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Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013)

269 points by fredrikaurdal 9y ago

fiatjaf 9y ago
I would prefer just the facts. Is it true that medieval peasants got so much vacation? When, where and how exactly? The article mentions many things, but they're left quite unsubstantiated. I know I could do the research on my own, but probably the article would be more valuable with more of the what and less of the why.
- thechao 9y ago
  The links to the resources are black, without an underline. So, if you search for the phrase "the economist Juliet Shor" it takes you to a book review by MIT CSAIL. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Maybe this is more your speed. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
golergka 9y ago
Because he didn't have a choice. If he could trade this vacation for more food, medication for his children, or many other resources, he gladly would - but I don't think that as a peasant in the winter you really could make anything out of your time without a capitalist society and other jobs. All modern people have a choice about how much time they spend at their jobs. I've switched to 3-day workweek sometimes, raking 50% cut in salary; turns out, if you're not in a leading position, it's painfully obvious to negotiate. People in first world countries don't need to work 40 hours a week to avoid starvation. We do it out of our own free will, because we want more stuff. And, out of this personal experience - because we don't really have anything better to do with our time. Even a regular, a bit boring job beats sitting around the house and watching TV. Driving your own personal projects requires a significant amount of motivation and willpower, and most of us would be too ashamed to admit that we lack it.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I don't think it's true that peasants would have worked more if given the option, nor that most people have a realistic option to negotiate to work less hours today.
- stupidcar 9y ago
  By "all modern people", you apparently mean the relatively small group of middle-class professionals who can earn a decent salary on a shorter working week, and are in a position to negotiate it. There is a far larger group of people working in low-skilled jobs whose entire salary is not enough to cover their outgoings, and must also rely on consumer debt and government assistance to support themselves and their families (think Walmart workers on foodstamps). What's more, the balance of power with their employer is such that they have absolutely no leverage to negotiate shorter working hours, even if they wanted to. A low-skilled worker is expected to be at the beck and call of their employer up to, and often beyond, the legal limit of work. When you can be fired from a job you've held for years for being 30 seconds late, you're not going to get far asking to work two less days a week. It's nice that you were able to arrange an easier lifestyle for yourself, but don't mistake your privileged situation for the norm.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Don't forget health insurance.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Most people working at Walmart would like to negotiate longer working hours.
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      They probably would prefer higher wages.
      - maxerickson 9y ago
        Both. Wages first of course. But plenty of people don't want to be limited to part time hours.
Hendrikto 9y ago
The USA are abolishing themselves... > In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity. Work smart, not hard.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Working long hours in an office job has nothing to do with productivity; it's an abstract form of signaling your commitment to the job.
  - deadbunny 9y ago
    Which is not at all smart.
- losvedir 9y ago
  Isn't labor productivity measured per-time, though? If there are diminishing marginal returns on labor (as there are on everything else) then it would make sense that those who work the least are the most productive. It doesn't mean they produce the most, though.
  - k__ 9y ago
    True. Isn't something like output/time
- mbroncano 9y ago
  Exactly, job scarcity is heavily correlated to long working hours in countries like Greece.
- IloveHN84 9y ago
  And working in Germany, I can say that productivity!= quality
  - wu-ikkyu 9y ago
ptero 9y ago
> In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze. I have serious doubts about this. Maybe someone could provide additional insight. I doubt all time not working the fields was "relaxing during long holidays". It would likely be spent on other chores. Food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explodes), so quaffing ale for a week is not impossible for a rich wedding, but unlikely in general. In my childhood I lived near rural areas (not US) and in the days when farm hands cannot do anything (rain; off season) they tend to just get drunk which, to me, hardly qualifies as a vacation time. Bottom line: I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Yeah there is definately an issue with understanding about what constitutes a vacation. The 14th century equivalent of unpaid vacation drinking malt liquor in a trailer isn’t my vision of a life of leisure.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    In the Middle Ages nobody was taking a "vacation" in the sense we mean it; that's really a more Victorian idea. But enough people today can't actually afford to go away when they have time off.
    - stult 9y ago
      Actually that's not quite true either. Pilgrimages were quite common, and although not necessarily a vacation as we would consider it, many even fairly poor people traveled quite far distances just for the spiritual pleasure of it.
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        That's true, but I think of that as a different phenomenon.
taneq 9y ago
