the replacement rate was 6-8 (this is counted of the women that survive to adulthood, raw BPW is about half that). This meant that women effectively had to spend most of their adult lives bearing and caring for children, a big reason why agrarian societies are overwhelmingly patriarchal. Rates of literacy and education did vary, and were as high as 40% in some agrarian societies, but were still far lower than the >90% rate we see in most countries today. And I'm not even going to dig into the can of worms that is the amount of slavery that occurred in agrarian society that was displaced by industrialization.

Capitalism may have a higher demand in terms of hours worked in explicit employment, but I doubt many today would genuinely trade life in a capitalist country for life in a pre-industrial society.

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

#43

Post by manfredo »

whatshisface wrote: post #11
hodgesrm wrote: post #8

This article is somewhat surprising. It does not seem to account for variation in the intensity of work at different times, for example planting and harvest. At those times it's hard to imagine that people worked anything less than dawn to dusk to ensure they had food for the next year.

The table at the bottom is in units of hours.

> Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.

I think the point the above poster is making is that "working hours" logged in these sources are very vague. Does the "175 days" in the English manor mean that these people had free time for the rest of the year? Or did the go and work second or third jobs to get by? Remember, only have the manor's records.

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

#44

Post by JamesBarney »

mbell wrote: post #13

Meh, I think this lacks perspective. Maybe you 'worked' less in that era in the sense that you provided a smaller portion of your time to a third party for pay. But, you worked more overall. You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner; You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer,…

Working on a side project to scratch your own itch feels very emotionally different than working for someone else.

And in the same way washing clothes or making dinner doesn't feel stressful in the way working for someone else does.

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

#45

Post by atoav »

BurningFrog wrote: post #34

It's hard to compare, but those who try usually say we have about 30x the income now. So the extra effort is worth it!

Poverty is usually measured relatively to the perceived average of your environment’s wealth because that is how poverty affects your life.

You can be 100 times as rich as some poor soul in a third world country and still be so poor in your own society that you are constantly struggling, fighting for survival, skipping meals and inheriting that struggle to your kids who are born into them without much chances of getting out.

This could be because the poor soul can maybe life decently within their society off a hundreth of the cost you have (sometimes you even just need to be a good hunter and be able to build some shelter).

The average societal wealth definition of poor used in sociology is not without critics of course, but you can ask yourself if 30 times the income buys 30 times as much rent today and helps you to sustain 30 times as many families (all costs and benefits considered). The income gap between rich and poor is higher today than it ever was under any industrial rule — I wish I’d be able to share your optimism, but considering the average top manager’s salery (including bonuses for failing upwards and fucking shit up) my optimism about the altruistic nature of today’s wealth distribution seems to vanish just a little too quickly..

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

#46

Post by wpietri »

anovikov wrote: post #39
hairytrog wrote: post #36

Sure, many spend 8 hours at the office. But do they do 8 hours of work? Probably not. There are diminishing returns on time spent working, and it probably starts around the third hour. https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/978019087... Many industries would probably suffer negligible losses (and maybe gains) by transitioning to 20 hour work weeks.

With coders, that's clearly not the case right? Coding requires immersion. Same person working on same thing 60 hours per week will make a lot more progress per hour than if he worked 20 hours. In the freelance world, this is name of the game: recruiters want people to work as much per week as possible for this reason, freelancers want to work as little as possible (that improves their skills quicker by working on ma…

I think that'd definitely wrong.

Some kinds of coding do benefit from lack of interruption, so that's can be an argument for very focused work. But one way coding is different than, say, factory work or service work, is that our errors accumulate. It takes just seconds to put a bug in, but hours or days to take it out again. So anybody working long enough to get tired will very quickly hit diminishing returns. There's a nice presentation on this from a while back: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...

I also have come to be suspicious of the "hyperfocus for many hours to get large amounts of state into my head" approach to coding. Code I have to be extremely clever to write usually ends up being a giant pain in the ass to maintain. These days I think it's better to use things like unit tests, pair programming, and very frequent releases to get things done.

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

#47

Post by ken »

hairytrog wrote: post #36

Sure, many spend 8 hours at the office. But do they do 8 hours of work? Probably not. There are diminishing returns on time spent working, and it probably starts around the third hour. https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/978019087... Many industries would probably suffer negligible losses (and maybe gains) by transitioning to 20 hour work weeks.

This article isn't about office workers. It's about workers. Laborers are doing 8+ hour days, too, and they would not be equally productive in half the time. There's a reason it tends to pay by the hour.

Let's compare apples to apples. Office jobs didn't exist in the medieval period, but labor jobs still exist today.

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

#49

Post by BurningFrog »

atoav wrote: post #45
BurningFrog wrote: post #34

It's hard to compare, but those who try usually say we have about 30x the income now. So the extra effort is worth it!

Poverty is usually measured relatively to the perceived average of your environment’s wealth because that is how poverty affects your life. You can be 100 times as rich as some poor soul in a third world country and still be so poor in your own society that you are constantly struggling, fighting for survival, skipping meals and inheriting that struggle to your kids who are born into them without much chances of gett…

> 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 today's poorest countries have better material standard than preindustrial people.

But we still have the same percentage of losers...

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