The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification.
This explains the system of values that revolve around it, such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time.
The servant was not expected to leave its master, that was not OK.
Or that you are expected to be available at all times, even though the contract only mentions 40h, and that is perfectly OK and even interiorized as acceptable by most people, which will even go to the extent of defending that state of affairs.
What I see in the workforce is a desperate need for people to continuously prove the need for their own role, as automation and informatization eat away more an more jobs.
It's a game of face time, who sends most emails past midnight, and who is willing to sell more of their personal life and squeeze other people out of theirs, often to do "important" tasks that are often completely unnecessary.
I had a couple of jobs where I was working overtime, running for deadlines all the time, sending emails left an right, meetings, you name it. One day I had enough and I left, and to my surprise, I was never replaced :-)
> such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time.
Your entire post is overgeneralization and dramatizing to prove some poorly thought out hypothesis but this here is the most obvious example. When there is enough choice people change jobs all the time - the demand in my local dev market went through the roof last couple of years for multiple reasons - I see people change 2 jobs within a year, demand all sorts of things - last round of job interviews I did the interviewers spent double the time explaining why their company was a great fit for me instead of actually interviewing me for position - compared to the usual narrative of asking why I fit them.
The situation is pretty much dictated by supply/demand and both sides take advantage. Firing and quitting can have negative implications for both sides, just depends on scenario.
What's your supply and demand explanation for the following norms?
- It's considered professional for employees give their employers two weeks notice before leaving. It's considered completely reasonable for employers to terminate employees and not even pay them for the rest of the day.
- It's considered unprofessional to talk about what you're getting paid.
- It's considered normal for potential employers to do background checks, call references, and even run credit checks on potential employees. Ask a potential employer for references or any information on their financials, and that's weird. The latter is particularly strange, because the employer is paying the employee, so the employee has a much larger interest in making sure the employer can pay them.
Termination without notice or payment is definitely considered bad form, short of the company closing due to bankruptcy.
I have never worked anywhere that did not provide notice or some severance. Even at a startup that cut 50% prior to going down in flames, they paid those half that were released two weeks pay and two weeks insurance coverage. (even though they were asked to leave immediately)
Large corporations tend to offer minimums plus based on years of service at termination.
Even termination with cause (performance, not legal) will generally be after a half year of 'remediation' training, then plenty of notice to find a new job.
Are you US-based? Because severence packages are absolutely an exception, rather than the norm. Most of the US has "at-will" employment, which states that employers can terminate employees at will, for any reason, without warning. And companies take advantage of this all the time.
The other thing is that you seem to be speaking as a developer. Everyone knows that our industry treats employees better than average. You really need to look at the broader landscape though.
"Most of the US has "at-will" employment, which states that employers can terminate employees at will, for any reason, without warning"
I think this is a misleading (although frequently stated) comment.
Large companies I've worked for have a bureaucratic procedure before they fire anyone, and generally allow people to save face even when they really want you gone.
Technically it's "at will", but I think it's primarily the mom & pop businesses that are going to fire on a whim.
Furthermore, you are implying that there are no constraints on companies in the US, like for instance the WARN act.
"primarily the mom & pop businesses that are going to fire on a whim"
Talk to some people in the hospital business who are over 50. I have a friend who worked for a huge hospital, was good at her job, had been doing it for many decades. One day an HR person called her into the office, said she needed to take a test, and said she had to leave that day until she took the test, administered by some 3rd party. A younger worker, doing the same job, also didn't have this credential they invented, but she got to stay. She wasn't making as much money because she hadn't been there as long.
My friend had a couple of weeks to study for this test, which was about the physics of the machine she had been using for 30 years. She failed the 1st time, they wouldn't tell her her score, and wouldn't tell her what she got right or wrong. The test itself was ridiculous: how many of us could explain in detail the physics of how our hard drive works? She was given a small severance and told to sign papers that I'm guessing gave up her rights to sue. And besides, it's well known in my area that suing a hospital is a fool's errand. The local lawyers do so much business with hospitals that they won't even take cases against them.
If you tell someone "your job ends today, but we'll give you a month's pay if you sign these papers", many people have no choice but to sign: they can't afford to have zero income starting today.
A quick search suggests that "many" firms pay severance, but I couldn't find hard numbers. In my experience it's not that unusual for people to give no notice or less than 2 weeks notice when they leave blue collar jobs like restaurant work.
Sure, but that goes back to the point that supply and demand are driving these sort of concessions by employers. Devs are in high demand and low supply, so the concessions are much higher than say, a retail job. I would say severance is common in "professional" roles, whether that be an accountant or middle manager. It's certainly less common in blue collar work and lower skill work. Despite the existence of at-will employment in some states, many companies in these states still choose not to fire indiscriminately. I think that it's smart business practice to offer severance, because companies are reviewed these days on sites like Glassdoor. A company with a bad reputation for treating employees is going to have a hard time attracting talent.
The couple times I've been laid off, the severance was dependent on signing over new legal requirements like new non solicits for who they didn't lay off.
My explanation is you are just wrong about all of those things. A firm that let people go without severance would be considered extremely unprofessional in professional contexts. Talking about how much you get paid is not only normal it’s protected by law and you should definitely be doing both legal and financial research on any perspective employers.
> A firm that let people go without severance would be considered extremely unprofessional in professional contexts.
Not everyone works at "firms": this is extremely common in food service, for example.
> Talking about how much you get paid is not only normal it’s protected by law
Citation? I've worked at least one place where it was explicitly against the rules to share what you were paid with your coworkers (although this was years ago--I'd be happy to hear if the situation has changed).
> you should definitely be doing both legal and financial research on any perspective employers.
Obviously, but you simply don't have the same tools to do that. Have you tried asking employers for references?
It is not a norm for non-professionals to provide 2 weeks notice. Leaving a good service job without providing notice will have no ramifications on your food service worker reputation.
I routinely ask my perspective boss for references. I also routinely ask for financial data before accepting a job. It has never caused even an eyebrow to be raised.
"Nope." is cute and shows you're cocksure about that. However, the reality is that this happens all the time and is never punished by culture as "unprofessional" for a corporation to do. Who would punish them? The customers?
Future potential employees. If I go on glassdoor and read about this happening I'm either going to
A: raise my rates as I need to keep a larger emergency fund to deal with these guys
B: decline to work there at all
They end up only ever getting entry level kids to work for them. The system sort of works in that regard if you come from a non-traditional background you can work for a year or two at a job like that, skill up and move on.
There have been many threads on HN where the debate is "Do employees have enough power to [punish companies] if they need" but none of them have really every made a coherent case one way or the other, but they seem to lean "no"
Disclaim: My personal Anecdote^
Most of your points feel out of date and just not true unless you're working in the boonies ie backwater areas with only 1-2 dominant employers
> It's considered unprofessional to talk about what you're getting paid.
This is no longer the case. Some companies have even taken the transparent route where everyone's salary is publicly available.
> Ask a potential employer for references or any information on their financials, and that's weird
You can work for a publicly traded company if you really want access to financial data. Even some startups will provide it if you just ask.
You can also glean insight through sites like Glass Door. They have existed well over a decade now. This issue mainly stems from employees not habitually doing enough due diligence on companies, unless there are legal and financial barriers that I missed.
>What's your supply and demand explanation for the following norms?
OK. You can't just assert things and then when someone disagrees challenge them to come up with their own explanation. The null hypothesis is "I don't know".
>If that hypothesis is true, then they can use that hypothesis to explain the existent phenomena
Why would that be the case? It is true that supply/demand largely explains what happens in the job market. It is also true that there are are socio/political/cultural forces at play. For example, supply and demand is not a good explanation for why you can't come into most work environments in your undergarments.
> For example, supply and demand is not a good explanation for why you can't come into most work environments in your undergarments.
Sure, when we get to ridiculous cases. But things just short of that, supply/demand is a huge contributor to. Showing up to work in shorts and flip flops? How acceptable this is depends a lot upon how hot the job market is.
Of course, no matter how hot the demand situation is-- it is never going to cause one to tolerate behavior so egregious that it scares away other employees and makes the supply picture worse.
Showing up to work in shorts and flip flops? How acceptable this is depends a lot upon how hot the job market is.
That's really more of a cultural question, though, where the culture obviously takes the kind of job into account. Specifically, showing up to a programmer job in shorts and flip flops is going to remain accepted in most places even when the job market gets less hot, until culture changes for some unrelated reason.
The supply-demand situation is only relevant when people are going against the culture.
I was disagreeing with the one-sided claim, "The situation is pretty much dictated by supply/demand and both sides take advantage."
But you said something more balanced which I agree with: "It is true that supply/demand largely explains what happens in the job market. It is also true that there are are socio/political/cultural forces at play."
What proportion of the total jobs market [in your country || in your supply chains] are you looking at though.
The parent might be a generalisation but you're objecting based on the thinnest sliver of contrary occupations. Seems like the parent could well be on the money for all menial roles?
The whole thing is much better explained through supply demand and security. When job supply is low you want to maintain a close relationship with your employer because you hope this grants job security. When the demand outpaces supply suddenly people are forced to bid up wages - I agree that the culture might need time to catch up - like initially the risk averse will still be stuck in this mode and few will change jobs, but as the demand ramps up the terms get better and switch job becomes much more common - culture changes and even the most cautious cannot ignore the market trends - I've seen this first hand in my local market over the last few years where the salaries went up 2x in 3 years.
How medival servitude explains any of this better is beyond me.
Have a look a low wage/low skill jobs. There is no such thing as security, employees are subject to their employer's benevolence. They even have to accept circumstances that might violate laws. They can't fight it because they need the job, even if they hate it.
I'm too busy to do the research for you, but Amazon warehouse workers are the first examples that come to my mind.
It’s the opposite. Low wage workers leave much more often than get fired. Consider Uber where drivers earn a very low net wage. Only 4% remain after a year. Maybe some are fired but I suspect he overwhelming majority just move on.
Amazon has the highest turnover of any Fortune 500 company in 2013. That’s because their workers quit. They have options even at a low wage. That’s why they recently raised wages.
If it's like when I worked menial jobs then the bosses just do something to make you quit like scheduling you for only 1 hour a week, assign you to only do the shit work that was previously spread out, etc. I think that muddies the water a bit in terms of those stats
Why should they? They're typically underpaid and in not so great conditions, but even if they aren't, why should they feel shape for quitting for a better job? If you fulfill your contractual obligations, you don't owe your employer anything and leaving any job for a better one is totally not something to be ashamed about. If anything, shame on the employer for doing a bad job in retaining their employees.
Yes and how do they find a better job without education? You are very fortunate that you were able leave that behind you. But do you realize there are millions of people in this world who have no means of pulling themselves out of the dirt?
