Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009) • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by mattstreet » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 8:59 PM UTC

Draiken wrote: post #271

ivanhoe wrote: post #219

It's comparing apples and oranges to compare medieval peasants life and modern office work. Even today in rural areas people work around the clock in and around the house to keep everything afloat and barely survive. Sitting on your butt for 10h a day and doing intellectual work seems hard only until you try to do some farming for a while - and modern farming is nothing compared to how hard it was back then, when you…

I'd argue it's actually easier to cope when what you need is repetitive hard physical labor. You don't go to sleep thinking about that big problem you still haven't solved. You actually get the satisfaction of doing the physical activity. You know with certainty that you've done your job (you can actually see it) and you know when to stop because your body will tell you to. Finally, you might be exhausted physically…

"I've never had the opportunity to work with physical labor"

Yes you have. You could go out today and find a job doing physical labor unless you are significantly physically disabled. It's not like there is an educational barrier to all of those jobs. (Yes, I know there is to SOME of them because they require skills and performing physical labor)

As someone that has done plenty of both, you aren't contributing anything to this discussion unless you try it.

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

#482

Post by gnaritas » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 9:05 PM UTC

mistersquid wrote: post #85

stevesimmons wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound as if washing and ironing is a massive chore. Let's say you have 5 shirts a week. Step 1: When you do your white wash, throw in the shirts. Hang them up afterwards. Incremental cost: 2 minutes of your time... Step 2: When you do ironing, incremental cost of 5 shirts @ 3 minutes per shirt is 15 minutes... Probably less that your two trips to the dry cleaner. Plus, nil $ cost, no plastic wrapping to t…

> When you do ironing, incremental cost of 5 shirts @ 3 minutes per shirt is 15 minutes. 3 mins? I iron my shirts, five a week, and it takes me 10-15 mins per shirt, depending on the shirt.

Then you're really bad at ironing. It really shouldn't take more than 2-3 minutes per shirt. 1 if you're good at it.

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

#483

Post by swayvil » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 9:10 PM UTC

JBSay wrote: post #423

swayvil wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was offering that "proving worth to the lord" was fundamental to that psychology. Which fits in with your scenario just fine.

That's the point. A serf didn't have to prove his worth. An employee does.

A serf who can't prove his worth get beatings and demotions. Ultimately death.

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

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Post by swayvil » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #428

swayvil wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, "not nasty brutish and short". And not "everybody suffered a short lifespan" either. As we have just seen. What is true is that many children died young. Beyond that they lived almost as long as we do. If they had modern medicine then the numbers would have equaled out. Heck, with their superior diet they may have lived even longer. So the question is, do we need to work long hours to have modern medicine?

Your own numbers say that the richest population in the world in 1850 - way into industrialization - died at 55 on average, after ignoring child mortality. Which BTW means they watched maybe 1/4 of their children die. If any population lived like that today, their lives would certainly be called nasty, brutish and short.

Well relatively short. Not necessarily nasty and brutish tho.

And, as I said, modern medicine might fix that.

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

#485

Post by BurningFrog » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 10:21 PM UTC

swayvil wrote: post #484

BurningFrog wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your own numbers say that the richest population in the world in 1850 - way into industrialization - died at 55 on average, after ignoring child mortality. Which BTW means they watched maybe 1/4 of their children die. If any population lived like that today, their lives would certainly be called nasty, brutish and short.

Well relatively short. Not necessarily nasty and brutish tho. And, as I said, modern medicine might fix that.

OK, the nasty and brutish part might not have been huge.

Modern medicine is great, but it turns out to not add that many years to our life spans. Mostly money does. Or more likely, the healthy lives money buys.

Put in other words, it's much better to not get sick than to have great health care!

(I'm not just bullshitting here, this is what the data shows (not that I have any links with proofs to show (so feels free to not believe this :)))

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

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Post by WalterBright » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 11:55 PM UTC

claudeganon wrote: post #480

WalterBright wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I already pointed you to one of Allende’s chief advisors identifying Friedman as providing the direct, ideological grounding for the Chilean coup, so I’m not sure what more evidence you want. Something from Friedman himself, not filtered through hearsay. Friedman has a very large body of work you can draw from. If he's a fascist, you should be able to find it in that work.

