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> 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 i

> 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.

atoav 7y ago
All of what you said is why poverty is usally seen as a relative value — it is relative to the perceived average of the wealth of the society you live in. A society that continuosly sustains high degrees of poverty under that definition, usually needs a narrative for why the poor people deserve to be poor and why the rich people deserve to be rich. Centuries ago (depending on the place) this might have been still been religion: you have been born into a poor life and those in the lead have been born as leaders and there is nothing you can/ought to do about it. Today individualism takes that function: you are responsible for beeing poor, even if you have been born into it. But you can become a billionaire if you want — it is just very hard. This means also those who are billionaires must have worked very very hard and so deserve their wealth. Rich people usually inherit their wealth tho, which makes a fool of the whole narrative and suggests who profits from it. Beeing poor means to struggle to make ends meet every day and despite optimization efforts fail to do exactly that every now and then. You can have a hundred times the absolute wealth of someone in a different society and still be poorer than them in that you struggle for survival, while they do okay for the society thwy are in.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  > This means also those who are billionaires must have worked very very hard and so deserve their wealth. This is called the 'just world hypothesis' and is behind may of our victim blaming impulses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
- manfredo 7y ago
  > Beeing poor means to struggle to make ends meet every day and despite optimization efforts fail to do exactly that every now and then. You can have a hundred times the absolute wealth of someone in a different society and still be poorer than them in that you struggle for survival, while they do okay for the society thwy are in. This doesn't seem right to me. Would you rather live as a middle class person, say 50th percentile in terms of wealth, in medieval Europe (which, despite being middle class still means 50% child mortality, little or no education, no effective medicine, etc.) Or a lower class person today - say 20th percentile by wealth. The latter is making $18,000 a year which will be tough to get by. But I'd still take that over any sort of pre-industrial life without hesitation.
chewz 7y ago
> 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. You are projecting the circumstances of Northern Europe. But this is a tough place to get by. So is Northern China etc. On the other end of the spectrum on some islands in Indonesia people need no more then 7 days of work per year to put a food on a table (from sago palm). Naturaly people would rather live where resources are abundant and living is easy.
- manfredo 7y ago
  Poverty in Indonesia has been decreasing with less than 10% falling below the international poverty line (which is the minimum amount needed to get food and shelter)[1]. Using them as a poster child of impoverishment seems to draw more on stereotype rather than fact. And again, the baseline needs to be compared against pre-industrial circumstances: do you really think that the average Indonesian wants to turn back th clock to pre-industrial Indonesia? That would be disastrous, the islands likely could not even support its current population levels without industrialization. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Indonesia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Indonesia
  - chewz 7y ago
    You missed my point. I have lived in Indonesia and traveled there a lot. The example is from book by Elisabeth Pisani [1]. My whole point is that you can still find places where living in preindustrial capitalism is fairly easy due to abundance of Nature. There were many more places like this ages ago maybe not like this particular example but without much hardship. Mediterraneans comes to mind. Thats it. http://indonesiaetc.com/ http://indonesiaetc.com/
    - manfredo 7y ago
      > My whole point is that you can still find places where living in preindustrial capitalism is fairly easy due to abundance of Nature. Any my point is, no you can't. No preindustrial society lives "fairly easy", at least not unless you have a very different conception of "fairly easy" living. Even in the pre-industrial Mediterranean, people lived on near-starvation diets and routinely died of easily treatable illnesses. Average adult male height was bewteen 5'2" and 5'4" in the ancient Mediterranean, based on skeletal evidence. Child mortality was in the 50% range. Most women had no opportunities besides child-rearing and domestic work. No amount of natural abundance can replace antibiotics and industrialized goods like contraceptives, communication, medicine, etc. If you have the conception that living off the abundance of Nature is at all easy, I highly suggest you dig deeper into this subject. During the 1960s to around the 1980s this idea that the state of nature is idyllic was popular. But as data on the lives of pre-industrial and pre-agricultural societies became more available all but the most ardent supporters of naturalistic idealism arrived at the conclusion that pre-industrial society is a lot worse than life in an industrialized society. Violence, and inability to provide for basic necessities is drastically lower in industrialized societies than it was in preindustrial societies.
wickedsickeune 7y ago
Who said that we have to trade current life for pre-industrial? Learning from the advantages of pre-industrial life and applying them now, is the point of the article, not regression.
- _7kf0 7y ago
  Seriously. How about our (humanity's) project becomes: make our modern lives the best easiest most awesome imaginable?
- manfredo 7y ago
  The author did, when she wrote that it is a myth that capitalism did not reduced human toll. Using number of days spent working per year in a pre-industrial society and comparing it with a modern work week is incredibly naive. The increase in human "toll" caused by this increase in work is drastically offset by the benefits that this work produces: all the amenities we take for granted living in a post-industrial society.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Hell even during WWII, less than 100 years ago, people were smaller. The draft board rejected a tremendous number for stunted growth etc. That's why we have the 'free lunch program' at public schools today - to ensure a good supply of citizens with good nutrition for military service!