Let me be sarcastic: Yes, it is very easy to have sufficiently fast internet (or even a computer) in a non-industrialized country. Even in the US it is perfectly viable to work 2-3 low wage jobs to keep your family fed and healthy and then bring up the energy to do a hacking boot camp. Also, because the basic education is so great in under developed regions regions, it is a breeze to grasp higher concepts of math. And analphabetism does not exist.
It wasn’t easy or fair in preindustrial times. People worked a few hours less on average, but they received less wealth in exchange and had no opportunity to educate themselves and grow wealth. Serfs were not given a choice of job or even the ability to leave or marry without their lord’s permission. Peasants were stuck for life, unlike someone who works low paid 2-3 jobs today.
I've never heard about anyone being ashamed of leaving a company in any market. Even ones that have small demand. In fact, I've heard countless people saying that they never quit interviewing entirely.
Ever done manual labor? Or something that requires both intense manual labor and intellectual problem solving, like carpentry or many of the building trades?
Or think about all the various fields that require intense intellectual output, with nothing like the rewards and security of software engineering.
We've got it good. Though, really, the ideal would be for all workers to be treated more like we are, and less like replaceable, abusable cogs in a machine.
Agree. Ever have to stand waist deep in cow shit? I have. One of the things that encouraged me to go back to college. After the farm job I twisted wrenches for a living. Six day fifty hour weeks were the norm, the pay was meh, and I had over $8K of my own money invested in tools at the end.
Yes, this career has been awesome. Awesome, and fun. Non-stop learning the entire time.
Yes - I have. I worked construction; worked on a loading dock; drove a delivery truck for bulk freight. Not having to do manual labor doesn't make a job 'easy' though. And certainly not the 'easiest'
Yes. Being a software developer is easy. It's not necessarily the case, but I can think of no other trade that pays so well and offers so many opportunities for so little ability, effort, accountability, responsibility and stress.
Where do you work? I'm in operations and spent 10pm-3am last night responding to an incident. There's a lady here going bald in her early 30s. Stress is high, responsibility is high, accountability is high, effort is high.
I can think of literally 1000s of jobs that are easier
Yep. I've been a grocery store manager, an interior contractor, a whole slew of other jobs, ... and a software engineer. Software engineer is by far the easiest job I've worked.
Back in the day, Merrill Lynch had a rep for hiring really green people on the cheap, doing a very good job training them up, and then not paying them according to their new value in the market. When you would leave, managers would often lay the guilt trip about "What you owe us..." (to which the proper response is the line from Goodfellas -"F* you. Pay me.")
There was a sitewide IT town hall in NY when I was there and some senior MD brought this problem up. "We're investing a lot of money in training people and then having difficulty retaining them." From the crowd of around 1000 a voice cried out "Stop training them!"
I don't think it's purely cultural because chances are you have co-workers who don't have these issues at all just as I know people who are limiting themselves because of feelings like this - I would say this is more individual.
To flip it around - do you feel other people who leave the company did something shameful ? Do you see judging from others (especially outside of co-workers where it's incentive based) ?
I think as job market turns from oversupply to undersupply the culture changes simply out of nececity.
No worker would ever get hired if he or she were open with that they would leave the company the very instance a better offer came around. Companies, on the other hand, have no trouble hiring even when they admit that they'd fire you the very instance someone who can do the job for less pay comes around.
Loyalty in the work place is a one-way street. It goes from the worker to the company but not the other way around.
That depends on demand/supply. Tech companies in cities with high demand for engineers have no problem hiring people who will leave as soon as something better shows up.
That is subtly different from what I wrote. :) I wrote that no one who were open about it would be unable to find a job. If you told your interviewer that your only objective is to maximize salary they would (rightly) treat you as a sociopath. A company whose only objective is to minimize salaries (and therefore maximize profits) is also a "sociopath" but that is somehow acceptable.
Yeah, that's true, I guess you'd normally wouldn't say that. Although I've worked a guy once that said something similar and got hired anyway. He still works in the same place after a couple years and still has the same attitude. I think that most people make it up to be a lot less socially acceptable than it actually is.
Well, isn't also the case that a toddler still hasn't fully developed their empathy and other mental faculties, and thus aren't capable of understanding the full extent of how their behavior affects others (and indeed why they should care).
I'm not saying that anyone should feel ashamed to negotiate for better compensation (quite the opposite!), but I'm also not sure that you can look at those little uncooked narcissists and conclude "this is how a human being naturally behaves". I think it's pretty normal for a person with mature emotions to feel at least a bit bad when making demands.
Ask yourself why you feel these emotions, because the culture you're in had to have made you learn them. The companies you have worked for sure as hell do not care about you once you leave.
>Your entire post is overgeneralization and dramatizing to prove some poorly thought out hypothesis but this here is the most obvious example.
What kind of garbage comment is this statement? Argue the points of disagreement but saying something offensive like this serves no purpose and is just plain wrong, rude and disgusting.
>the demand in my local dev market went through the roof last couple of years for multiple reasons
Do you think your local development market is remotely representative of the nature of national employment trends in general? And you accuse the OP of "over-generalization"?
In the past, there definitely was such norm. The "job hopping" was seen as negative.
Even today, I software development and especially sillicon valley is a bit of outlier - people in our industry change more often then in other industries.
…proceeds to extrapolate from "my local dev market" to economy with thousands of sectors and tens of millions of workers without a trace of irony or self-awareness. Um, ok.
As others have pointed out, being in software engineering at this particular point in time is probably not super representative.
>Your entire post is overgeneralization and dramatizing to prove some poorly thought out hypothesis
I find that the main thesis is actually pretty sound. Historically speaking, the current (capitalistic) labour / production system is a direct descendant of the medieval feudal labour relations that existed in Europe 900 years ago. When you truly look at it, they are pretty identical in their core mechanics. There is a class system, there is servitude, there is limited social mobility.
It's just that the outer appearance is different, that some aspects are improved (in degree, not in kind, if I'm making myself understood), and finally that the technological advances mask the inequality and the problems in the system (a world where one person has 500$ and the other 500,000$ seems better than one where one has 1$ and the other 1,000$, but they are equally unequal).
Simple rules that work for me: a) don't take my work laptop home, no corp provided phone (if they insist I'd keep the phone at my work desk, where it belongs). b) work 40 hours on average per week. Just go home already! Helps if you're a late sleeper (like me), you can simply arrive later at work to compensate for the hours you've recently donated to your employer. This works very well for me, although I'm based in Europe, ymmv.
This is what I did too, leave the laptop at work, arrive relatively late, as I knew I had to leave late anyway.
It makes it more bearable, but it still kind of sucks, and everyone in your team is doing it (taking laptop home, answering calls), eventually, it's going to cost you.
You get to work in the morning, and there is this long email thread about how something was "urgent" or went wrong and they tried to reach you and they couldn't... all that good email delivered peer pressure stuff, passing the bucket blame it on the absentee kind of thing.
I think that BS only persists because not just because people allow it to, but some people positively get off on it. They love the opportunity to be the hero "I was up from 4 til 7 rebuilding the database -- you're welcome" and the ability to differentiate themselves without actually being competent at their jobs.
Some roles (junior investment banking analysts, junior lawyers, etc) the long hours and weekends are part of an apprenticeship type weeding out process, and are almost a form of hazing ("I did it - you have to do it too") But at least in those cases there is an expected path out.
It sounds like you are in a dysfunctional shop. If it's possible, move. It's not like that everywhere.
> "I was up from 4 til 7 rebuilding the database -- you're welcome" and the ability to differentiate themselves without actually being competent at their jobs.
Some do this because it's in their nature. They don't spend their free time doing enjoyable, fulfilling tasks for whatever reason, so work is really the only form of stimulation they have. Older women without children (or adult children) seem to be particularly susceptible to this.
I would argue not only that early rising is totally unnatural but also that lying in bed half awake - sleep researchers call this state "hypnagogic" - is positively beneficial to health and happiness. A good morning doze of half an hour or more can, for example, help you to prepare mentally for the problems and tasks ahead.
I wish I could wake up naturally, when I feel rested, but my 2 y.o. Won’t let me. Also, my wife is nuts and thinks it’s lazy to sleep past 7. I want to wake up at 9... but have to be up around 5:30-6 every day. Thing is, I’m self-employed and have nowhere to be, no one to answer to. What went wrong...
Not taking your laptop home is poor information security practice. We had a break-in where dozens of laptops were stolen. We had to do key rolling, password resets, etc for the whole organization. Many people couldn't even work until new computers were shipped in. Of course me and the people who took our laptops home were fine.
Eyes on the building. Bars/shutters on the windows. An alarm system. Caltrops on the floor. A locked room with a decent door for the laptops, and/or a strongbox. Africanized killer bees. Full-disk encryption on the laptops themselves.
There's plenty of reasonable measures that organizations can take to protect their equipment and data. "Give the laptops to the employees, they might be stolen if left in the building" is not one of them, not if they care at all about information security.
This is a curious statement. Why would someone having a bunch of laptops require password resets? Weren’t the laptops properly configured so physical access != network access? If not, then having people commuting with these timebombs is not a good idea. As it’s much more likely that a laptop will be stolen from a worker’s home or car or anywhere than the office.
Somehow I don't think you know much about medieval serfdom. While the serf was not allowed to leave neither was the lord allowed kick the serf out of his land. The only way the lord could "fire" a serf was to sell the associated land in which case he would simply become the serf of another lord. By contrast employees are not attached to their place of work and are free to leave. The two systems have nothing in common.
> The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification.
Where can i read more about this assertion? I was not aware that serfdom would specify such details as the number of hours. I guess that serfdom would be a very different institution in each country, or even within each province; (I guess corvée service might have been a more detailed contract, but I am not aware of the details) so I would like to hear some more details.
>I was not aware that serfdom would specify such details as the number of hours.
I'm not sure they did, but your work day was effectively limited to when the sun was up. Candles were quite expensive well through the middle ages as they were mostly made from beeswax, lower class persons would use fires or candles made from soaking things like rushes in animal fat - neither of which provided light conducive to any sort of work.
the landlord still had to allow his serfs to work their own plot/cottage on occasion; so they had to agree on some form of time management, even without clocks or candles.
It has everything to do with power. You don't even need to consult the history.
Large organizations very rarely need any particular drone. The drones always need money to survive, their health insurance, stability for their family, a clean professional reputation. So the big guys takes advantage of the little guys.
Early in my career, I worked a lot and was compensated poorly for the value I brought to the business. Then I built systems that made me very difficult to get rid of without losing all the money I was bringing in. Now I make double and work 30 hours a week when I'm busy.
For any reasonably large corporation, your employer is not your friend. They deserve professional courtesy, but never loyalty or personal respect. Always look out for yourself, what you bring to the table, and what you're getting out of it. Forget anything else. If you want something personal, go home to your wife and kids at a reasonable hour. They love you.
