7 ms·

Life, Work, Death and the Peasant: Family Formation

214 points by Khaine 1y ago

super_deap 1y ago
I sometimes wonder why such essays mostly extrapolate 'western' history to the entire world.
- carlos_rpn 1y ago
  This series at least doesn't, and the author points it out in the first part, as is many other articles, he can't really speak of cultures far removed from what he's specialized in, Roman Republic and Roman Empire, and anything outside of it is more of an overview.
CalRobert 1y ago
Interesting blog.. Is it not strange to see a post with 126 points and zero comment? "in nearly all of these societies everyone got married and was expected to get around to having children because the community required them rather than necessarily because they wanted to." I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world, and nobody ever really _wanted_ to raise kids so much as they just kinda had to (especially if they wanted to have sex)
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  I think occasionally a blog post of his gets a lot of comments, so people generally submit his new blog posts to him, but not every one engenders discussion.
- automatic6131 1y ago
  We have socialized the gains of children (via their adult tax receipt used to pay for benefits and healthcare) but (largely) privatized the costs of children solely onto their parents. In the modern world, if you do not have children, but instead save your income in a retirement fund, you have an even better claim to the labor of the next generation than the childrens' parents through your increased retirement fund. Privatized X matched with socialized anti-X is the classic condition for a moral hazard to emerge.
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    Good point - I also think we have a race to the bottom w.r.t housing. When homes were abundant one income could support a household (ish). Then we added more women to the workforce at the same time NIMBYism took hold and peer competition meant you needed two incomes. Then fewer people had kids and you needed two stressed out incomes without the expense (in time and money) of kids to support one. Hell, the “who’s hiring” thread sometimes has companies talking about massive overtime being expected, hard to raise a kid like that. Perhaps in time we’ll see more polycule formation driven by housing costs… (These are all on average of course, there are still high earners who manage)
    - ponector 1y ago
      Average amount of living space per person in a new house has nearly doubled in just the last 50 years. Price per square foot is pretty much the same as decades before (adjusted for inflation). Isn't it the abundance of housing? >>When homes were abundant one income could support a household Was it the case, though? Could one income support household with 3000sq ft house, big new truck and college for each kid back then?
      - CalRobert 1y ago
        No, but it also is much harder to buy smaller homes (especially townhouses, etc.), and you didn't actually need a vehicle nearly as much as you do now. The NIMBYs I mentioned made it much harder to have a decent ~1200 sqft home where your family needed one (or no) vehicle for their daily life. College is actually another good example- sending more people to college mostly just meant everyone else _also_ needed to go to college in order to compete with their peers for jobs that didn't used to require a degree. We can see this across borders - jobs that require a bachelor's in the US often require a master's in Europe, because too many people in Europe have master's degrees compared to the number of jobs that should actually need one.
        jltsiren 1y ago
        People often have master's degrees in Europe, because master's has been the primary university degree since the middle ages. Bachelor's degrees only started becoming popular in most European countries with the Bologna Process ~20 years ago. And the industry hesitated accepting them for a long time, often considering them little more than glorified dropouts.
- pyrale 1y ago
  > I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world Well, you could ask people in age why they don't get in couple and have children, you could look at studies trying to understand why otherwise comparable countries have different birth rates. Or you could wonder if the uncomfortable truth hidden from us is a fable about individuals' personal character.
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    You could, but asking people what they want instead of looking at what they actually do is pretty unreliable.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - kergonath 1y ago
      Not "Almost everyone involved in the modern birth rate discussion" is a pro-natalist, come on.
    - decimalenough 1y ago
      This is a very US culture war take. Places like Japan and the Scandinavian countries also worry about low birth rates, but (eg) criminalizing abortion is simply not on the table.
      - watwut 1y ago
        Even outside of abortion, a lot of discussion is about wanting women back in the kitchen, dependent on partner. Simultaneously being forced to marry to have resources and simultaneously being unable to leave it things dont work well
        tossandthrow 1y ago
        Again, American. In Scandinavia women are a part of the draft and parental leave is being equalized such that men can leave the workforce as long as women to take care of kids. There is no pressure for women to get kids at all (besides what their mother might say).
- hypertele-Xii 1y ago
  The uncomfortable truth is that people are poisoning themselves into extinction. Births succesfully controlled for.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Mostly because Bret is a good historian and it's going to be difficult for non-specialists to credibly nitpick it. Also it's quite a long read. And he's not got to that question yet: "So this week we’re going to look at marriage patterns, particularly the question of age at first marriage. Then next week, we’re going to turn to the implications those patterns have for child-bearing and child-rearing" But I think you're missing the other aspect of the population pyramid, extremely high child and maternal mortality. It's more that everyone, especially women, was a conscript in the War on Death. And even then people are generally having fewer children than humanly possible, because they're also starvation-constrained. From the article: "We’ll be coming back to some of these points when we talk about fertility next week, but the mortality rate for pre-modern societies is very high, thus necessitating a lot of births, but it is not so high that societies need to approach a maximum ‘natural fertility’ (the birth rate using absolutely no means of birth control) to hit replacement and slow growth. But these are also peasant households with significantly constrained resources. So the question becomes how to restrain fertility to a high, but not maximum level."