I don’t think Friedman was a fascist. I think he was a sophist who had no problem working with or lending support to fascists when he thought it served his interests and ingratiated him to him to elites in the economic and political milieu in which he operated. Again, on the one hand you have someone who fled Chile and was murdered by the Pinochet regime and someone who flew into give speeches and pal around with the…

Again, your information is hearsay. I'm asking you if you have any words from Friedman's mouth or his typewriter. If he was the terrible person you say he was, there should be plenty in a lifetime of output from him.

Besides, do you really believe someone could talk with Pinochet for 45 minutes and thereby turn him into a monster? It's not credible. It's more likely Pinochet used Friedman for propaganda value, and stroked Friedman's ego. People who run governments tend to be users and tend to be masters at stroking ego.

I once had a conversation with a Senator whom I despised. He was incredibly charming in person. I can easily see falling under the spell of someone like that.

Frankly, you don't like libertarianism, which is your choice, but if this 45 minute conversation with Pinochet (for which no transcript exists) is all you have, it isn't much of anything.

I still think it's ironic that libertarianism's detractors claim it's both about no government at all and oppressive, authoritarian regimes. Clearly both positions can't be right, and likely neither.

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

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Post by WalterBright » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 11:57 PM UTC

mftrhu wrote: post #443

WalterBright wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which self-professed Libertarians appear to be against. That's conflating Anarchists with Libertarians. Libertarians are not Anarchists. Feudalism is something different altogether.

> Libertarians are not Anarchists. Unless with "libertarians" you are referring to ancaps, this is just false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#Rise_of_anarchi...

Libertarianism relies on government to enforce peoples' rights. Anarchism is fundamentally different.

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

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Post by mikelyons » Thu, Aug 22, 2019, 11:58 PM UTC

fuzz4lyfe wrote: post #455

mikelyons wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nope." is cute and shows you're cocksure about that. However, the reality is that this happens all the time and is never punished by culture as "unprofessional" for a corporation to do. Who would punish them? The customers?

>Who would punish them? The customers? Future potential employees. If I go on glassdoor and read about this happening I'm either going to A: raise my rates as I need to keep a larger emergency fund to deal with these guys B: decline to work there at all They end up only ever getting entry level kids to work for them. The system sort of works in that regard if you come from a non-traditional background you can work fo…

There have been many threads on HN where the debate is "Do employees have enough power to [punish companies] if they need" but none of them have really every made a coherent case one way or the other, but they seem to lean "no" Disclaim: My personal Anecdote^

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

#489

Post by BurningFrog » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 12:16 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #459

BurningFrog wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All else equal, more money per hour should decrease the number of hours worked I would have shared that guess, but clearly that's not how we humans operate. Maybe we just like to work! Or maybe we really like to be richer than others. We're primates after all, and primates really care about their place in hierarchies...

> I would have shared that guess, but clearly that's not how we humans operate. What are you basing that on? I mean, the article is about as far as you can possibly get from "all else equal".

I just base it on living in the 21th century.

Humanity is stupendously rich, by the standards of all previous generations, and yet most of us work like crazy, certainly including many of the richest ones.

Or maybe we're talking about slightly different things?

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

#490

Post by pandapower2 » Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 1:16 AM UTC

Mirioron wrote: post #250

pandapower2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that is true. Firstly, what are you working in exchange for? Are you performing some kind of useful work for someone else, receiving nothing in exchange then going and being a hunter gatherer for some reason? Probably not. >You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner Money has existed for a very long time so purchasing food ready to eat isn't so far fetched assuming your life took you near…

Most farmers lived on farms. They actually did have to make a lot of their stuff themselves. Yes, you had a large family, but you needed that to be able to survive. > Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all. You would salt and preserve the mea…

>You would salt and preserve the meat/fish and consume it in the future.

That is very environment specific.

Depending on when/where you are salt was expensive or extremely laborious to produce. Salting, smoking etc is itself laborious, can require special purpose equipment and can take weeks. Its entirely possible that the effort to obtain the supplies and equipment to preserve your surplus food exceeds the effort to simply obtain more food in the future.

There is a reason why salting/pickling/fermentation was common in places that had winters severe enough to impact the availability of food Vs anywhere closer to the equator. People did it when they faced a large chunk of the year when starvation was a serious concern.