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> Working a 8/9-5/6 job is historically an aberration Very much so. It used to be from dawn until dusk. When hours were first instituted, it was always compa

> Working a 8/9-5/6 job is historically an aberration Very much so. It used to be from dawn until dusk. When hours were first instituted, it was always compared to farm work, since that was understood to be the hardest work possible. EDIT: I see there's a lot of academicians with opinions. Anyone here grow up on a farm? Would you like to tell us about how easy the work is?

_delirium 15y ago
There's considerable variation in estimates, but most historians don't consider dawn-to-dusk to have been typical agrarian working hours, apart from peak weeks at planting and harvest. Data is really spotty, though, and before formalized hourly employment, it's not even really clear that people distinguished systematically between "working hours" and "leisure hours", so reconstructing it is difficult. To take one minor example, is "knitting by the fire while chatting with a neighbor" 100% work, 50% work, or something else? Perhaps it depends on whether it was a relaxed, half-working, half-chatting sort of knitting, or more industrious, but can we plausibly estimate how much of each was done in the 19th century? Even the distribution of how much of their day people typically took off for meals isn't well established (though it probably also varied by season).
- scarmig 15y ago
  Work wasn't considered something apart from social life. Basically, if something needed to be done, you did it. Things weren't nearly as compartmentalized as they are now. Agricultural lifestyles mean that life and work are much more integrated than they are now, because they had to be. Which has pros and cons: people lived much more on the brink of survival, but a local area was also more self-sufficient. The trade we've made is to take risk of dying from starvation during a bad year where we are not self-sufficient enough for risks related to specialization, meaning we now have the equally uncontrollable risk of being screwed by a NYC financier or a DC bureaucrat. It's also important to distinguish between different cultures and different time periods. A peasant in 15th century England lived a very different lifestyle than a peasant in 2nd century China. Edited to clarify.
  - true_religion 15y ago
    How is compartmentalizing work from home life related to "uncontrollable risks of being screwed by a NYC financier or a DC bureaucrat"? I'm not following.
    - astine 15y ago
      If you're self sufficient, it doesn't matter how the economy is doing.
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  > but most historians don't consider dawn-to-dusk to have been typical agrarian working hours Probably because they've never worked on a farm.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Ah, I didn't realize we were having an intellectual discussion at that level here. Your counter-argument to historical research is essentially, "fuck them ivory tower mothafuckas, I've got anecdotes"?
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
  - scarmig 15y ago
    How true is this? Are you asserting that no historian or anthropologist has ever worked on a farm? Or are you arguing that no living historian or anthropologist has ever been a pre-20th century peasant?
ahoyhere 15y ago
I've read a lot about the history of the work, and what you say isn't described by any of the historians -- until the advent of the industrial revolution, that is. The time spent by hunter-gatherers is the least of all. Agrarian times -- when everybody farmed their own -- were more demanding but not all of the time for sure as the other commenter has pointed out. During times when people were required to work for an "employer" (e.g. landowner) for rent, and then subsist on the time left, yes, they worked hard, but that is not unlike what we have today (just much more extreme). As Clay Shirky describes in Here Comes Everybody, and you'll find in many other books as well, many skilled people would choose only to work as much as they had to get by, and spend the rest of their time in leisure or drunk.
- baddox 15y ago
  I suspect that hunter-gatherers did "worse" on other metrics like quality and duration of life. Obviously, no metric is somehow objectively better than another, but many people will argue that working harder is worth it if you live longer and healthier (i.e. you rarely or never have to truly worry about having enough food to survive). Clearly some (most) hunter-gatherers found that organized food production was a better alternative, since they were obviously the ones that became farmers.
  - scarmig 15y ago
    It's complicated, but hunter gatherers typically lived longer than the first agriculturists. Infant mortality was the really brutal thing there--most people who made it to 15 would have a pretty long lifespan, comparable to what we. (Infant mortality was also very bad among the agriculturists, while they did not do as well in the years after 15.) Beyond that, it wasn't a one way street--people regularly transitioned from farmer to hunter gatherer. Neither was a particularly hellish existence, except in times of plague, famine, or war (all of which hunter gatherers usually could avoid more easily, through lower population density and less demand on natural resources). The hard evidence, as far as it exists, suggests that the typical hunter gatherer was, if anything, actually better off than the typical farmer. And for ages it was a constant back and forth. Where farming civilizations massively surpassed hunter gatherers was in the creation of the State and its associated violence-producing and self-perpetuating capabilities. Quantity (of people, of swords, of food) has a quality all its own. See Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake of the Human Race" for an interesting perspective. http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
scarmig 15y ago
"academicians with opinions"? Really? Have we reverted to name calling? Few people here have grown up on a farm. But even if you have, it's not representative of what historians and anthropologists study when they study peasant societies. Agriculture is thoroughly embedded in the market nowadays. You can't compare the experience of a struggling family farmer in Iowa, under siege by corporate interests and the demands of the market, with the experiences of the average pre-industrial peasant. A businessman running a gas station in Dallas has more in common with the Iowa farmer than the pre-industrial peasant does. There are very few places in the world nowadays that are comparable to even the recent (several centuries) past. There is, however, a lot of evidence about how people lived back in the day. Enough evidence, actually, that tens of thousands of people study it.
georgieporgie 15y ago
Anyone here grow up on a farm? I grew up in a very agricultural area, and many of my young friends' families owned farms. You really can't make any kind of comparison between modern farming versus old-timey farming. For example, you can now ride in an air-conditioned combine harvester where you can't chat with your friends, but you're not out in sweltering heat. You can clear vastly many more acres, but is it more or less 'work'? Also, the amount of work would seem to vary tremendously based on season. I think it's more interesting to look at pre-industrialized, non-agrarian life. Like, a shoemaker in a city. According to a historian on a Planet Money podcast, you might go a couple of days without doing any meaningful work. Just sort of hanging around the shop, going to chat with friends, and so on. Then, someone would have a need for boots. So, you measure them up, get to work, and a couple of days later you hand them their custom boots. The guy's claim was that these sorts of jobs involved quite a lot of just waiting around for your next customer/project.