>The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification.
You're claiming the opposite of what the article does. Medieval serfs did not work a 40h week.
>This explains the system of values that revolve around it
No.
>such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time.
Says who? This is so overbroad that it doesn't actually match reality. Lots of people quit jobs all the time.
>The servant was not expected to leave its master, that was not OK.
Come on.
You have an angle you want to argue but you can't just distort reality to fit your conclusion. Nothing you argued is broadly true, though I'm sure you can find individual examples.
> The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification.
Well, in Europe it is more the estate system and urban manufactures, I think, that have influenced the culture of work. In the US, you have something much worse even. I found this recent article eye-opening for me:
[1] M. Desmond. In order to understand the brutality of american capitalism, you have to start on the plantation. New York Times Magazine, Aug 18 2019.
> a desperate need for people to continuously prove the need for their own role, as automation and informatization eat away more an more jobs.
While I agree with this (go @AndrewYang! ;), I don't think it is the only (or even the biggest) factor. It is the long shadow of WWII and the resulting demographic imbalance coupled with a self-serving but fundamentally wrong narrative around "economic growth". This has led to what some have called "the big institutional lie" where throughout society you have institutions that rely on promises of advancement or necessity to lure the fresh blood but that can not keep these promises to all of them. It's basically a pyramid scheme. Peter Turchin pointed to this as a contributing factor to polarization as the educated "elite" of such countries/societies must increasingly fight among itself for the increasingly rare places or resources (relatively speaking). → revolutionary potential
The big lie is all the lavish promises people made to their future selves. Expensive medical treatments (Medicare), retirement funds (social security/pension payments), expensive infrastructure (constant access to clean water/electricity/gas/sewage/etc).
Maybe the biggest lie is pretending to be able to predict the future. All those aforementioned promises require future resources, population, growth, technological advances, all of which are just guesses as to what will be available in the future.
As a person which lives in Russia and Germany, I'm really interested in what you mean by solved?
Universal healthcare in Russia is a total mess. Universal healthcare (edit: in Germany) have a lot of problems too, of which the most significant is underpayment, low salaries, and such a lack of personnel, that CDU people did really suggest to use conscription to draw the free workforce.
The very flaw of positive rights is that you can't guarantee them, since they cost money. If you have no money, your positive rights end there. Yet people still believe that one could guarantee such rights.
First, I'm not sure if you're aware, but the price of a procedure in the US is not necessarily related to its cost. There's been several news articles showing the same procedure can cost 100x more in one hospital vs the other in the same city. Hospitals literally pull prices out their ass and justify it by saying "no one pays that price". Then they bludgeon people with these completely fictitious numbers when insurance doesn't play ball.
What you're also failing to realize is the US does have a universal health care system, it's just really shitty and inefficient: its called the emergency room. Doctors can't just leave people to die if they can't pay.
Stories from the great US paid healthcare system:
When my wife had to get her gall bladder removed. The hospital charged us $25k for 1 hour use of the surgery room, and $20k for 1 hour use of the recovery room. It took insurance almost a year to resolve, and in the meantime both sides kept bothering us. Hospital told us not to worry though because things usually get resolved once both sides start threatening eachother with lawsuits. I asked what happens if insurance still doesn't pay it, and they said that the hospital usually writes it off. Sounds GREAT!
The above was on top of ~10k other general hospital bills, plus 3.6k anesthesiologist, 25k surgeon, and a couple k in post operation followup. Total charged price for one of the most common operations in the country: about 85k. Completely sustainable.
In another instance, we needed something done that we thought wasn't covered by insurance. When trying to figure out what the price would be, it took several weeks worth of phone calls, and tens of hours on the phone to figure out with our local hospital what it would cost. Then when we got there, someone said it didn't include something. But it was OK because insurance covered the whole thing for various reasons. We said OK. They were wrong though, insurance still didn't cover it. This is important because medical places usually have an "insurance price" and a "cash price", and we got screwed out of the cash price by going through insurance.
We also had a close friend deliver her own baby in a hospital hallway and get charged $30k for the delivery.
My sister was charged $1.2k for the removal of a cotton ball from her ear while waiting in a line.
My brother had a $5k ambulance ride.
I always think twice before interacting with the healthcare system in the US.
Could you elaborate how anything of this is relevant to what I wrote?
The point was that you can't guarantee positive rights, since positive rights require some commitment.
>Stories from the great US paid healthcare system
Did I said it is great? Why you emphasize "paid" when any healthcare system is paid?
Your services are flawed in a typical American way, i.e. overregulated crony mess where all the burden lies on
an avg Joe since he has no leverage on a political system while lobbyists do.
I bet my head that if you implement a universal healthcare, you would end up in a mess like that which Russia have, rather than something more decent.
I had a friend who had an appendix removed, the bill was $80K, similar to what you quoted. He didn't have insurance, however, so he haggled on the bill. Eventually they settled and accepted $8K, or 10% of the sticker price, for the procedure. I don't know how insurance companies settle these things behind the scenes, but I imagine many are overpaying and we're all paying the cost through higher insurance prices.
Insurance companies have zero incentive for real procedure prices to ever be listed; they provide 'value' both in terms of their negotiation services and in terms of pointing to how expensive getting anything done is.
However the true result is presented to wall street: If the insurance company is making more than a very meager profit we're getting screwed out of what should be universal affordable care.
The legal maximum out of pocket cost for a calendar year for in network providers (providers who agree to a price with your insurance company) is $13.5k. You should budget at least that much for a childbirth in the US (in case of complications such as C sections and other common issues after birth), if you can manage to plan your child being born between ~May to Oct, as you can then likely have all your expenses be in one year, otherwise another year's out of pocket maximum will come into play.
I am Russian, and Russia is a total mess, full stop.
To address positive rights - societies don't just "run out" of money. As has been repeated a million times, a country with a sovereign currency is not run like a household budget.
And the "right to clean water" is rather useful in making sure we don't have outbreaks of the plague and other fun stuff
Money is a proxy for power. That power comes from the ability to trust the government issuing the money and the people the government represents (i.e. the country). You can claim the right to clean water all you want, but unless you fund infrastructure development, and have access to aquifers or fresh water lakes, it doesn't matter how much money a government issues. Similarly, if a country isn't producing enough children to support the elderly, it doesn't quite matter if they've been promised nursing homes.
Social programs do. Price goes up due to natural reasons, budget goes down due to natural reasons, your government can't provide a service anymore.
The most common example is social security, the pension system. Demography changed, age of retirement goes up, payments go down, and you can't do anything about it.
Sure, the governments try to deflate the price, but there are no miracles, and artificial price deflation causes deficit, for example a deficit of medical personnel or scarcity of a service.
To address positive rights - societies don't just "run out" of money. As has been repeated a million times, a country with a sovereign currency is not run like a household budget.
Sure, a country with a sovereign currency can create as much currency as they wish. They can never "run out" of money, literally. Practically, though, creating more currency doesn't result in more products being made and services being performed. Most countries are aiming for their currency to hold its real value relatively steady in accord with its nominal value, and you cannot do that if you create more money whenever you "run out" of it. So yes, countries cannot "run out" of money literally, but practically they can and do.
It means that in Europe universal healthcare is almost a solved problem, according to WHO (World Health Organization) 6 out of the first 10 and 16 out of the first 20 highest ranked healthcare systems are in Europe.
>20 highest ranked healthcare systems are in Europe.
It's not a rank, it's a (bad) efficiency metric, which says that Ukrainian and Kazakhstan HC is "more efficient" than Russian, and that Chilean HC is "more efficient" than that of Denmark.
If you assume this metric shows what's better, it's safe to assume that this metric is garbage. To lazy to dive into the methodology, they weight the date using avg schooling years and other vague staff, but the results rendering this paper totally unsound.
Comparing different countries using a single "performance" metric is nearly always garbage, since all sorts of important nuances are being omitted.
> It's not a rank, it's a (bad) efficiency metric, which says that Ukrainian and Kazakhstan HC is "more efficient" than Russian, and that Chilean HC is "more efficient" than that of Denmark.
They are, according to the World health Organization.
Ukrainian healthcare system is more efficient than Russian because you don't have remote regions that have very little or no chances of being reached in case of emergency.
Chile and Denmark are basically at the same level, it shouldn't be a surprise that many South American countries rank at the same level of some western countries.
If you look at the ranking created by other entities, it's more or less the same, even though they used different metrics.
You will always find mostly European countries in the top 20s.
Italy and France really are among the best in the World when it's about healthcare.
USA really is shitty, even though they have the highest spending per capita.
The methodology is well explained, there's an entire chapter explaining it, they are not 'Comparing different countries using a single "performance"', your rebuttal is rebutted.
I guess my comment was specific to the US, but pay in the medical field is vastly lower in Europe than in the US. Regardless, Europe is still subject to the biggest factor, which are demographic changes and they will have an impact on the availability of future benefits. I would say these past 20 years and maybe next 10 will have been the peak, and then there will be visible cuts in services or quality of services due to lack of people (and/or taxes) to service the debt.
Compared to the system in the US it is. How did one researcher put it? "Every healthcare system has its flaws, but the US somehow manages to have all of them."
Compared to the US it is. Obviously there are going to be ongoing problems in any large undertaking, but Sweden pays half the cost for healthcare per capita. A 50% discount for equal quality care. Americans like myself are getting absolutely screwed in terms of the cost of healthcare.
> This explains the system of values that revolve around it, such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time.
This looks very USA-centric to me. In Germany, the mentality is rather that both directions are to be ashamed of.
You don't even imagine how much employers do to favor employees. This jaded view from corporate america, by corporate employees, ignores that the majority of employment comes from small businesses that eat up losses all the time to not lose valuable employees.
It is something to be ashamed of for employees to leave their employers? Where? I've worked in a few places in the US and I never sensed any "shame" when an employee left. I have sensed that employers feel shame when laying people off though.
I think the modern wage labor relation is very different than medieval serfdom, on both sides. Marx does a good job of explaining this Kaptial Vol. I. What is the same is the basic exploitation that underlies that relationship.
I agree 100% with the rest of what you say though, there are too many people taking BS jobs too seriously.
At my last company, there were several employees who spent the vast majority of their time trying to convince people their jobs are important. Whether I thought they were or not is kind of irrelevant, but it seems insane to work a job where the majority of your time spent is convincing people it makes sense for you to have a job.
At a place I previously worked, I heard a rumor that the entire job of someone who was fairly high up was to email a simple report to someone higher up every day. As someone put it, the job of a crontab entry.
Since then, I started a job that was ostensibly non-technical, and it seems like people are overly impressed by anyone who can provide a dashboard style report, and it's as though you're assumed to be putting forth significant effort every time you make a new one.