Note the significant difference between "leisure time" as in "playing games, socializing and making merry" and just "huddling in a primitive hut waiting for a chance to work more." It's not like he's having much fun (unless you include all the begatting that must have gone on during the winter months...) I'm really lucky that I don't generally want more things, and the things I do want are cheap. Living in the future is freaking amazing if you enjoy making things.
macspoofing 9y ago
This sounds like it could be explained by the same structural problems that communist nations went through ... in that if you don't own the land, and the proceeds of what you make don't really belong to you and there is no incentive to make more than what your neighbour makes ... why not put in the least amount of work you can.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I feel like the same lack of "incentive" applies to many people with menial jobs in a capitalist economy.
  - macspoofing 9y ago
    Not quite. There is still a direct correlation between work and benefit, as in if you work more, you make more, but you keep more. In Communist economies, that isn't true. If you work more, you make more, but you don't get to keep more.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      And working your field doesn't provide for your life? The relationship between a peasant's effectiveness at his work and the rewards he reaps is actually more, rather than less, direct than that relationship for someone stocking shelves, because if he produced more food he'd be able to keep more of it -- what was being rewarded was the result rather than the number of hours he spent in the fields.
      - macspoofing 9y ago
        >And working your field doesn't provide for your life? Under communism, all surplus (or even the full total) is appropriated by the state. So working more and harder nets no extra benefit on the peasant. The incentive then is to exert as little effort as you can. NPR's Planet Money had a really good podcast on this recently [1] I speculated that feudal peasant may have been subject to the same kinds of incentives as everything they produced belonged to the local Lord. >because if he produced more food he'd be able to keep more of it Under certain communist regimes (Soviet Union and Mao's China), that wasn't necessarily true. The state appropriated everything. [1]https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/07/583999476/episode-337-the-secret-document-that-transformed-china https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/07/583999476/epis...
exratione 9y ago
A lens to look at this through is the struggle for control over the population. The competing factions in the Middle Ages were very different from those now - so the manifestations of authoritarianism naturally differed in the Middle Ages. Large numbers of holy days (holidays) went hand in hand with simony and temporal power emanating from Rome. The church was just as rapacious and self-interested as the lords who claimed ownership over the peasantry. So then, a fractious feudal nobility, the ruler, and the church, now fractious corporate powers and a more unified state, with the church faded to irrelevance in temporal matters. The only constant is the undiminished desire to order the lives of others in order to farm them for profit, to be the stationary bandit. Even if matters were the same, however, the march of technology would still make the present a far better place to live than the past. It is technology, not politics, that is the greatest driver of quality of life.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I mean, it's a lens, but I don't know that I'd view merrymaking during holidays as a sinister form of control.
zeth___ 9y ago
What if it isn't a bug but a feature? Tired citizens are not engaged citizens, they don't have the energy to organize and push for their interests. Workers being less productive is a small price to pay for employers when all your productivity gains go to them anyway.
- equivalentideas 9y ago
  +1
- lawlessone 9y ago
  Could it have more to do with agriculture? during certain times of year you probably didn't have work . waiting for things just grow or thaw. before you can begin plating or harvest?
- hn0 9y ago
  Oh, the joy of the marginalist supply and demand theorem! Here's an excerpt of Alan Greenspan’s Feb. 26, 1997, testimony before the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee: "The performance of the U.S. economy over the past year has been quite favorable. … Continued low levels of inflation and inflation expectations have been a key support for healthy economic performance. … Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now, and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity. The willingness of workers in recent years to trade off smaller increases in wages for greater job security seems to be reasonably well documented. The unanswered question is why this insecurity persisted even as the labor market, by all objective measures, tightened considerably."
qwr23qwer 9y ago
"Leisure" might not mean exactly what we think it means today. I think it'll be obvious to anyone who's worked in a manual labour job e.g. construction, farming, etc, even with today's tools, you can't physically do these at anything but a "leisurely pace" and a limited amount of hours a day, with breaks for rest, food etc. Specially in warmer climates. Claiming that this means that life was easy is a little bit dishonest here. There's a limit to what's humanly possible, digging ditches with shovels for 8 hours a day is not equal to sitting in an office for same 8 hours. No matter how many breaks you have, and at how "leisurely pace" you're digging.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Yeah, sure, but how many construction workers work only 150 days a year and have mid-day naps?
  - qwr23qwer 9y ago