_delirium 15y ago

There's considerable variation in estimates, but most historians don't consider dawn-to-dusk to have been typical agrarian working hours, apart from peak weeks at planting and harvest. Data is really spotty, though, and before formalized hourly employment, it's not even really clear that people distinguished systematically between "working hours" and "leisure hours", so reconstructing it is difficult. To take one minor example, is "knitting by the fire while chatting with a neighbor" 100% work, 50% work, or something else? Perhaps it depends on whether it was a relaxed, half-working, half-chatting sort of knitting, or more industrious, but can we plausibly estimate how much of each was done in the 19th century? Even the distribution of how much of their day people typically took off for meals isn't well established (though it probably also varied by season).

scarmig 15y ago
Work wasn't considered something apart from social life. Basically, if something needed to be done, you did it. Things weren't nearly as compartmentalized as they are now. Agricultural lifestyles mean that life and work are much more integrated than they are now, because they had to be. Which has pros and cons: people lived much more on the brink of survival, but a local area was also more self-sufficient. The trade we've made is to take risk of dying from starvation during a bad year where we are not self-sufficient enough for risks related to specialization, meaning we now have the equally uncontrollable risk of being screwed by a NYC financier or a DC bureaucrat. It's also important to distinguish between different cultures and different time periods. A peasant in 15th century England lived a very different lifestyle than a peasant in 2nd century China. Edited to clarify.
- true_religion 15y ago
  How is compartmentalizing work from home life related to "uncontrollable risks of being screwed by a NYC financier or a DC bureaucrat"? I'm not following.
  - astine 15y ago
    If you're self sufficient, it doesn't matter how the economy is doing.
jpdoctor 15y ago
> but most historians don't consider dawn-to-dusk to have been typical agrarian working hours Probably because they've never worked on a farm.
- _delirium 15y ago
  Ah, I didn't realize we were having an intellectual discussion at that level here. Your counter-argument to historical research is essentially, "fuck them ivory tower mothafuckas, I've got anecdotes"?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- scarmig 15y ago
  How true is this? Are you asserting that no historian or anthropologist has ever worked on a farm? Or are you arguing that no living historian or anthropologist has ever been a pre-20th century peasant?