If I was able to act in a more strategic manner, I would not let on that I had automated such things, and soon my entire job would be pushing a button three or four times a day.
> The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification.
Not really, they come as rather significant modifications of early capitalist servitude, won at a substantial cost in lives.
Early capitalist servitude did itself evolve directly from feudal servitude, but it got much worse, in economic terms, in the process. It usually came with at least notional political freedom, though.
>Early capitalist servitude did itself evolve directly from feudal servitude, but it got much worse, in economic terms, in the process.
No it didn't. This Roussaunian idealization of rural subsistence living must really die. People aren't idiots, you don't move to urban factory work (as bad as it was compared to modern day) unless rural life was much worse.
> People aren't idiots, you don't move to urban factory work (as bad as it was compared to modern day) unless rural life was much worse.
Rural life was worse not because rural feudal tenancy was worse than urban factory servitude, but because the technology advances which made it possible to support the latter also simultaneously produced a population boom and reduced the total (not just per capita) quantity of rural labor demanded, producing a whole lot of surplus rural labor.
You think subsistence living was great before technological progress? Why do you think there was a population boom? How do you think population size was controlled before technological advances?
Standard of living rose by some measures on moving to the cities; however, the dependence on an employer was much greater than the old dependence on your lord.
> however, the dependence on an employer was much greater than the old dependence on your lord
I'm not sure the dependence was much greater, but it was less likely to be honored restart than mercilessly abused by the employer, because capitalism arose in the context of a huge labor surplus created by agricultural productivity revolutions, whereas feudal tenancy arose in tighter labor conditions and had grown traditions (and in some cases legal structures) based on that. Which is not too say that feudalism was without massive abuses of dependent relationships, itself.
> The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification.
Citation needed
It really come from workers rights to have a life outside the workplace AND a salary even when they could not work (what we call safety).
In medieval servitude there was no life outside the workplace, nor safety.
Pre-induistrial workers worked less, on the average, because they were surviving
They were working when they needed money and not working (AKA doing some other job for the house or the family, like farming or breeding cows and pigs) when they had enough to go on for maybe a week or so.
Life was on the edge back then.
You had an accident, any kind of accident, you were ruined.
There was no safety net, of any kind.
> it's a game of face time, who sends most emails past midnight, and who is willing to sell more of their personal life and squeeze other people out of theirs
It's not in Europe, for example, where we don't think that socialism is a curse word, we think it is necessary for the progress of society as a whole.
I will quote one of my favourite computer scientist ever, Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, that unfortunately recently passed away.
> Yes - happy days. At the time I was working a 6 hour day due to the enlightened Swedish child care policies. Parents of young children are entitled to work 80% of full time - good for creativity and family life. Result 2 kids and a new programming language.
> Pre-induistrial workers worked less, on the average, because they were surviving
> They were working when they needed money and not working (AKA doing some other job for the house or the family, like farming or breeding cows and pigs) when they had enough to go on for maybe a week or so.
Especially they worked depending on the season. During planting or harvest they were on the fields from dawn till dusk. In winter they took care of the animals and stayed by the fire place inside.
Manufacturing work had similar cycles.
Only industrialisation brought working cycles independent from season and daylight.
This is a cohesive response.
The definition of work is itself a manifestation of industrialization, post-U.S. revolution.
Previously, in the teleologically-oriented universe of the Medieval period and early Enlightenment, there was little if any distinction between work and life. Exceptions were for those who sought to become members of Guilds -- the architects, alchemists, millers, bakers and too herbalist apothecaries whose guild was closesly associated to the early Catholic church and later, loosely, with Luther's heresy.
> the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time.
Did you just make this up? The stigma is the exact opposite. Western society makes it quite difficult to fire employees. Hell, it's even illegal to fire striking employees. You'd be hard-pressed to find any employer willing to fire an employee without thoroughly documented evidence of the employee's malfeasance.
The only time anybody gets fired is when they really really deserved it. In contrast, many employees leave their jobs capriciously with little to no consequence.
You appear to live in quite the bubble if you really believe this with absolute certainty.
> Western society makes it quite difficult to fire employees.
Have you worked in a US "right-to-work" state? It's incredibly easy to fire people. Large companies are typically the only businesses that bother with "thoroughly documented evidence of the employee's malfeasance". And even that is rare.
> You'd be hard-pressed to find any employer willing to fire an employee without thoroughly documented evidence of the employee's malfeasance. The only time anybody gets fired is when they really really deserved it.
I'm just a single data point. I'm a bit of a workaholic. I'm also a perfectionist. And I'm someone who always busts his ass at every job. In the last 20 years in TN, I have encountered the following occasions:
- During college, I worked part-time at Books-a-Million in their little cafe. I had the laziest, most unreliable cafe "manager" I've ever met—she would regularly be 30+ minutes late to shifts, causing me to be late to classes and events; she would constantly offload managerial tasks to me when we shared a shift; she would spend vast majorities of her shifts talking on the phone with family and friends; she wouldn't respond to customers at the counter if I was busy (because she was on the phone), and would ignore them waiting for me to get to them; when I would follow her shifts, she never spent any time at all cleaning up after herself, and left the entire area a fucking mess; the list goes on. When Spring Break hit, I'd had a pre-approved vacation on the books for nearly 3 months—a road trip to Chicago with friends. My ride showed up 15 minutes before my shift ended and came in for a coffee to wait for me to be relieved by the manager. One hour later, I finally called the manager. She was at home watching TV (yes, she told me that directly). I asked if she was aware she was supposed to be relieving me so I could leave for vacation, and she said yes. I told her my ride had been waiting for over an hour by this point, and needed to leave because it was a long drive. She complained about having to work on a Saturday. Said she guessed she'd go get in the shower and start getting ready for work. I decided I'd had enough of this behavior after nearly 1 year—I told her that I would be leaving in 30 minutes whether she was there or not. And since she's the manager, an 18-yr-old kid shouldn't be displaying more responsibility, reliability, and dedication to his part-time job than she, as a 30-something, gave to her full-time job. Then I thanked her and hung up. I then wrote all this up in the cafe log book—a book we were supposed to write important notes for store management in that they would review daily. She showed up right at 30 minutes later, and I left. Upon returning from the vacation, she called and asked if I'd come in and cover a shift for her. I agreed. Upon arriving at the store, she was there, and she and the store manager told me I was fired for insubordination. I had expected it, of course, but that's beside the point. I'm sure I really really deserved to be the one fired in that situation, right?
- Nearly 20 years ago, I was fired from Best Buy. I'd worked there for somewhere close to 9 months, I think. Never missed a day. Even walked to work after my clutch went out on the interstate. The day before departing for an approved vacation, I declined the female store manager's advances and being asked out. The day I returned, I was asked to sign a document declaring that the reason for my firing was poor job performance and missing work. My direct manager on the pre-Geek Squad declined to sign the form—telling me privately afterward there was no way he could sign such a statement because he absolutely depended on me and was now fucked without a replacement—but wouldn't you know it ... lucky for Best Buy there was a store manager who was happy to do it. I declined to sign the form, informing them I'd happily sign a form that declared I was being fired after declining to go out with a superior. They declined to provide such a form, so I wrote it myself on their form, after striking through their bullshit reason, and signed that statement. But again, surely I really really deserved being fired there.
- 17 years ago, I worked as a temp worker with Randstad for Maytag in one of their customer service centers. It was a pretty easy job—just take calls all day and help people figure out appliance problems. One day, Maytag announced they were moving a US factory to Renosa, Mexico. There were quite a few jobs being lost. That night, at home, on my personal computer, I was doing some research into US companies moving factories to Mexico. There was a particular organization in Texas that helped facilitate such moves who mentioned working with Maytag on their website. They had a form on their site you could fill out for more information, or to ask questions. So, I filled out the form—asked some specific questions about working conditions, average pay rates of Mexican workers compared to US workers, time to spin up factories, worker treatment, and a few other things. I put my name, email, and phone number in the form. There was an input that asked where I worked that was required—so I just typed in Maytag without thinking and moved on. The next morning, I arrived at my desk to a couple managers waiting for me. Followed them into the office, where they showed me a printout of the form I had filled out the night before on my personal computer at home. All the questions I'd asked. They asked what I thought I was doing. I simply explained—in absolute honesty—I was very curious about how factory moves work, how workers are treated and paid in Mexico, especially compared to union workers at Maytag's existing US factories, and had found that site saying they could provide such information. They told me I was a customer service rep and had no business looking into such matters, and then informed me I was being fired for impersonating Maytag company personnel and misrepresenting their interests. But, of course, I really really deserved it.
> Hell, it's even illegal to fire striking employees.
- Oh, this is a funny one. About 15 years ago, I was fired after getting involved with union organizing, and sharing some literature and discussing unions with my coworkers. This was in a factory, where part of the employees were already unionized, but the company was subcontracting jobs out to cheaper, non-union workers like me. I mean, it's supposed to be illegal to fire someone for union organizing. Ah, the beauty of a right-to-work state—where every employee is an at-will employee, and you can pretty much make up any excuse to fire them. But alas, I'm sure I really really deserved it.
I moved into sales for a few years after that, and did really well. Then I finally decided to put my computer skills to use as a software developer 12 years ago—and subsequently turned that into running my own business for the last 7 or 8 years. The tech world has been quite different—though there are still plenty of issues that could be improved. However, the lessons of my years of "normal" employment were quite clear—in right-to-work states, it's absolutely okay for employers to terminate any employee, any time, for any reason. Real reasons. Utter bullshit reasons. It doesn't matter. The employer has all the power, and the employee has to just take it or lose their job and income.
It's comparing apples and oranges to compare medieval peasants life and modern office work. Even today in rural areas people work around the clock in and around the house to keep everything afloat and barely survive. Sitting on your butt for 10h a day and doing intellectual work seems hard only until you try to do some farming for a while - and modern farming is nothing compared to how hard it was back then, when you had to do everything manually, no running water, no electricity, no farming machinery, no supermarkets. They even had to make their own cloths as textile was extremely expensive, and I've read that weaving was one of the activities that was taking any free moment to medieval women, it was extremely time consuming. The pace of life was slower, that for sure, and perhaps the average working hours were indeed shorter (in winter especially because of shorter daylight), but they worked way harder than most people have to today.
In modern farming, the hard part is not sitting in the tractor working on the fields. The struggle comes from running a business, taking care of financials and keeping the tractors running and cash flow positive in a very competitive, globalized environment which pays very badly.
I have done farm hand work the modern way with tractors and the old timey way with horses. If it paid as well and was as stable as computer work in the office, I'd trade my job for either.
Farm work with tractors is sweaty, dirty, solitary job but it's not particularly physically taxing. You don't need much strength most of the time, but there are times when you need to lift heavy things etc. But at the end of the day you see the field is plowed and you get to work with big machines (fun!).