  - vintermann 1y ago
    I trust his judgment of the time and places he studies. It's also easy to trust, since it's more or less what I believed already. However, I'm wary about the generalization to pre-modern societies in general. Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs, but also because when I started digging into the church books for my own genealogy, I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected. Maybe not a majority, sure, and maybe not on average (and also, we're way out of both the time and the geography Bret studies). The past is never quite as I imagined.
    - namenotrequired 1y ago
      I agree with you, but a few slight caveats to your point that I think are worth noting. > Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs A lot of anthropological research is done on non-agrarian societies. The author limited himself to peasants here, so that limits some (far from all) of the variation. > I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected The author also limits himself to age at _first_ marriage; I’d expect a lot more variation in age at remarriage. And even if divorce was rare compared to today, death of a spouse was much more common. So you’d expect to see quite some remarriages in the family tree
- noosphr 1y ago
  There is nothing simple you can say about the blog in under 1,000 words other than 'neat'. It's also one of a longer series of blog posts about life at the time so you have a good 45min of reading before you can even start saying anything intelligent about it. Up votes are just a way to tell other people that this is a really good site you should read.
- nottorp 1y ago
  > Is it not strange to see a post with 126 points and zero comment? Can't speak for everyone, but acoup is regularly referred to here. Some people, including me, read it regularly anyway so we don't even click on the HN posts most of the time. I read this particular article Saturday on my morning coffee for example. I didn't upvote it when it got posted on HN, but I've done it before on other acoup articles. Without ever going to the comments. If acoup is new to you, start here: https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/ https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/ It's what made it famous originally. Then it added actual history lessons on top of the media and video game commenting.
- rayiner 1y ago
  > I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world, and nobody ever really _wanted_ to raise kids so much as they just kinda had to (especially if they wanted to have sex) I don't know how "uncomfortable" the truth is. In Islam, there's a principle that getting married (and presumably having kids) is half your religion. People were talking about social frameworks to incentivize marriage and reproduction 1,400 years ago. Maybe some people are uncomfortable with it now. Putting religion aside, there's a biological aspect to this as well. Having children rewires your brain. People who don't have kids yet have little ability to know how they'll feel about it in advance. Talking about what people "want" a priori doesn't really make sense. To use an analogy, I recently visited Napa and really enjoyed it. I had talked myself into the idea I wouldn't like it--too bougie, etc. But of course I liked Napa. Most people like Napa. It's literally famous for being enjoyable. I wasn't special or different, I had just developed intellectual reasons to think I'd dislike something that's more of a brain-stem level experience to begin with.
  - FredPret 1y ago
    This is a good argument. It’s hard to be wise about what one might like or dislike in possible lifestyle choices. But there are some possible enlightening questions for this and other brain-stem-level experiences like marriage and babies: - did millions of years of evolution program my brain stem to like this? - do lots of other people in other places and times do X, and after they’ve done X, do it again? I think our brain stems and simpler functions must be very similar to one another. After all, visual illusions, the smell of bacon, and stories of human drama have similar effects on ~everyone.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    I’m not sure it does require everyone’s brain. I love being a dad (and thought I would before having kids too) but there are a LOT of parents who regret having kids. The strong stigma against admitting regret, especially for moms, means that if anything it’s underreported. And having it be part of a religion’s expectations seems like that suggests for some people at least it’s more duty than desire, does it not?
pyrale 1y ago
The article seems to revolve around defining an archetypal average peasant, which reminded me of [1]. While the article is well-written, I feel like I walk away with very little, given the story's focus on generalities. [1]: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages/article_e3231734-e5da-5bf5-9496-a34e52d60bd9.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...
- kergonath 1y ago
  There is a discussion of the statistical model he’s considering and why it is relevant even if it is imperfect in the first post of the series: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/ https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
- xxs 1y ago
  infamous the air force average strikes again. Yet, I don't know if that pertains to peasantry as they didn't have much of a choice depending where they lived. The article talks about Europe as if it was somewhat homogeneous (and mostly divided west & east)
- potato3732842 1y ago
  The point of this series is to address the subset of his readers/commenters/his followers on twitter who have various flavors of delusions of the past being some utopia of multi-generational housing/family units and that wasn't just the reflection of harsh economic realities. He's already written blogs addressing the extreme on the other end where people assume too much economic freedom and upward mobility like is typical in video games. He's done other blog series in the past that are more specific about specific things. His best work is on ancient military tactics and strategy. Every now and then he does these "baseline knowledge/understanding" series when he gets fed up with a particular group of idiots in his comments. It's like a teacher getting a class and being like "oh, you really are this dumb, I guess I gotta teach prerequisites before we dive in" even if they're not the best person to teach those prerequisites.
  - 1y ago
officehero 1y ago
Can highly recommend Bret Devereaux for those interested in no-bs history on the ancient world. I found him on YT, he speaks well and is a rare break from the enshittification/slop avalanche there.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