atoav 7y ago

All of what you said is why poverty is usally seen as a relative value — it is relative to the perceived average of the wealth of the society you live in. A society that continuosly sustains high degrees of poverty under that definition, usually needs a narrative for why the poor people deserve to be poor and why the rich people deserve to be rich. Centuries ago (depending on the place) this might have been still been religion: you have been born into a poor life and those in the lead have been born as leaders and there is nothing you can/ought to do about it. Today individualism takes that function: you are responsible for beeing poor, even if you have been born into it. But you can become a billionaire if you want — it is just very hard. This means also those who are billionaires must have worked very very hard and so deserve their wealth. Rich people usually inherit their wealth tho, which makes a fool of the whole narrative and suggests who profits from it. Beeing poor means to struggle to make ends meet every day and despite optimization efforts fail to do exactly that every now and then. You can have a hundred times the absolute wealth of someone in a different society and still be poorer than them in that you struggle for survival, while they do okay for the society thwy are in.

gerbilly 7y ago
> This means also those who are billionaires must have worked very very hard and so deserve their wealth. This is called the 'just world hypothesis' and is behind may of our victim blaming impulses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
manfredo 7y ago
> Beeing poor means to struggle to make ends meet every day and despite optimization efforts fail to do exactly that every now and then. You can have a hundred times the absolute wealth of someone in a different society and still be poorer than them in that you struggle for survival, while they do okay for the society thwy are in. This doesn't seem right to me. Would you rather live as a middle class person, say 50th percentile in terms of wealth, in medieval Europe (which, despite being middle class still means 50% child mortality, little or no education, no effective medicine, etc.) Or a lower class person today - say 20th percentile by wealth. The latter is making $18,000 a year which will be tough to get by. But I'd still take that over any sort of pre-industrial life without hesitation.

chewz 7y ago

> 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. You are projecting the circumstances of Northern Europe. But this is a tough place to get by. So is Northern China etc. On the other end of the spectrum on some islands in Indonesia people need no more then 7 days of work per year to put a food on a table (from sago palm). Naturaly people would rather live where resources are abundant and living is easy.

manfredo 7y ago
Poverty in Indonesia has been decreasing with less than 10% falling below the international poverty line (which is the minimum amount needed to get food and shelter)[1]. Using them as a poster child of impoverishment seems to draw more on stereotype rather than fact. And again, the baseline needs to be compared against pre-industrial circumstances: do you really think that the average Indonesian wants to turn back th clock to pre-industrial Indonesia? That would be disastrous, the islands likely could not even support its current population levels without industrialization. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Indonesia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Indonesia
- chewz 7y ago
  You missed my point. I have lived in Indonesia and traveled there a lot. The example is from book by Elisabeth Pisani [1]. My whole point is that you can still find places where living in preindustrial capitalism is fairly easy due to abundance of Nature. There were many more places like this ages ago maybe not like this particular example but without much hardship. Mediterraneans comes to mind. Thats it. http://indonesiaetc.com/ http://indonesiaetc.com/
  - manfredo 7y ago
    > My whole point is that you can still find places where living in preindustrial capitalism is fairly easy due to abundance of Nature. Any my point is, no you can't. No preindustrial society lives "fairly easy", at least not unless you have a very different conception of "fairly easy" living. Even in the pre-industrial Mediterranean, people lived on near-starvation diets and routinely died of easily treatable illnesses. Average adult male height was bewteen 5'2" and 5'4" in the ancient Mediterranean, based on skeletal evidence. Child mortality was in the 50% range. Most women had no opportunities besides child-rearing and domestic work. No amount of natural abundance can replace antibiotics and industrialized goods like contraceptives, communication, medicine, etc. If you have the conception that living off the abundance of Nature is at all easy, I highly suggest you dig deeper into this subject. During the 1960s to around the 1980s this idea that the state of nature is idyllic was popular. But as data on the lives of pre-industrial and pre-agricultural societies became more available all but the most ardent supporters of naturalistic idealism arrived at the conclusion that pre-industrial society is a lot worse than life in an industrialized society. Violence, and inability to provide for basic necessities is drastically lower in industrialized societies than it was in preindustrial societies.

wickedsickeune 7y ago

Who said that we have to trade current life for pre-industrial? Learning from the advantages of pre-industrial life and applying them now, is the point of the article, not regression.

_7kf0 7y ago
Seriously. How about our (humanity's) project becomes: make our modern lives the best easiest most awesome imaginable?
manfredo 7y ago
The author did, when she wrote that it is a myth that capitalism did not reduced human toll. Using number of days spent working per year in a pre-industrial society and comparing it with a modern work week is incredibly naive. The increase in human "toll" caused by this increase in work is drastically offset by the benefits that this work produces: all the amenities we take for granted living in a post-industrial society.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

Hell even during WWII, less than 100 years ago, people were smaller. The draft board rejected a tremendous number for stunted growth etc. That's why we have the 'free lunch program' at public schools today - to ensure a good supply of citizens with good nutrition for military service!