Farm work with horses is sweatier and dirtier but it's a community effort with typically a minimum of two people and one horse. In the olden days it would have been a whole family group working together to put food on the table. This kind of work is very tough physically but is very rewarding and relaxing mentally.
And sitting on my ass all day in the office is also quite physically demanding in the sense that I must hit the gym regularly after work or my health will suffer.
You mention textile work, for example. Spinning yarn was an activity almost everyone took a part in. People back then carried a spool of yarn and a bunch of fibers in their pockets and spun it in their idle time, e.g. while sitting together with their family at night. It's not too dissimilar to playing with a yo-yo, or doing knitting or other activities people enjoy even today.
Pre-industrial life was not as tough as modern people think. There were many positive sides to a simpler lifestyle back then. These days we're well fed and have good health care but we work ourselves to death for no obvious reason.
I was talking more about the amount of work, than how hard it is (and it's hard, especially in summer). On the farm you start very early in the morning and there's always something that needs to be taken care of, practically until you go to bed. Now, it probably depends also on the size of the farm, number of people, type of crops and how good the land is, what animals do you keep, machines, etc. My experience is that there was very little free time of just doing nothing. Pace is slower, so you have a lot of small time-outs in between the chores, but very rarely you're like: "OK, we did everything for today, I'm off to binge watch Netflix for the rest of the day" (except in winters when days are shorter, then you get some tv time). That was my experience, at least.
I'd argue it's actually easier to cope when what you need is repetitive hard physical labor.
You don't go to sleep thinking about that big problem you still haven't solved. You actually get the satisfaction of doing the physical activity. You know with certainty that you've done your job (you can actually see it) and you know when to stop because your body will tell you to. Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards.
On the other hand with mental work, mostly you can't stop thinking about work unless you distract yourself. Many times you don't see the outcome of what you did and it's pretty easy to think you haven't actually "done" anything.
Another thing I'd say is that with farming (and other manual labor activities) there is very little that is not known beforehand. You might have some unexpected events, but even then, you likely know what to do in those occasions. With mental work it's a lot more unpredictable and full of unknowns.
Having said all that, I've never had the opportunity to work with physical labor so my views are likely biased.
> You actually get the satisfaction of doing the physical activity.
Found a guy who haven't done any hard physical labor before. You are confusing a 8-hourd hardcore shift/12 hours hard work under the boiling sun in the field with a 1-2 hour workout in a gym.
> Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards.
I don't like sleeping more than eight hours, unless I'm completely sleep deprived. Even then, I'll automatically wake up after about eight hours. This has been the case for as long as I can remember, including times of extremely intense mental work, like a compressed exam week at university. The exceptions was when I did manual labour on a construction site for a few weeks.
I'd get home, eat, shower, and pass out, and sleep for ten or more hours. I wanted to do some reading or watch series but I couldn't keep my eyes open.
Maybe I would've gotten used to it at some point. But the experience was unlike anything else I've gone through.
Not OP but I have done manual labour jobs (Construction jobs gen labour and mudding, seismic exploration labour, moving) for years hen we first moved to the West.
I absolutely miss being in a good shape by default. I miss the satisfaction of seeing the fruits of your labour like with mudding.
> Namely, to lie down and get sleep at once.
And boy did I use to not have any sleeping issues! Slept like a baby most nights and woke up ready to go only drank coffee for the flavour. But now that I'm an office plankton I can't even think in the morning without a cup of tims.
To pay for my nice computer science education, I worked in mine exploration and later a working mine.
> Another thing I'd say is that with farming (and other manual labor activities) there is very little that is not known beforehand. You might have some unexpected events, but even then, you likely know what to do in those occasions. With mental work it's a lot more unpredictable and full of unknowns.
This is laughably false. Much of the day at physical jobs is spent problem-solving and jury-rigging stuff to work, whether it's figuring out how to mount a drill platform or dealing with the tailgate falling off your pickup.
> Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards.
The grind of this sort of work is far more mentally exhausting than programming, and I only worked there in the summers when I was in my late teens/early 20s. The two things are not even comparable. When I realised I'd worked my last day mining, I was as happy as I've ever been.
I disagree. I worked in construction and factories in the past. Problem solving at your typical physical job is easier mentally. Moreover, the duration and number of occurrences is much less. When I came home after work, I did not think about work compared to when I became a programmer. The physical exhaustion and aches were pronounced, but I didn't feel any mental exhaustion unless I was sleep deprived due to working overtime.
> Having said all that, I've never had the opportunity to work with physical labor so my views are likely biased.
Very strong opinion to end up saying everything could be just false because it is a mere gut feeling.
Everyone has worries and problems, if it is not the weather which is about to damage the harvest it will be the expensive providers or the fruits imported from cheaper countries or the workers who try to do as less as possible with the maintenance of their tools. And after work everyone stressed because they are afraid that this year benefits might end up not covering expenses and not knowing what to do if the price of milk drops again and your 11 year daughter does not understand why all family can't go to Disneyland during the tourist season like her friends do.
You're confounding affluence with the difference between physical/mental labour. I've done both hard physical labour and hard mental labour, and what OP says is totally spot on. Hard physical work, even when excruciatingly tough, is most often more bearable than hard mental work. There's nothing like beig 'done' after a hard day of work. After a hard day of mental work you just feel miserable until you fall asleep. If only manual laborers were appreciated (i.e. compensated) as much as mental laborers...
My significant other does manual labor, and it's a good day when they don't want to just come home and fall asleep on the couch and those good days are rare. Even after my worst days of a software dev job, I still have the energy to come home and cook dinner, do some yard work, and other chores.
I will echo your line about wishing manual laborers were better appreciated. I have impostor syndrome, but it's not in comparison to peers in my industry, it's feeling like I don't deserve to earn multiples more then people like my spouse who break their bodies for a pittance.
well, yes, unless after hard day of work, you have more work waiting or, you go to bed worrying if weather will kill your crops, or will you be able to sell them, etc. Farming in particular is much more like running a startup, then it is like office work, where the risk of running business is someone else's problem, and you get your salary at the end of the month no matter what.
> Everyone has worries and problems, if it is not the weather which is about to damage the harvest it will be the expensive providers or the fruits imported from cheaper countries or the workers who try to do as less as possible with the maintenance of their tools. And after work everyone stressed because they are afraid that this year benefits might end up not covering expenses and not knowing what to do if the price of milk drops again and your 11 year daughter does not understand why all family can't go to Disneyland during the tourist season like her friends do.
Sure we all worry, but that wasn't what I meant to say. I mean on the actual work day, almost everything is predictable or it has known responses. Today you have to plow the field, remove weeds, prepare seeds, milk the cows, etc. While on a mental job you get thrown literally anything at you and you're supposed to solve the problem.
Those worries you mention exist on both worlds equally. What if my startup fails? What if I get old and can't get a job anymore? What if the tech I'm working gets obsolete? What if I get replaced by a cheaper alternative so the bottom line grows?
> Very strong opinion to end up saying everything could be just false because it is a mere gut feeling.
Maybe I should've mentioned it but I got this from talking to friends and others that have physical jobs. It's not a study, but definitely not just a gut feeling.
> Those worries you mention exist on both worlds equally. What if my startup fails?
This cannot be serious. I've worked at startups, and the answer is: there are 50 other companies within 10 blocks who are falling over themselves to hire programmers, especially one with the gumption to try a startup. I've never heard of anyone who worked at a tech startup who then had trouble finding other employment after it failed.
If your biggest "worry" at work is that you might not become a millionaire and may have to fall back on a $150K/yr job, I really don't know how to respond, because that is nothing at all like the worries faced by people working in labor.
I've never worked on a startup and have no intention to do it. I live in a poor country where the average developer earns $8k/year and very few of us have any fallback. Mentioning startups was a way to relate to people here on HN.
If you don't focus on the specifics I bet you can come up with examples that relate to you and my argument still stands. Everyone has a different worry. Putting one's worries on a pedestal and discarding everyone else's as "not as bad" is pretty shallow to me.
Even when everything appears to be repetitive it is never repetitive. You should just try a work holiday visa on a country where you want to learn a language and work at a farm. It still won’t reflect all the stress that means just changing one provider, investing in new technology from all those companies that want to make profit on you for and never be sure on whether this year you are really not going to make it anymore, knowing you are already at the bottom of the chain (primary sector) and you start considering closing everything right before getting into bankruptcy. And your friends still believe you are ok because “you work in the nature” and if you are an owner you are very likely to get the whole year salary at once and they cannot understand why being cheap is just a way of survive.
There's some bits of truth to this, but you're also missing some big issues.
> You don't go to sleep thinking about that big problem you still haven't solved.
Possibly, but maybe not. Just because you're working in the physical realm doesn't mean you're not working at all in the mental realm.
Additionally, it's easy to worry about injury. Sprain an ankle? Sitting at a computer, it's merely an inconvenience. In labor, you're not working (and not earning money to pay the rent) until you've recovered.
Also: most people I know in labor are living paycheck to paycheck. Financial stress is real. To combine these: many people I know don't have health insurance. It's really expensive when you have to buy it yourself. More stress.
> you know when to stop because your body will tell you to
Definitely sounds like someone who has never worked in labor. You work until the job is done. If 'your body tells you to stop' before the job is done, you've got a problem.
> Finally, you might be exhausted physically at the end of the day, but your mind is definitely not exhausted, which allows you to actually do something with it afterwards.
Flip it around: does this claim still work? Are office workers so physically fresh from sitting around all day carb-loading that they all leave at 5:00 and hit the gym or the track? Some do, most don't.
When I get home from a long day of physical work, even if I didn't have any mental issues to deal with that day, I don't exactly look forward to cracking open a technical manual.
> Another thing I'd say is that with farming (and other manual labor activities) there is very little that is not known beforehand.
Not true at all, for any of the work I've done. Just last week I had a day scheduled for 10 hours that ran 6 hours over, and that wasn't even the worst I've experienced. Why would unanticipated roadblocks appear for mental problems but not physical ones? That makes no sense to me.
Just look around at physical projects and you'll see they're just as bad as digital ones. The SR-99 tunnel was 3.5 years late after they started digging.
"I've never had the opportunity to work with physical labor"
Yes you have. You could go out today and find a job doing physical labor unless you are significantly physically disabled. It's not like there is an educational barrier to all of those jobs. (Yes, I know there is to SOME of them because they require skills and performing physical labor)
As someone that has done plenty of both, you aren't contributing anything to this discussion unless you try it.
I don't know how it works on your country but unless I was at a starter level salary fresh out of college or I worked minimum wage, I couldn't work on any physical job without starving my family.
This comment actually diminishes physical labor implying "anyone can do it", which I don't believe it's true.
I would add that cows (or whatever other animals in the farm) don't have any idea about saturdays, sundays or hoilidays, they want to be fed (and in the case of cows need to be milked) every day, sun, rain or snow.