214 points by Khaine 1y ago

super_deap 1y ago

I sometimes wonder why such essays mostly extrapolate 'western' history to the entire world.

carlos_rpn 1y ago
This series at least doesn't, and the author points it out in the first part, as is many other articles, he can't really speak of cultures far removed from what he's specialized in, Roman Republic and Roman Empire, and anything outside of it is more of an overview.

CalRobert 1y ago

Interesting blog.. Is it not strange to see a post with 126 points and zero comment? "in nearly all of these societies everyone got married and was expected to get around to having children because the community required them rather than necessarily because they wanted to." I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world, and nobody ever really _wanted_ to raise kids so much as they just kinda had to (especially if they wanted to have sex)

IncreasePosts 1y ago
I think occasionally a blog post of his gets a lot of comments, so people generally submit his new blog posts to him, but not every one engenders discussion.
automatic6131 1y ago
We have socialized the gains of children (via their adult tax receipt used to pay for benefits and healthcare) but (largely) privatized the costs of children solely onto their parents. In the modern world, if you do not have children, but instead save your income in a retirement fund, you have an even better claim to the labor of the next generation than the childrens' parents through your increased retirement fund. Privatized X matched with socialized anti-X is the classic condition for a moral hazard to emerge.
- CalRobert 1y ago
  Good point - I also think we have a race to the bottom w.r.t housing. When homes were abundant one income could support a household (ish). Then we added more women to the workforce at the same time NIMBYism took hold and peer competition meant you needed two incomes. Then fewer people had kids and you needed two stressed out incomes without the expense (in time and money) of kids to support one. Hell, the “who’s hiring” thread sometimes has companies talking about massive overtime being expected, hard to raise a kid like that. Perhaps in time we’ll see more polycule formation driven by housing costs… (These are all on average of course, there are still high earners who manage)
  - ponector 1y ago
    Average amount of living space per person in a new house has nearly doubled in just the last 50 years. Price per square foot is pretty much the same as decades before (adjusted for inflation). Isn't it the abundance of housing? >>When homes were abundant one income could support a household Was it the case, though? Could one income support household with 3000sq ft house, big new truck and college for each kid back then?
    - CalRobert 1y ago
      No, but it also is much harder to buy smaller homes (especially townhouses, etc.), and you didn't actually need a vehicle nearly as much as you do now. The NIMBYs I mentioned made it much harder to have a decent ~1200 sqft home where your family needed one (or no) vehicle for their daily life. College is actually another good example- sending more people to college mostly just meant everyone else _also_ needed to go to college in order to compete with their peers for jobs that didn't used to require a degree. We can see this across borders - jobs that require a bachelor's in the US often require a master's in Europe, because too many people in Europe have master's degrees compared to the number of jobs that should actually need one.
      - jltsiren 1y ago
        People often have master's degrees in Europe, because master's has been the primary university degree since the middle ages. Bachelor's degrees only started becoming popular in most European countries with the Bologna Process ~20 years ago. And the industry hesitated accepting them for a long time, often considering them little more than glorified dropouts.
pyrale 1y ago
> I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world Well, you could ask people in age why they don't get in couple and have children, you could look at studies trying to understand why otherwise comparable countries have different birth rates. Or you could wonder if the uncomfortable truth hidden from us is a fable about individuals' personal character.
- CalRobert 1y ago
  You could, but asking people what they want instead of looking at what they actually do is pretty unreliable.
- pjc50 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - kergonath 1y ago
    Not "Almost everyone involved in the modern birth rate discussion" is a pro-natalist, come on.
  - decimalenough 1y ago
    This is a very US culture war take. Places like Japan and the Scandinavian countries also worry about low birth rates, but (eg) criminalizing abortion is simply not on the table.
    - watwut 1y ago
      Even outside of abortion, a lot of discussion is about wanting women back in the kitchen, dependent on partner. Simultaneously being forced to marry to have resources and simultaneously being unable to leave it things dont work well
      - tossandthrow 1y ago
        Again, American. In Scandinavia women are a part of the draft and parental leave is being equalized such that men can leave the workforce as long as women to take care of kids. There is no pressure for women to get kids at all (besides what their mother might say).
hypertele-Xii 1y ago
The uncomfortable truth is that people are poisoning themselves into extinction. Births succesfully controlled for.
pjc50 1y ago