ahoyhere 15y ago

I've read a lot about the history of the work, and what you say isn't described by any of the historians -- until the advent of the industrial revolution, that is. The time spent by hunter-gatherers is the least of all. Agrarian times -- when everybody farmed their own -- were more demanding but not all of the time for sure as the other commenter has pointed out. During times when people were required to work for an "employer" (e.g. landowner) for rent, and then subsist on the time left, yes, they worked hard, but that is not unlike what we have today (just much more extreme). As Clay Shirky describes in Here Comes Everybody, and you'll find in many other books as well, many skilled people would choose only to work as much as they had to get by, and spend the rest of their time in leisure or drunk.

baddox 15y ago
I suspect that hunter-gatherers did "worse" on other metrics like quality and duration of life. Obviously, no metric is somehow objectively better than another, but many people will argue that working harder is worth it if you live longer and healthier (i.e. you rarely or never have to truly worry about having enough food to survive). Clearly some (most) hunter-gatherers found that organized food production was a better alternative, since they were obviously the ones that became farmers.
- scarmig 15y ago
  It's complicated, but hunter gatherers typically lived longer than the first agriculturists. Infant mortality was the really brutal thing there--most people who made it to 15 would have a pretty long lifespan, comparable to what we. (Infant mortality was also very bad among the agriculturists, while they did not do as well in the years after 15.) Beyond that, it wasn't a one way street--people regularly transitioned from farmer to hunter gatherer. Neither was a particularly hellish existence, except in times of plague, famine, or war (all of which hunter gatherers usually could avoid more easily, through lower population density and less demand on natural resources). The hard evidence, as far as it exists, suggests that the typical hunter gatherer was, if anything, actually better off than the typical farmer. And for ages it was a constant back and forth. Where farming civilizations massively surpassed hunter gatherers was in the creation of the State and its associated violence-producing and self-perpetuating capabilities. Quantity (of people, of swords, of food) has a quality all its own. See Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake of the Human Race" for an interesting perspective. http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

scarmig 15y ago

"academicians with opinions"? Really? Have we reverted to name calling? Few people here have grown up on a farm. But even if you have, it's not representative of what historians and anthropologists study when they study peasant societies. Agriculture is thoroughly embedded in the market nowadays. You can't compare the experience of a struggling family farmer in Iowa, under siege by corporate interests and the demands of the market, with the experiences of the average pre-industrial peasant. A businessman running a gas station in Dallas has more in common with the Iowa farmer than the pre-industrial peasant does. There are very few places in the world nowadays that are comparable to even the recent (several centuries) past. There is, however, a lot of evidence about how people lived back in the day. Enough evidence, actually, that tens of thousands of people study it.

georgieporgie 15y ago

Anyone here grow up on a farm? I grew up in a very agricultural area, and many of my young friends' families owned farms. You really can't make any kind of comparison between modern farming versus old-timey farming. For example, you can now ride in an air-conditioned combine harvester where you can't chat with your friends, but you're not out in sweltering heat. You can clear vastly many more acres, but is it more or less 'work'? Also, the amount of work would seem to vary tremendously based on season. I think it's more interesting to look at pre-industrialized, non-agrarian life. Like, a shoemaker in a city. According to a historian on a Planet Money podcast, you might go a couple of days without doing any meaningful work. Just sort of hanging around the shop, going to chat with friends, and so on. Then, someone would have a need for boots. So, you measure them up, get to work, and a couple of days later you hand them their custom boots. The guy's claim was that these sorts of jobs involved quite a lot of just waiting around for your next customer/project.