    Work on oil rigs, fishing (Deadliest Catch guys?), underwater welding etc. are usually done for a couple months a year and taking the rest off, (at least from anecdotal data from folks I know). Construction work can be similar in places where harsh winters make it impossible to build anything during winter (frozen ground and all that). Farming can be similar.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      I work in Boston and I see people working in the winter in buildings. What region is this?
      - ghaff 9y ago
        Depends on the type of construction specialty. I have a neighbor who is in heavy construction (i.e. drives backhoes, etc.) and he's typically off for the winter--though he sometimes does various other things.
    - dogma1138 9y ago
NicoJuicy 9y ago
If this is true, i wonder how much is attributed to the shortage of light when it's dark.
- ctdonath 9y ago
  Good (and apparently unaddressed) point. We get several more hours per day for leisure precisely because "daylight" can be continued indoors indefinitely.
lucozade 9y ago
Right. So that'll be the vast amounts of unpaid vacation that they were all enjoying. And I'm sure they were enjoying the extended vacations because of the strong contractual obligations that the landowners had to their serfs. The US do have an issue with the amount of vacation time that they have but it's close to infantile to compare it so naively to the Middle Ages. If you're going to compare it to Europe (which this is doing), how about comparing it to Europe in, say, the 21C?
- pjmlp 9y ago
  > If you're going to compare it to Europe (which this is doing), how about comparing it to Europe in, say, the 21C? Sure, between 20 and 30 days paid vacation depending on the country, illness isn't considered vacation and usually gets paid up to 6 months. Oh then there is the paternal and maternity leave, up to two years, depending on the country.
  - lucozade 9y ago
    Precisely. There are countries, working under very similar constraints to modern day US, that are trying, and succeeding, with other arrangements. This should be the focus of the compare and contrast because it's a valuable comparison. I've seen a few of these, Monty Python-esque, comparisons recently. There was one in the Guardian that asserted (wildly incorrectly) that female life expectancy had decreased since the 19C. If I was prone to paranoia, I'd be concerned that they are planted by folk that want the status quo and are making these cartoonish comparisons to make it easy to lampoon.
ctdonath 9y ago
Methinks medieval peasants would consider most modern work a vacation.
sparrish 9y ago
They got up to 1/2 the year off, sure. But my guess is they had to work more than 2000 hours the other half. They just compressed the hours worked into the growing season. Modern farmers do the same thing (from a rural farming community).
- watwut 9y ago
  In winter you still need to care about animals, repair stuff, sew, chop wood, cook, etc. Peasants had to create a lot of things that we buy nowdays. They did not slacked whole winter.
  - sparrish 9y ago
    I agree, they worked in the winter, as modern farmer do as well, but not nearly as hard as the spring, summer, fall. I was just going with the "up to 1/2 the year vacation" from the article.
    - watwut 9y ago
      From what I read, it really was no slacking. For instance, all sewing was done by hand - that includes stuff to put on bed and cover your self with. That is huge amount of time consuming work. If you had daughter you had to prepare things she will need after marriage - so even if you are fixed, you are preparing things for that. Anything from wood is done by hand too. And insulation is not nearly as good as today, so you need to sleep more for the cold.
cbayram 9y ago
There was no concept of vacation. Notion of a vacation is very nascent in many cultures.
Proven 9y ago
Well, no shit - the State steals 30% of my income... Socialism is worse than feudalism.
minikites 9y ago
I'm going to duplicate a comment I made in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16652952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16652952), because it applies equally well here and I'm quite disappointed that I seem to be the only one pointing this out (after that thread reached more than 340 comments, a mere two other people made a similar comment to mine): As I type this comment, there are 55 other comments in this discussion, not one of them using the word "union". That's the only feasible method I can see to enact large scale change. CEOs and other executives aren't going to change out of the kindness of their hearts, as evidenced by the fact that they could start at any point and still choose not to.
- evanwise 9y ago
  While I am sympathetic to the idea of unionizing development and IT work, I have a hard time imagining a practical path. Vaguely libertarian ideologies seem to be the norm in these professions.
vadimberman 9y ago
Ugh. The paper reeks of political agenda. The very first sentence is: > One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. What about the Communism? Why would they spread this durable myth? Because I remember hearing the same story in the Soviet school. The paper does not make a real effort trying to consider different evidence and honestly investigate the subject. Most of the sources are related to the UK (specifically, England) with a couple referring to the US in XIX century. How do we know how much the Dutch, German, French, Russian peasants worked, let alone those in the rice-growing Asia? Finally, how about trying to research 1600s and 1700s in North America to compare apples with apples? Even in her own paper, the results appear a bit, ahem, uneven: > 1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours > 1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours > Calculated from Ian Blanchard's estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day Yes, it's 180 days, but 11 hours each. Did she actually try working 11 hours on a backbreaking menial job? Does she actually believe that 11 hours being a miner in 1500s is the same as 11 hours in the office or even a modern assembly line?
- vertex-four 9y ago