Mostly because Bret is a good historian and it's going to be difficult for non-specialists to credibly nitpick it. Also it's quite a long read. And he's not got to that question yet: "So this week we’re going to look at marriage patterns, particularly the question of age at first marriage. Then next week, we’re going to turn to the implications those patterns have for child-bearing and child-rearing" But I think you're missing the other aspect of the population pyramid, extremely high child and maternal mortality. It's more that everyone, especially women, was a conscript in the War on Death. And even then people are generally having fewer children than humanly possible, because they're also starvation-constrained. From the article: "We’ll be coming back to some of these points when we talk about fertility next week, but the mortality rate for pre-modern societies is very high, thus necessitating a lot of births, but it is not so high that societies need to approach a maximum ‘natural fertility’ (the birth rate using absolutely no means of birth control) to hit replacement and slow growth. But these are also peasant households with significantly constrained resources. So the question becomes how to restrain fertility to a high, but not maximum level."
- vintermann 1y ago
  I trust his judgment of the time and places he studies. It's also easy to trust, since it's more or less what I believed already. However, I'm wary about the generalization to pre-modern societies in general. Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs, but also because when I started digging into the church books for my own genealogy, I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected. Maybe not a majority, sure, and maybe not on average (and also, we're way out of both the time and the geography Bret studies). The past is never quite as I imagined.
  - namenotrequired 1y ago
    I agree with you, but a few slight caveats to your point that I think are worth noting. > Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs A lot of anthropological research is done on non-agrarian societies. The author limited himself to peasants here, so that limits some (far from all) of the variation. > I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected The author also limits himself to age at _first_ marriage; I’d expect a lot more variation in age at remarriage. And even if divorce was rare compared to today, death of a spouse was much more common. So you’d expect to see quite some remarriages in the family tree
noosphr 1y ago
There is nothing simple you can say about the blog in under 1,000 words other than 'neat'. It's also one of a longer series of blog posts about life at the time so you have a good 45min of reading before you can even start saying anything intelligent about it. Up votes are just a way to tell other people that this is a really good site you should read.
nottorp 1y ago
> Is it not strange to see a post with 126 points and zero comment? Can't speak for everyone, but acoup is regularly referred to here. Some people, including me, read it regularly anyway so we don't even click on the HN posts most of the time. I read this particular article Saturday on my morning coffee for example. I didn't upvote it when it got posted on HN, but I've done it before on other acoup articles. Without ever going to the comments. If acoup is new to you, start here: https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/ https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/ It's what made it famous originally. Then it added actual history lessons on top of the media and video game commenting.
rayiner 1y ago
> I wonder if this is the uncomfortable truth behind low birth rates in the modern world, and nobody ever really _wanted_ to raise kids so much as they just kinda had to (especially if they wanted to have sex) I don't know how "uncomfortable" the truth is. In Islam, there's a principle that getting married (and presumably having kids) is half your religion. People were talking about social frameworks to incentivize marriage and reproduction 1,400 years ago. Maybe some people are uncomfortable with it now. Putting religion aside, there's a biological aspect to this as well. Having children rewires your brain. People who don't have kids yet have little ability to know how they'll feel about it in advance. Talking about what people "want" a priori doesn't really make sense. To use an analogy, I recently visited Napa and really enjoyed it. I had talked myself into the idea I wouldn't like it--too bougie, etc. But of course I liked Napa. Most people like Napa. It's literally famous for being enjoyable. I wasn't special or different, I had just developed intellectual reasons to think I'd dislike something that's more of a brain-stem level experience to begin with.
- FredPret 1y ago
  This is a good argument. It’s hard to be wise about what one might like or dislike in possible lifestyle choices. But there are some possible enlightening questions for this and other brain-stem-level experiences like marriage and babies: - did millions of years of evolution program my brain stem to like this? - do lots of other people in other places and times do X, and after they’ve done X, do it again? I think our brain stems and simpler functions must be very similar to one another. After all, visual illusions, the smell of bacon, and stories of human drama have similar effects on ~everyone.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- CalRobert 1y ago
  I’m not sure it does require everyone’s brain. I love being a dad (and thought I would before having kids too) but there are a LOT of parents who regret having kids. The strong stigma against admitting regret, especially for moms, means that if anything it’s underreported. And having it be part of a religion’s expectations seems like that suggests for some people at least it’s more duty than desire, does it not?

