61–70 of 523 posts
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.
This is true, and it's interesting. However, it's also important to keep in mind that there was also a lot of grinding poverty and near-starvation during the off-seasons. A peasant family might not have been working during the winter, but its a bit misleading to view that period as "leisure time."
The article argues that even when they had a chance to work more they didn't. Maybe they were all being shortsighted, or maybe that happened in a brief climactic golden age.
I think that historically the first job with the work ethic of more is better was the merchant.
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Common usage indicates that "than us" is just fine. Remember English grammar doesn't come from a grammar book - grammar books are merely imperfect attempts to describe common English usage.
More than that, "Than We" sounds archaic to me, 19th C at best, i.e. wrong. Who talks like that?
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The closer your work is to the actual benefit it provides, the more gratifying it is.
I post this quote a lot, but I your point made me think of it again: "It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of society as a whole." - Ursula K LeGuin
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.
I don't disagree with you. The average eight hour office worker probably only does do four hours of work a day. But I think the problem is that that nearly everyone has internalized that cadence. If every office worker had their schedule cut to a 20 hours a week, I strongly suspect that only 10 hours of work would actually get done. It's just too much of the low efficiency is culturally ingrained on every level from…
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!
I believe at the height of Imperial Rome, workers almost had one day off for every day worked. The Romans did use a lot of space labor, so that may also have something to do with it.
If you look at hours per worked per family, things have gotten even way worse since woman were drafted en mass into the salaried workforce post ww2, going from a 40hr week to well over 70hrs.
In the 1940s a woman would typically spend 62 hours a week in housework.
Nowadays women typically spend 15 hours in housework and 45 hours in paid work. So the same ballpark, really, and not a dramatic expansion.