  The argument is not capitalism vs state socialism ("communism"). That you seem to think it is, shows exactly how well propaganda has worked on you, from both of those sources.
  - vadimberman 9y ago
    It's wonderful that there is someone with mind as unclouded by propaganda to enlighten me and improve my limited world view. Did you find any figures or arguments in the original paper that I overlooked? Like, Chinese peasants, German peasants, etc.
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      No, I generally agree that we've shifted things around so that most workers now are generally a bit better off than before in many ways. I think they could be better off still under alternative systems. I was however responding, primarily, to your apparent argument that anyone criticising capitalism can only be a Soviet-era state-supporting "communist".
Jaruzel 9y ago
> As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually. Is this true? In the UK, 'standard' holiday entitlement for most jobs starts at 20 days annually, and that doesn't include official days off such as Xmas, New Year, Easter etc.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  Yes, this is true for the average American white collar worker at the start of employment, sort of earning fractional vacation hours per hour of work. Service worker - not sure about that - is that the same as zero hours contract employee? Low unemployment has forced companies to start offering paid vacation to employees in fast food restaurants in recent years. Many teachers in public schools famously don't have to work for three months a year, but don't get paid for those three months a year.
- refurb 9y ago
  It's not true. It's tough to find a job that doesn't offer 2 weeks and most white collar jobs offer 3 weeks (15 days). That doesn't include the typical 13 stat holidays. I have a job in the US that offers 25 paid days of vacation, plus the standard 13.
  - notfromhere 9y ago
    counting PTO as vacation is disingenuous. That's all your time off for the year rather than exclusively vacation
booleandilemma 9y ago
And they got to work from home every day, too.
commandlinefan 9y ago
They paid less tax, too.
- hn0 9y ago
  They paid substantial taxes in grain. They were pretty much considered the private property of their landlord. If they wanted to get married they first had to be allowed so by their lord, and then pay him as compensation for being so nice to them. Then there's debt-servitude, invasions, and all that fun stuff.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Until the 1200's, there was pretty much just the Geld in Europe (a land tax). Because the geld was assessed on landowners, it only applied to free men who owned land, and thus serfs and slaves were exempt. Later on the income tax got invented, and was generally 1/10 to the king. I wish I only paid 1/10 to the feds.
  - notahacker 9y ago
    Serfs and slaves weren't so much exempt from paying taxes as exempt from earning income, whilst still being obliged to provide labour for other people alongside trying to meet their own subsistence needs.
YTGRK 9y ago
https://youtu.be/I2l8xkjTUh4 https://youtu.be/I2l8xkjTUh4
socratewasright 9y ago
They also died younger and led miserable lives by today's standards. The article claims the american worker gets 8 days of vacation annually. 52*2 > 8 last time I checked. I do believe though that with more automation, workers should be getting more vacation time.
muzani 9y ago
Is this surprising? People in the past had much more time and much less resources. This isn't just medieval workers. It might have applied to the last two generations, before the information age allowed us to check work email first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
megiddo 9y ago
The comparison ignores the blistering daily poverty of a medieval peasant. This is not merely a lack of technology - that would be a historical argument. But even basic amenities that could be easily built in this time period were difficult to come by. Entire villages might have to share a few pieces of furniture, like a stool. These people may have had a lot of "time off", but they spent it in horrible poverty, many months of the year near starvation, even within the context of what was available to them in their own time. I would hazard to say that many modern office workers rarely actually accomplish 40 hours of productive work in a given week. They may be physically present, but how often are they chatting, goofing off, or standing around waiting for an interaction. Modern business is built upon availability, not necessarily toil.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > daily poverty of a medieval peasant And death was omnipresent. Most of your kids would die in young age, folks around you were killed by random infections or flu regularly, and there was not much to look forward to in life.
NPMaxwell 9y ago
Conditions in Europe in the 14th century were mostly due to the Black Plague (Black Death), which killed ~50% of the European population. The result was a variety of infrastructure, institutions, and economic systems designed for a much larger population. Used goods and housing were available at very reduced rates. Labor was a scarce commodity. It took a while before Europe regained an economic system that matched its population.
aanxiety 9y ago
The problem with so many of the comments here: Of course you would sacrifice your vacation time to avoid the pains of the middle ages and to gain the advantages of today. But those advantages are not the mere consequence of us working more. They are the consequence of centuries of technological advancement. If we started working as little as medieval peasants our standards of living would not just suddenly drop to their levels but they would stay much higher. We can have our cake and eat it too. And in passing, we would likely save planet earth doing so.
ggg9990 9y ago
I’d rather sit at a desk for 280 days than do backbreaking work in plague-ridden medieval Europe for 150 days.