And it is not so ancient (medieval) as it may seem, it depends a lot on the country and the actual area.
I am told that the family (a very large one, composed of some thirty-forty people) of my great-grandfather (born in 1860 or 1861) lived in a farm (near but not so near to a village) in a remote area of the Apennines and they made one trip each year (with a horse carriage) to a village some 60 km away, on the seaside, to buy salt.
Besides that, all they actually bought "outside" were matches and some kerosene (or lamp oil), some steel/iron tools and glass and clay tableware, all the rest, including furniture, soap and candles was created/manufactured in the farm, including shoes[1] and clothes (they had wool, linen/canvas, leather) .
An older brother of my great-grandfather was semingly the first one to buy (circa 1865 or so) a rifle to go hunting, so you can add to the list gun powder.
[1] what was used largely at the time in farms were wooden clogs (or barefoot) , shoes were reserved for special occasions only
Sure we might not work as 'hard' but at what cost? Mentally people are suffering about as much if not more. It's not unfounded nor is it even surprising that people are complaining and comparing their lives to the past.
> Mentally people are suffering about as much if not more.
Physically too. Watch people when they get their first office job, a lot will start packing on the weight because they are sitting and grazing on junk food all day, walk considerably less, more stress "just got an email, argh my phone is ringing, ugh what does my team lead one that is instant messaging me, ugh I'm not meeting production, do I have time to go pee before the half hour meeting?" etc.
That's OK and expected, but it's hard to compare two very different situations and life styles by looking just at time spent on the activity. Also 10 hours in office is not the same as 10 hours of working, no one works all the time. So I'm just saying that we need to compare things properly, taking all the angles into the account, rather than just cherry-picking some metrics and use it to attack "modern day capitalism"
it's equally hard, one could argue it's not equally heavy, but many athletes today exercise way more than what the typical medieval "drunk till the early morning ready to beat his wife and kids" farmer did.
My family comes from poverty and hard work, my grandmother died last November at the age of 96, she worked, mainly as a farmer, her entire life up until 3/4 years ago.
I've never seen her tired, she never looked like she was not gonna finish what she started because it was too much.
Truth is physical work is hard only if you're not used to it.
Your body adapts to the amount of energy you give to it.
The harder the job, the more it takes to adapt, but it happens.
Well, unless we're talking about extreme malnutrition, but I've honestly never seen it in the west, not even in the deep country of central Italy, where my family comes from.
After a while working the fields is a lot less hard than climbing a dozen steps twice a day after you sat all day eating snacks, drinking sodas and basically not exercising at all.
Hard work today, IMHO, is working at Amazon's storage facilities, where stress adds up to what's basically legalized slavery and the workers cannot even work at their own pace because they have to work at the machines speed.
I enjoy hard labour, just not for 40 hours or more a week, every week. People doing traditional agriculture have to bust their ass during planting and harvest, but the rest of the time they aren't working that hard.
Same with sitting at a computer, doing it all the time drives me insane. I've got various hobbies and interests I'm passionate about, just not so passionate that I want to do them full time for the rest of my life.
Almost certainly in the sense of physical hardship -- but perhaps not in terms of total working hours. Here's another more sprightly essay on the topic:
"Consider a typical working day in the medieval period,” said Schor. “It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent — called to halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also mid-morning and mid-afternoon refreshment breaks."
Additionally, the medieval calendar was also one of many official Church-going holidays which were always considered mandatory. In total, leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year.
This contradicts my understanding of meal times. "Three meals a day" didn't really start until the industrial revolution [0]. In medieval times you ate when you got food.
I think there is absolutely no need every adult person needs to work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. We might just as well work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. It seems to me, this is just a matter of how the market pressures people to spend as much time as possible at work vs how much work most people can tolerate.
How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their household and there are countries when it is mostly male parent that does the same with same effect. Yet, there is not much difference in their capability to provide, it seems in cases of both types of countries the system settled and regulated itself.
Remote work may influence this. Commuting to a workplace just to do the things you might as well do from home will be considered old-fashioned, inefficient and/or shameful in a few years, if my crystal ball is not lying.
Our team comes in the office once a week for some face time. But we have plenty of face time throughout the week on Webex Teams. We've eliminated the friction for remote face time.
If anything, it's an improvement over the in-office because instead of interrupting someone at work, we politely message someone (or the team) about doing a quick call once it's convenient for them.
There are ways to work around that problem remotely.
When working similar to the Basecamp guys it's even the other way around.
Write problems down and give people time to chew on them. Everyone adds his thoughts and refining the idea will lead to better results than a two hours meeting.
That's optimistic. I have what I think has to be about as close to optimal a bike commute as it's possible to get in the US (nearly all separated bike paths, minimal risk of getting hit be a car). I wouldn't call it particularly enjoyable, much less one of the best parts of my day. It's just a thing I do a couple times a week because I hate going to the gym even more and it saves a bit of gas.
Not only have others suggested the reduction of the week to 4 days, but if you manage to de-align everyone's work week then commuting can become faster. And de-centralising work (not necessarily to the home!) can also improve the commuting situation.
10h 4 days a week to keep the 40h work week. But it also depends on the type of work. I think desk jobs would benefit more than manual labour form longer days(asuming same total). As the mind and body recovers differently.
I don't understand this presumably American fixation with the 40 hour week. It's almost 10% longer than the default UK week which is already too long. Having worked both and currently on 36.75 there's still a huge amount of slack and wasted time assuming software development or other office jobs.
> I don't understand this presumably American fixation with the 40 hour week.
Not just America. We have elections coming up in Saxony (a state in East Germany), so I watched a 2-hour interview with the current MP from the conservative party (the same party as Angela Merkel). When it came to the topic of UBI and automation, he adamantly refused to consider any policy that would move away from the 40-hour work week. He meant that there were so many challenges ahead of us, we couldn't afford to lose any of our precious working hours. His mantra seems to be "Work harder, not smarter".
> His mantra seems to be "Work harder, not smarter".
Bavarian here. Your MP is a nutjob, as is Söder and the rest of the conservatives. The point is that conservatives (as well as the FDP and the AfD) focus primarily on the needs of the businesses which means keeping to old Prussian traditions no matter what.
> How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their household and there are countries when it is mostly male parent that does the same with same effect.
I don't understand how this supposedly proves that e.g. male single providers could work only 4 hours a day instead of 8. Care to explain? As an argument against both parents working it would make more sense...
He is implying that in some countries only one spouse works 8 hours a day, and the couple/family have a fairly comfortable life. So presumably in these countries, both spouses could instead work 4 hours a day and they could still have the same comfortable life.
Countries where it's normal for both parents to work rely on a serf class, usually of immigrant women, to care for their children at terrible wages so both parents can work. I wonder how long this can be sustainable.
I live in Germany, both my kids go to public kindergarten/daycare (there is no distinction between the 2 here, it starts when the child is 1 year old) & the kindergarten teachers are mostly German themselves.
They don't earn great wages but they are not indentured servants either.
I became a parent last year and all of my research indicates that 1 is way too young to send a kid away. The optimum age seems to be 3 years. It seems we have come to accept social norms that are not designed around the well-being of the child.
It's a tough question that we have struggled with with both our kids. At the end we've reached the conclusion that we need to balance between the needs of the child and the needs of the parent.
The first 2 months after the birth we were both home, then my wife stayed for another 9 months & finally I took 1 more month of parental leave (so in total it was 1 year before starting to acclimate him to daycare).
After almost a year at home my wife needed (mentally & socially) to return to work & if we could afford to live off of her salary alone I think I would have gladly stayed at home for another 6+ months (instead of just 1).
But I don't think our kids would have been better off overall if my wife stayed for another 2 years but would have done so only out of a feeling of obligation and suffering during that time (it is VERY isolating to be a stay at home parent, even when you have contact to other parents of young children & there is a real lack of intellectual stimulation despite there constantly being work to do).
I don't have all the answers but I think it's a tough question & the balance really depends on the kids and the parents - I believe there is no "1 size fits all" solution.
> there is a real lack of intellectual stimulation despite there constantly being work to do
My wife is taking more of a leading role with our 1 year old (maybe 70/30 between her and me ... also in Germany) and she gets her mental stimulation through voraciously reading about changing dietary requirements of children as they age along with general child developmental research. In fact it is leading us to a discussion about startup opportunities.
Im glad it works for you & it's great you were able to fit the situation to your advantage & interests. But different people have different wants and needs.
In Iceland at least being a leikskoli teacher requires a degree and they are far from child storage. They work and care for the childs development. This is at least a fairly common model in Nordic countries and presume its similar in a lot of Europe.
I've heard horror stories about featureless cinder block rooms as day care in the US though.
In UK (before state mandated ages, ie 4yo) the level of care can be pretty grim, and it's often low skilled young women ([1]) - particular if you're poor yourself.
[1] because for some reason minimum wage is reduced for younger people, like young people don't need housing or food, I don't know ...
Funny, I did the same thing. Describing the Icelandic preschool system is the best way I have to blow my UK friend's minds.
"No matter where you live, your child is in the catching area for a nearby preschool and is automatically enrolled there. And it's by no means a child storage facility; the primary focus is on teaching children through play and at least half the staff have a master's degree in preschool teaching. And they're fully fed. Also, it's practically free."
Why do you assume the kindergarten teachers earn less than they would have otherwise had in a different job or less than the average parent of the kids in their group? I mean yes, I support better wages for them (jobs in education generally don't pay that great) & I'm sure people working in the financial sector earn much more but I don't think that was the alternative the common teacher had to chose from.
As I said wages are not great but they are not that far from the median. My wife (teacher in a music school) doesn't earn more than a kindergarten teacher, the advantage is mostly in economies of scale (1 teacher per 6-7 pupils vs 1 mother per 1-3 offspring).
> Why do you assume the kindergarten teachers earn less than they would have otherwise had in a different job or less than the average parent of the kids in their group?
Cause when they leave, they get jobs that earn more money.
Who leaves what job? There are plenty of kindergarten teachers who stay at that job their entire careers. If you refer to the parents, in Berlin it costs no money for the parent to send their kids to kindergarten (same as public schools).
And plenty who leaves at least around here. Those I knew personally got more money after. I can also check unemployment rates (low) and compare kindergarten salary to other jobs that hire same qualification (most of administrative work, junior tester etc).
I assume they earn less money they would otherwise, because those who left found better paid jobs without much problems.
They who work in the daycares are not a "serf class", they are paid professionals, and they don't need to have "terrible wages" in a civilized country.
>They who work in the daycares are not a "serf class", they are paid professionals
I wouldn't say 'professionals', in the United States daycare workers can expect to make a little more than minimum wage to start and might get up to 10-11$ an hour for dealing with the maximum number of kids allowed by law all day.