pyrale 1y ago

The article seems to revolve around defining an archetypal average peasant, which reminded me of [1]. While the article is well-written, I feel like I walk away with very little, given the story's focus on generalities. [1]: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages/article_e3231734-e5da-5bf5-9496-a34e52d60bd9.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/when-u-s-air-force-disc...

kergonath 1y ago
There is a discussion of the statistical model he’s considering and why it is relevant even if it is imperfect in the first post of the series: https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/ https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
xxs 1y ago
infamous the air force average strikes again. Yet, I don't know if that pertains to peasantry as they didn't have much of a choice depending where they lived. The article talks about Europe as if it was somewhat homogeneous (and mostly divided west & east)
potato3732842 1y ago
The point of this series is to address the subset of his readers/commenters/his followers on twitter who have various flavors of delusions of the past being some utopia of multi-generational housing/family units and that wasn't just the reflection of harsh economic realities. He's already written blogs addressing the extreme on the other end where people assume too much economic freedom and upward mobility like is typical in video games. He's done other blog series in the past that are more specific about specific things. His best work is on ancient military tactics and strategy. Every now and then he does these "baseline knowledge/understanding" series when he gets fed up with a particular group of idiots in his comments. It's like a teacher getting a class and being like "oh, you really are this dumb, I guess I gotta teach prerequisites before we dive in" even if they're not the best person to teach those prerequisites.
- 1y ago

officehero 1y ago

Can highly recommend Bret Devereaux for those interested in no-bs history on the ancient world. I found him on YT, he speaks well and is a rare break from the enshittification/slop avalanche there.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]