269 points by fredrikaurdal 9y ago

I would prefer just the facts. Is it true that medieval peasants got so much vacation? When, where and how exactly? The article mentions many things, but they're left quite unsubstantiated. I know I could do the research on my own, but probably the article would be more valuable with more of the what and less of the why.

thechao 9y ago
The links to the resources are black, without an underline. So, if you search for the phrase "the economist Juliet Shor" it takes you to a book review by MIT CSAIL. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
emodendroket 9y ago
Maybe this is more your speed. http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...

golergka 9y ago

Because he didn't have a choice. If he could trade this vacation for more food, medication for his children, or many other resources, he gladly would - but I don't think that as a peasant in the winter you really could make anything out of your time without a capitalist society and other jobs. All modern people have a choice about how much time they spend at their jobs. I've switched to 3-day workweek sometimes, raking 50% cut in salary; turns out, if you're not in a leading position, it's painfully obvious to negotiate. People in first world countries don't need to work 40 hours a week to avoid starvation. We do it out of our own free will, because we want more stuff. And, out of this personal experience - because we don't really have anything better to do with our time. Even a regular, a bit boring job beats sitting around the house and watching TV. Driving your own personal projects requires a significant amount of motivation and willpower, and most of us would be too ashamed to admit that we lack it.

emodendroket 9y ago
I don't think it's true that peasants would have worked more if given the option, nor that most people have a realistic option to negotiate to work less hours today.
stupidcar 9y ago
By "all modern people", you apparently mean the relatively small group of middle-class professionals who can earn a decent salary on a shorter working week, and are in a position to negotiate it. There is a far larger group of people working in low-skilled jobs whose entire salary is not enough to cover their outgoings, and must also rely on consumer debt and government assistance to support themselves and their families (think Walmart workers on foodstamps). What's more, the balance of power with their employer is such that they have absolutely no leverage to negotiate shorter working hours, even if they wanted to. A low-skilled worker is expected to be at the beck and call of their employer up to, and often beyond, the legal limit of work. When you can be fired from a job you've held for years for being 30 seconds late, you're not going to get far asking to work two less days a week. It's nice that you were able to arrange an easier lifestyle for yourself, but don't mistake your privileged situation for the norm.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Don't forget health insurance.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Most people working at Walmart would like to negotiate longer working hours.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    They probably would prefer higher wages.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      Both. Wages first of course. But plenty of people don't want to be limited to part time hours.

Hendrikto 9y ago

The USA are abolishing themselves... > In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity. Work smart, not hard.

emodendroket 9y ago
Working long hours in an office job has nothing to do with productivity; it's an abstract form of signaling your commitment to the job.
- deadbunny 9y ago
  Which is not at all smart.
losvedir 9y ago
Isn't labor productivity measured per-time, though? If there are diminishing marginal returns on labor (as there are on everything else) then it would make sense that those who work the least are the most productive. It doesn't mean they produce the most, though.
- k__ 9y ago
  True. Isn't something like output/time
mbroncano 9y ago
Exactly, job scarcity is heavily correlated to long working hours in countries like Greece.
IloveHN84 9y ago
And working in Germany, I can say that productivity!= quality
- wu-ikkyu 9y ago

ptero 9y ago

> In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze. I have serious doubts about this. Maybe someone could provide additional insight. I doubt all time not working the fields was "relaxing during long holidays". It would likely be spent on other chores. Food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explodes), so quaffing ale for a week is not impossible for a rich wedding, but unlikely in general. In my childhood I lived near rural areas (not US) and in the days when farm hands cannot do anything (rain; off season) they tend to just get drunk which, to me, hardly qualifies as a vacation time. Bottom line: I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either.

Spooky23 9y ago
Yeah there is definately an issue with understanding about what constitutes a vacation. The 14th century equivalent of unpaid vacation drinking malt liquor in a trailer isn’t my vision of a life of leisure.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  In the Middle Ages nobody was taking a "vacation" in the sense we mean it; that's really a more Victorian idea. But enough people today can't actually afford to go away when they have time off.
  - stult 9y ago
    Actually that's not quite true either. Pilgrimages were quite common, and although not necessarily a vacation as we would consider it, many even fairly poor people traveled quite far distances just for the spiritual pleasure of it.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      That's true, but I think of that as a different phenomenon.

taneq 9y ago

Note the significant difference between "leisure time" as in "playing games, socializing and making merry" and just "huddling in a primitive hut waiting for a chance to work more." It's not like he's having much fun (unless you include all the begatting that must have gone on during the winter months...) I'm really lucky that I don't generally want more things, and the things I do want are cheap. Living in the future is freaking amazing if you enjoy making things.