And unless you're talking some elite, gotta get on a waiting list and pay 30 grand a year to send one kid, anyone that passes a background check can get a job in daycare.
Sure, they don't need to have terrible wages. Do they though? Are daycare workers a healthy mix of educated men and women with a lot of other economic opportunities but choose to be daycare workers because of the pay or emotional rewards?
>Are daycare workers a healthy mix of educated men and women with a lot of other economic opportunities but choose to be daycare workers because of the pay or emotional rewards?
That's shifting the goalposts a little. Why would they need to have "a lot of other economic opportunities" anymore than tons of jobs (restaurant staff, retail employees, factory workers, truckers, etc) have?
Here in Norway daycare is an OK respectable job. Not particularly high paying but not the lowest on the scale either. A full time daycare professional can pay their rent, living expenses and travel for vacation off that.
Where I’m from (slovenia) you need to major in kindergarten education to be a kindergarten teacher. So while the major is a little limited, it’s still a bachelors.
They are professional trained, it takes 4 years to get a "puériculteur/puéricultrice" diploma in a university or equivalent. You have also nursery assistant that works under the supervision but even that need formal training + hand-on experience.
It varies a lot from country to country, but to assume that nobody would like to work with small children or that, as a parent, you would let your children under the care of untrained people is strange for me.
It's the same in Asia. It's a great way to ensure entrenched cultural norms are passed across generations. This can be positive but I'd wager it's more likely negative especially considering the lives current grandparents led.
There's no mention of the pretty pleasant 16-21 years that most Americans spend in education, compared to preindustrial labourers starting work before age 11. Or of the concept "retirement", which would have been hard for medieval peasants to imagine.
"The central message of this Economic Commentary is that the presumption of declining leisure is in fact a fallacy. Previous studies purporting to have uncovered such a fact have not adequately disentangled time spent in home production..."
15 - 21 I had at least one job, usually two, and was in school full time.
School was an additional job. School was a ladder out of devastating poverty. School was an opportunity to not be used for my base physical labor. School was hope. It was not 'Pretty Pleasant'.
Medieval peasants couldn't imagine modern dentistry either but I'm sure we have it good enough and can stop improving working conditions.
Most Americans don't have saving to handle a one time emergency, much less free capital to fully retire. A leisurely retirement sounds like a realistic proposition for a lucky few.
"pretty pleasant" - I'm glad that your educational experience was that way, but for a lot of people education is a form of work. In fact, I would bet most students would prefer work to education - and indeed many vote with their feet and drop out of education.
Heck, even on HN there are many of us who hated "education" - it wasn't pleasant at all.
As for retirement, well that's an unfair comparison, life expectancy at middle age was a lot lower in pre-industrial times, mostly as a result of poor public health knowledge and practice. Furthermore, there was de facto retirement as families and communities took care of elders - but who knows how that related to retirement today. The author of this book probably doesn't know and you certainly don't know.
The Cleveland Fed's Economic Commentary is absolutely positively not pertinent. It is comparing the 1950s to the 1980s, not pre-industrial labor to industrial labor. Did you just google "myth of XYZ" and copy and paste the first result without reading it?
And by the way, even on its own merits that Economic Commentary is pretty suspect. It doesn't look like it takes into consideration commute times, time spent shopping, time spent on administrative overheard like paying bills figuring out insurance payments and the whole host of bureaucratic non-sense that a market economy requires customers to engage - all of that is work, it's not leisure and it needs to be accounted for.
Preindustrial you didn't spend time shopping, you spent time growing your own food and preserving it. You didn't spend time figuring out insurance, because there was no health care, at all. You didn't have bills because you paid up front, or you did without.
The part about the commute though, I'll grant you that. During the last thirty five years, my commute was two and a half hours each day for eighteen years. They rest has been reasonable, but that eighteen was awful.
> the pretty pleasant 16-21 years that most Americans spend in education
From everything I've seen in the US, high school (age 14+) and college are more work than a full-time job, and many students also work a part-time job on top. I'm not sure "pretty pleasant" is quite so accurate.
Meh, I think this lacks perspective. Maybe you 'worked' less in that era in the sense that you provided a smaller portion of your time to a third party for pay. But, you worked more overall. You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner; You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer, then an hour creating clothing, then an hour cooking, then an hour mending the hole in your roof, etc.
Firstly, what are you working in exchange for? Are you performing some kind of useful work for someone else, receiving nothing in exchange then going and being a hunter gatherer for some reason? Probably not.
>You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner
Money has existed for a very long time so purchasing food ready to eat isn't so far fetched assuming your life took you near a non-trivial population center. Bartering goods like food, clothing etc has existed for even longer.
>You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer, then an hour creating clothing, then an hour cooking, then an hour mending the hole in your roof, etc.
It reads as if you are assuming that a given individual is going to have to do everything, which doesn't seem to have been the norm for most humans. Most people didn't live alone. Instead of doing all of that maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer. Meanwhile someone else created clothing, someone else cooked, someone else mended the roof.
Its also worth noting that all of these jobs have a very well defined point of being done. It doesn't matter if it takes you 2 hours or 20 minutes to acquire food. Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.
Most farmers lived on farms. They actually did have to make a lot of their stuff themselves. Yes, you had a large family, but you needed that to be able to survive.
>Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.
You would salt and preserve the meat/fish and consume it in the future.
Imagine how you would live, if you could only buy metalworks from the store. Basically everything else you'd have to make yourself.
>You would salt and preserve the meat/fish and consume it in the future.
That is very environment specific.
Depending on when/where you are salt was expensive or extremely laborious to produce. Salting, smoking etc is itself laborious, can require special purpose equipment and can take weeks. Its entirely possible that the effort to obtain the supplies and equipment to preserve your surplus food exceeds the effort to simply obtain more food in the future.
There is a reason why salting/pickling/fermentation was common in places that had winters severe enough to impact the availability of food Vs anywhere closer to the equator. People did it when they faced a large chunk of the year when starvation was a serious concern.
You should look into inflation. Most jobs pre-industrialization absolutely would not provide you food with delivery or several shirts in exchange for a couple hours of unskilled labor (which is what you can get today).
I'm not sure it's what the parent comment is doing, but it's beyond baffling to me when I see this view in the wild. You'd have to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, economics, and basic arithmetic to think that historical incomes were anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods, and yet I see this very often. (Not to be mistaken with more reasonable arguments that rely on the differences in utility derived from goods whose prices have gone down and goods afflicted by cost disease)
Well, one also has to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, culture, and social understanding, to think that historical cultural concerns where anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods and buying more stuff...
You could be perfectly content (and more happy than most office drones with 1000x the stuff) with a couple of clothe articles, food and a basic home...
> Well, one also has to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, culture, and social understanding, to think that historical cultural concerns where anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods and buying more stuff..
Uh, sure? This is a complete non sequitur, as nobody is making the claim you're describing. If you actually read my full comment, I address this directly by saying that it's a much more reasonable argument that utility from all goods isn't equally distributed and the important ones haven't gotten easier to get at the same rate as the unimportant ones.
That doesn't mean that it's not incredibly factually inaccurate to think that access to consumer goods hasn't become mind-bogglingly higher
And even if you replace "office drone stuff" with more highbrow items... You really don't need a lot of books either. I'd die an accomplished man if I grokked what's on ~2m of my modest bookshelf. Hell, if that was all what was available at me, I'd probably get there sooner.
We recently read Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods to the kids. The parents’ life was non-stop work from sun-up to sundown and beyond, and while there was some downtime in the winter, everyone was basically homebound. It did not seem like a bad life at all, but then I think there is an eternal virtue to hard work that is only tangentially related to sitting at a desk in the modern era.
I post this quote a lot, but I your point made me think of it again: "It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of society as a whole." - Ursula K LeGuin
Nobody has to like everything. I like cooking, I hate doing dishes and cleaning. I know people who hate cooking and enjoy dishes. It is good to have a mix of complementary skills and preferences in a household.
It's a hell of a thing when, as a cook, you can stand up from a good dinner you made and walk away from the mess knowing that your roommate Barry wants to have a quiet hour of not talking to anyone doing the dishes and tidying the kitchen because he has actually been looking forward to it and that's what gives him peace. The same peace I got from chopping vegetables and stirring pots.
I've even met someone who likes doing laundry! They wash and iron their own dress shirts despite being perfectly able to pay an inexpensive dry cleaner and describe it as "Cheaper than seeing a shrink".
You make it sound as if washing and ironing is a massive chore.
Let's say you have 5 shirts a week. Step 1: When you do your white wash, throw in the shirts. Hang them up afterwards. Incremental cost: 2 minutes of your time... Step 2: When you do ironing, incremental cost of 5 shirts @ 3 minutes per shirt is 15 minutes... Probably less that your two trips to the dry cleaner. Plus, nil $ cost, no plastic wrapping to throw away, no use of dry cleaning chemicals.
I recently experienced this with a specific work-related task, where I was shocked to find myself enjoying doing something that I usually hate. When I asked myself what the difference was, the only thing I could come up with was that during this particular run-through, it was the only time that I wasn't rushing through the task while thinking about what came next.
Any additional insight into what's going on here? I'd love to wield this power to help myself love other things that I hate.
There are many definitions of cooking. Do you hate cooking for thanksgiving, when step-parents are coming for supper on sunday or when you slap peanut butter on loaves of bread ?
This seems counter-intuitive, if you consider the work choices throughout history. People who had no choice did all the "direct benefit" work (cooking, cleaning, etc) whereas those with money engaged in a bunch of pursuits with no clear benefits, just for the sake of it: science, theoretical math, philosophy, art, etc. Often the fruits of their work only came after their deaths.
No, they really worked less hours including those things, and it has been studied a lot. In fact, a lot of the work was those things precisely.
(Not that there's anything great to come home dead tired from a 10 hour day at the office + commute, and then have the "amazing" convenience to "order food for dinner").
You can still see it in societies that don't have our lifestyles. Go to a blue zone like in Ikaria (where people live in much longer age than average, often reaching 90-100). People tend to their farms some time of the season, do things leisurely, take noon naps, stay up late with friends to eat and drink (late as in, 2-3 am is not uncommon), and so on. Giving less fucks seems a major factor in those "blue zones" (I've also researched a similar one in Italy).
Heck, several french farmers have told me how their grown children in supposedly fancy city jobs (programming, banking, etc) work twice as much as they ever did, and still have a less enjoyable lifestyle.
French farmers and farmers in the EU have a lot of support from the CAP (subsidy). Having said that there are a lot of pressures suicides etc farming Is not some dream job.
That is not universally true. I would much rather work (at my employer) than do household stuff. I like to cook but I still by the pre-planned bags with recipes since I don't like the planning part. But I pay someone else to clean my home since i rather work.