macspoofing 9y ago

This sounds like it could be explained by the same structural problems that communist nations went through ... in that if you don't own the land, and the proceeds of what you make don't really belong to you and there is no incentive to make more than what your neighbour makes ... why not put in the least amount of work you can.

emodendroket 9y ago
I feel like the same lack of "incentive" applies to many people with menial jobs in a capitalist economy.
- macspoofing 9y ago
  Not quite. There is still a direct correlation between work and benefit, as in if you work more, you make more, but you keep more. In Communist economies, that isn't true. If you work more, you make more, but you don't get to keep more.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    And working your field doesn't provide for your life? The relationship between a peasant's effectiveness at his work and the rewards he reaps is actually more, rather than less, direct than that relationship for someone stocking shelves, because if he produced more food he'd be able to keep more of it -- what was being rewarded was the result rather than the number of hours he spent in the fields.
    - macspoofing 9y ago
      >And working your field doesn't provide for your life? Under communism, all surplus (or even the full total) is appropriated by the state. So working more and harder nets no extra benefit on the peasant. The incentive then is to exert as little effort as you can. NPR's Planet Money had a really good podcast on this recently [1] I speculated that feudal peasant may have been subject to the same kinds of incentives as everything they produced belonged to the local Lord. >because if he produced more food he'd be able to keep more of it Under certain communist regimes (Soviet Union and Mao's China), that wasn't necessarily true. The state appropriated everything. [1]https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/07/583999476/episode-337-the-secret-document-that-transformed-china https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/07/583999476/epis...

exratione 9y ago

A lens to look at this through is the struggle for control over the population. The competing factions in the Middle Ages were very different from those now - so the manifestations of authoritarianism naturally differed in the Middle Ages. Large numbers of holy days (holidays) went hand in hand with simony and temporal power emanating from Rome. The church was just as rapacious and self-interested as the lords who claimed ownership over the peasantry. So then, a fractious feudal nobility, the ruler, and the church, now fractious corporate powers and a more unified state, with the church faded to irrelevance in temporal matters. The only constant is the undiminished desire to order the lives of others in order to farm them for profit, to be the stationary bandit. Even if matters were the same, however, the march of technology would still make the present a far better place to live than the past. It is technology, not politics, that is the greatest driver of quality of life.

emodendroket 9y ago
I mean, it's a lens, but I don't know that I'd view merrymaking during holidays as a sinister form of control.

zeth___ 9y ago

What if it isn't a bug but a feature? Tired citizens are not engaged citizens, they don't have the energy to organize and push for their interests. Workers being less productive is a small price to pay for employers when all your productivity gains go to them anyway.

equivalentideas 9y ago
+1
lawlessone 9y ago
Could it have more to do with agriculture? during certain times of year you probably didn't have work . waiting for things just grow or thaw. before you can begin plating or harvest?
hn0 9y ago
Oh, the joy of the marginalist supply and demand theorem! Here's an excerpt of Alan Greenspan’s Feb. 26, 1997, testimony before the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee: "The performance of the U.S. economy over the past year has been quite favorable. … Continued low levels of inflation and inflation expectations have been a key support for healthy economic performance. … Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now, and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity. The willingness of workers in recent years to trade off smaller increases in wages for greater job security seems to be reasonably well documented. The unanswered question is why this insecurity persisted even as the labor market, by all objective measures, tightened considerably."

qwr23qwer 9y ago

"Leisure" might not mean exactly what we think it means today. I think it'll be obvious to anyone who's worked in a manual labour job e.g. construction, farming, etc, even with today's tools, you can't physically do these at anything but a "leisurely pace" and a limited amount of hours a day, with breaks for rest, food etc. Specially in warmer climates. Claiming that this means that life was easy is a little bit dishonest here. There's a limit to what's humanly possible, digging ditches with shovels for 8 hours a day is not equal to sitting in an office for same 8 hours. No matter how many breaks you have, and at how "leisurely pace" you're digging.

emodendroket 9y ago
Yeah, sure, but how many construction workers work only 150 days a year and have mid-day naps?
- qwr23qwer 9y ago
  Work on oil rigs, fishing (Deadliest Catch guys?), underwater welding etc. are usually done for a couple months a year and taking the rest off, (at least from anecdotal data from folks I know). Construction work can be similar in places where harsh winters make it impossible to build anything during winter (frozen ground and all that). Farming can be similar.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I work in Boston and I see people working in the winter in buildings. What region is this?
    - ghaff 9y ago
      Depends on the type of construction specialty. I have a neighbor who is in heavy construction (i.e. drives backhoes, etc.) and he's typically off for the winter--though he sometimes does various other things.
  - dogma1138 9y ago

NicoJuicy 9y ago

If this is true, i wonder how much is attributed to the shortage of light when it's dark.

ctdonath 9y ago
Good (and apparently unaddressed) point. We get several more hours per day for leisure precisely because "daylight" can be continued indoors indefinitely.

lucozade 9y ago

Right. So that'll be the vast amounts of unpaid vacation that they were all enjoying. And I'm sure they were enjoying the extended vacations because of the strong contractual obligations that the landowners had to their serfs. The US do have an issue with the amount of vacation time that they have but it's close to infantile to compare it so naively to the Middle Ages. If you're going to compare it to Europe (which this is doing), how about comparing it to Europe in, say, the 21C?

pjmlp 9y ago
> If you're going to compare it to Europe (which this is doing), how about comparing it to Europe in, say, the 21C? Sure, between 20 and 30 days paid vacation depending on the country, illness isn't considered vacation and usually gets paid up to 6 months. Oh then there is the paternal and maternity leave, up to two years, depending on the country.
- lucozade 9y ago
  Precisely. There are countries, working under very similar constraints to modern day US, that are trying, and succeeding, with other arrangements. This should be the focus of the compare and contrast because it's a valuable comparison. I've seen a few of these, Monty Python-esque, comparisons recently. There was one in the Guardian that asserted (wildly incorrectly) that female life expectancy had decreased since the 19C. If I was prone to paranoia, I'd be concerned that they are planted by folk that want the status quo and are making these cartoonish comparisons to make it easy to lampoon.

ctdonath 9y ago

Methinks medieval peasants would consider most modern work a vacation.

sparrish 9y ago

They got up to 1/2 the year off, sure. But my guess is they had to work more than 2000 hours the other half. They just compressed the hours worked into the growing season. Modern farmers do the same thing (from a rural farming community).

watwut 9y ago
In winter you still need to care about animals, repair stuff, sew, chop wood, cook, etc. Peasants had to create a lot of things that we buy nowdays. They did not slacked whole winter.
- sparrish 9y ago
  I agree, they worked in the winter, as modern farmer do as well, but not nearly as hard as the spring, summer, fall. I was just going with the "up to 1/2 the year vacation" from the article.
  - watwut 9y ago
    From what I read, it really was no slacking. For instance, all sewing was done by hand - that includes stuff to put on bed and cover your self with. That is huge amount of time consuming work. If you had daughter you had to prepare things she will need after marriage - so even if you are fixed, you are preparing things for that. Anything from wood is done by hand too. And insulation is not nearly as good as today, so you need to sleep more for the cold.

cbayram 9y ago

There was no concept of vacation. Notion of a vacation is very nascent in many cultures.

Proven 9y ago

Well, no shit - the State steals 30% of my income... Socialism is worse than feudalism.

minikites 9y ago

I'm going to duplicate a comment I made in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16652952 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16652952), because it applies equally well here and I'm quite disappointed that I seem to be the only one pointing this out (after that thread reached more than 340 comments, a mere two other people made a similar comment to mine): As I type this comment, there are 55 other comments in this discussion, not one of them using the word "union". That's the only feasible method I can see to enact large scale change. CEOs and other executives aren't going to change out of the kindness of their hearts, as evidenced by the fact that they could start at any point and still choose not to.

evanwise 9y ago
While I am sympathetic to the idea of unionizing development and IT work, I have a hard time imagining a practical path. Vaguely libertarian ideologies seem to be the norm in these professions.

vadimberman 9y ago

Ugh. The paper reeks of political agenda. The very first sentence is: > One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil. What about the Communism? Why would they spread this durable myth? Because I remember hearing the same story in the Soviet school. The paper does not make a real effort trying to consider different evidence and honestly investigate the subject. Most of the sources are related to the UK (specifically, England) with a couple referring to the US in XIX century. How do we know how much the Dutch, German, French, Russian peasants worked, let alone those in the rice-growing Asia? Finally, how about trying to research 1600s and 1700s in North America to compare apples with apples? Even in her own paper, the results appear a bit, ahem, uneven: > 1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours > 1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours > Calculated from Ian Blanchard's estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day Yes, it's 180 days, but 11 hours each. Did she actually try working 11 hours on a backbreaking menial job? Does she actually believe that 11 hours being a miner in 1500s is the same as 11 hours in the office or even a modern assembly line?

vertex-four 9y ago
The argument is not capitalism vs state socialism ("communism"). That you seem to think it is, shows exactly how well propaganda has worked on you, from both of those sources.
- vadimberman 9y ago
  It's wonderful that there is someone with mind as unclouded by propaganda to enlighten me and improve my limited world view. Did you find any figures or arguments in the original paper that I overlooked? Like, Chinese peasants, German peasants, etc.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    No, I generally agree that we've shifted things around so that most workers now are generally a bit better off than before in many ways. I think they could be better off still under alternative systems. I was however responding, primarily, to your apparent argument that anyone criticising capitalism can only be a Soviet-era state-supporting "communist".

Jaruzel 9y ago

> As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually. Is this true? In the UK, 'standard' holiday entitlement for most jobs starts at 20 days annually, and that doesn't include official days off such as Xmas, New Year, Easter etc.

stevenwoo 9y ago
Yes, this is true for the average American white collar worker at the start of employment, sort of earning fractional vacation hours per hour of work. Service worker - not sure about that - is that the same as zero hours contract employee? Low unemployment has forced companies to start offering paid vacation to employees in fast food restaurants in recent years. Many teachers in public schools famously don't have to work for three months a year, but don't get paid for those three months a year.
refurb 9y ago
It's not true. It's tough to find a job that doesn't offer 2 weeks and most white collar jobs offer 3 weeks (15 days). That doesn't include the typical 13 stat holidays. I have a job in the US that offers 25 paid days of vacation, plus the standard 13.
- notfromhere 9y ago
  counting PTO as vacation is disingenuous. That's all your time off for the year rather than exclusively vacation

booleandilemma 9y ago

And they got to work from home every day, too.

commandlinefan 9y ago

They paid less tax, too.

hn0 9y ago
They paid substantial taxes in grain. They were pretty much considered the private property of their landlord. If they wanted to get married they first had to be allowed so by their lord, and then pay him as compensation for being so nice to them. Then there's debt-servitude, invasions, and all that fun stuff.
JoeAltmaier 9y ago
Until the 1200's, there was pretty much just the Geld in Europe (a land tax). Because the geld was assessed on landowners, it only applied to free men who owned land, and thus serfs and slaves were exempt. Later on the income tax got invented, and was generally 1/10 to the king. I wish I only paid 1/10 to the feds.
- notahacker 9y ago
  Serfs and slaves weren't so much exempt from paying taxes as exempt from earning income, whilst still being obliged to provide labour for other people alongside trying to meet their own subsistence needs.

YTGRK 9y ago

https://youtu.be/I2l8xkjTUh4 https://youtu.be/I2l8xkjTUh4

socratewasright 9y ago

They also died younger and led miserable lives by today's standards. The article claims the american worker gets 8 days of vacation annually. 52*2 > 8 last time I checked. I do believe though that with more automation, workers should be getting more vacation time.

muzani 9y ago

Is this surprising? People in the past had much more time and much less resources. This isn't just medieval workers. It might have applied to the last two generations, before the information age allowed us to check work email first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

megiddo 9y ago

The comparison ignores the blistering daily poverty of a medieval peasant. This is not merely a lack of technology - that would be a historical argument. But even basic amenities that could be easily built in this time period were difficult to come by. Entire villages might have to share a few pieces of furniture, like a stool. These people may have had a lot of "time off", but they spent it in horrible poverty, many months of the year near starvation, even within the context of what was available to them in their own time. I would hazard to say that many modern office workers rarely actually accomplish 40 hours of productive work in a given week. They may be physically present, but how often are they chatting, goofing off, or standing around waiting for an interaction. Modern business is built upon availability, not necessarily toil.

ekianjo 9y ago
> daily poverty of a medieval peasant And death was omnipresent. Most of your kids would die in young age, folks around you were killed by random infections or flu regularly, and there was not much to look forward to in life.

NPMaxwell 9y ago

Conditions in Europe in the 14th century were mostly due to the Black Plague (Black Death), which killed ~50% of the European population. The result was a variety of infrastructure, institutions, and economic systems designed for a much larger population. Used goods and housing were available at very reduced rates. Labor was a scarce commodity. It took a while before Europe regained an economic system that matched its population.

aanxiety 9y ago

The problem with so many of the comments here: Of course you would sacrifice your vacation time to avoid the pains of the middle ages and to gain the advantages of today. But those advantages are not the mere consequence of us working more. They are the consequence of centuries of technological advancement. If we started working as little as medieval peasants our standards of living would not just suddenly drop to their levels but they would stay much higher. We can have our cake and eat it too. And in passing, we would likely save planet earth doing so.

ggg9990 9y ago

I’d rather sit at a desk for 280 days than do backbreaking work in plague-ridden medieval Europe for 150 days.