May be same could be said of your perspective and the comment thereof. It’s all relative. Your idea of you and you working is totally relative too. You are nothing but a collection of cells which never stop working until they all do together. By that logic nobody ever had free time.
To make it more concrete, I strongly suspect that pre-industrial people did not have any leisure equivalent activity to the five hours a day that the average American spends watching TV.
Remember that people didn’t really have money. Most folks subsisted or tended a few animals.
Capitalism wasn’t a thing, and the society was fundamentally different. People were in caste like social strata and did what they were supposed to do, no more.
it's not only due to the work but to the solitude as well. there used to be 70% of the population, men and women farming and living in farming communities, now only 3%, mostly men, actually working and not many people around
In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.
And this is why scarcities of necessities (housing in particular) must be manufactured - to keep people competing with each other to see who can best make investors wealthy that they might be rewarded with the ability to barely able afford a decent home (after signing away their liberty for 30 years of course)
In America, at least, we should consider the legacy of slavery and indentured servitude in attitudes towards working hours. Many of the expectations for economic output by American industry have been set by the productivity of people who had little or no right to question the conditions they worked under, overseen by people who cared little for their well-being beyond that productivity. If that's the basis of the American work ethic, no wonder your boss looks at you like you're crazy when you say you'd like to be able to live comfortably on 30 hours of labor a week.
There are plenty bosses like this in Germany, which doesn't have as much of a history of slavery.
I'd wager that when looking at countries with roughly the same level of industrialization, whether humans view fellow humans as something more than mere resources is linked to a certain set of attitudes.
I'd guess that reduced working hours are positively correlated to pluralism and pacifism, and perhaps negatively correlated to religiousness.
The more you think that life ought to be lived a certain way, the more likely you are to see work as a savior from straying from that way.
Looking at countries that have severely mistreated minorities, natives or remote people might also reveal a correlation, the more so the less this is part of the public consciousness.
Just an anecdote from quitting yesterday at a German IG-Metall company:
Yesterday I quitted my working student job in order to precipitately take the opportunity for an internship at another company.
My boss congratulated me for the offer, said it's a pity that I leave AND
spoke with HR so that I do have a shorter period of notice (otherwise I would have had problems).
All on the same day.
While accompanying me on my way out he said that especially with students, he invests in people. The doors are always open and he would be glad to see me there again.
In fact, he recommended a former student worker to join another company before graduation in order to have a better looking CV.
Im kinda blown away by this non-selfish (in a company's view) behaviour and strongly consider to rejoin at some point.
I received a similar experience choosing an offer from a different tech company over staying at my current one in the US. I could still easily return today even though it’s been three years.
Only stupid companies get angry at employees lured away by others.
If the behavior is rewarded, it is not altruistic but self-interested, which is the true nature of things that capitalism rewards. It is not true in the general case that altruism aligns with self-interest, which is precisely the problem with capitalism.
> It is not true in the general case that altruism aligns with self-interest
Actually, it is true. Treating your customers, employees and associates results in them wanting to do business with you, which increases profits. Treat them badly, they go away and deal with someone else.
Put simply, you aren't going to go the extra mile for someone you hate.
> There are plenty bosses like this in Germany, which doesn't have as much of a history of slavery.
Excuse me? My grandma was a slave worker in Germany. Kidnapped from the streets of Warsaw and forcefully moved to Southwest Germany to work for a rich farmer.
I purposefully wrote "not as much of", because NS-Zwangsarbeit was indeed massive.
It happened in the main part from 1939-1945, with a total of 8 million people enslaved at one point or another.
On the other hand, US slavery went on for three centuries, with a peak number of 4 million slaves and also about 8 million affected in total.
The time scale is why I think there is a major difference, both in terms of life years stolen as well as in terms of possible social and cultural adaptation or accustomizaton to slavery, the latter being the point of the OP.
Oh man, either you have a completely different experience than me or you don't know what it's like working elsewhere.
I'm Israeli & spent the last 6 years living in Germany. I lived in Austria for 8 years before that. Israel is quite a dog-eat-dog hyper-capitalism kind of economy, maybe not to the wild extent of the US but definitely closer to it than to Germany & Austria (the two countries have very similar culture/attitudes in this particular area).
While there are plenty of asshole bosses here, the kind of attitude common in hyper-capitalist countries is not comparable. Even the assholes will not dare publicly espouse the kind of Libertarian anti-working-class vitriol in a Berlin working place (or even outside of it).
How often did you hear your German boss say that the state should not offer welfare as it's just supporting laziness? Or that "taxes are theft"? That whatever work "the free market" doesn't directly support via consumers spending money should not exist (e.g. publicly funded theatre)?
Maybe anti-poor is a better description? Could also be that I only notice the assholes and the milder form of libertarians just don't stick out as much :)
No. Libertarians are against any sort of class system (i.e. legal privileges for certain groups). They are neither anti-rich nor anti-poor. Of course, there are libertarians who are jerks, but that isn't what Libertarianism is about. Also, most people only hear about Libertarianism from non-Libertarians, hence they only hear negative things about it.
Libertarianism is mainly about people being free to choose, and being responsible for their choices, as long as they aren't hurting others in the process.
Milton Friedman's book "Free to Choose" is a good introduction if you're interested in more.
The process of making sure people aren't hurting others is called "government" and "regulation", which self-professed Libertarians appear to be against. They say things like "the FDA is stupid, the free market will sort it out" - when the FDA was created because the free market was killing people.
Vis a vis classism, if you refuse to regulate and allow everyone to be "free to choose", you are essentially advocating a dog-eat-dog world where people with money and power consolidate more and more of it. This is "feudalism" and it generally results in a raw deal for the poor.
>Milton Friedman's book "Free to Choose" is a good introduction if you're interested in more.
At some point you have to acknowledge the irony at refusing to see Libertarianism as anti-poor ideology, while simultaneously pointing people to a man who worked (and trained others to work with at the University if Chicago) far right dictators like Pinochet.
(Ironically, you say Libertarian Friedman supported far right dictator Pinochet and the other reply says Libertarianism is for no government at all. Clearly something is amiss with these two criticisms of Libertarianism.)
Eh, I’ll take Allende’s ambassador, Orlando Letelier’s, word on the matter over a bunch of apologists on a subreddit (who largely and laughably quote what Friedman and his buddies said was there involvement). Letelier was killed by agents of Pinochet for saying as much:
It seems a wrong conflation of Libertarianism and Anarchism.
I already pointed you to one of Allende’s chief advisors identifying Friedman as providing the direct, ideological grounding for the Chilean coup, so I’m not sure what more evidence you want.
What Friedman said in his speeches and wrote in books is not the sum total of his work and ideology. There’s also what he did, who he allied himself with, etc. He was remarkably consistent in denouncing his detractors as part of a “communist conspiracy,” while at the same time being remarkably callous about things like the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Tiennamen Square massacre. So I find appeals to him as some undaunted supporter of “freedom” specious at best.
> I already pointed you to one of Allende’s chief advisors identifying Friedman as providing the direct, ideological grounding for the Chilean coup, so I’m not sure what more evidence you want.
Something from Friedman himself, not filtered through hearsay. Friedman has a very large body of work you can draw from. If he's a fascist, you should be able to find it in that work.
I don’t think Friedman was a fascist. I think he was a sophist who had no problem working with or lending support to fascists when he thought it served his interests and ingratiated him to him to elites in the economic and political milieu in which he operated.
Again, on the one hand you have someone who fled Chile and was murdered by the Pinochet regime and someone who flew into give speeches and pal around with the junta. I’m sorry if I weigh the account of the former more than that of the latter.
Again, your information is hearsay. I'm asking you if you have any words from Friedman's mouth or his typewriter. If he was the terrible person you say he was, there should be plenty in a lifetime of output from him.
Besides, do you really believe someone could talk with Pinochet for 45 minutes and thereby turn him into a monster? It's not credible. It's more likely Pinochet used Friedman for propaganda value, and stroked Friedman's ego. People who run governments tend to be users and tend to be masters at stroking ego.
I once had a conversation with a Senator whom I despised. He was incredibly charming in person. I can easily see falling under the spell of someone like that.
Frankly, you don't like libertarianism, which is your choice, but if this 45 minute conversation with Pinochet (for which no transcript exists) is all you have, it isn't much of anything.
I still think it's ironic that libertarianism's detractors claim it's both about no government at all and oppressive, authoritarian regimes. Clearly both positions can't be right, and likely neither.
Let's first get everyone on an even playing field. 40 hours is a laughable suggestion to many workers right now. If you could promise every worker that they have to work 40 hours a week for the rest of their life but that OT was forever banned after, I don't think you'd hear many complaints ever again.
Some might want to earn more money so they can retire earlier. Others might actually like their jobs. I've seen people work 10-20 hours more regularly without anyone asking them to.
You haven't worked on the line or a traditional factory job then? There are a lot of "practices" to power game your pay by working in such a way to ensure there is Overtime or to optimise your piece rate.
For example in the UK don't post a first class letter on Friday as work is deliberately kept back to ensure there is OT at the weekend.
This is a boatload of pop culture brainwashed hullabaloo spewed by a foreigner.
The basis of the American work ethic is in dreaming. Clearly, you've chosen to disregard the centuries of European, African, Oriental and S./Central American slavery, ritual sacrifice, imperialism and almost constant war and subjugation.
But, you know - the intentional racism instilled by the English must be the lingering driver of American commerce and ambition.
I'm an American. Pretending that New World slavery was not of a different, more brutal character than others is a white supremacist talking point and I'm not really here for it. Try something else.
Sure, many spend 8 hours at the office. But do they do 8 hours of work? Probably not. There are diminishing returns on time spent working, and it probably starts around the third hour.
I don't disagree with you. The average eight hour office worker probably only does do four hours of work a day. But I think the problem is that that nearly everyone has internalized that cadence.
If every office worker had their schedule cut to a 20 hours a week, I strongly suspect that only 10 hours of work would actually get done. It's just too much of the low efficiency is culturally ingrained on every level from the cultural to the organizational. It would probably take a generation for things to change.
I beg to differ. Everywhere I've worked, people have despised the waiting built into the processes they have to conform to. Many roles are constructed so that they're actually two roles: one is pure productivity, with clear goals and deadlines. The other is some sort of service role where you're at the beck and call of clients who could waltz in whenever, defined less by your productivity than by your availability (which is always meant to keep you in an workplace for 6+ hours). Switching between roles is aggravating; effectiveness at one kills the other, to some degree. Most would rather just do one at a time, and be paid for either the time sacrificed or the work completed, at a dignified rate.
But that would cut into C-suite bonuses and dividends.
> But that would cut into C-suite bonuses and dividends.
I beg to differ. I think, the mixture of work items as you describe is solely motivated on fear that employees may produce less if not under 8hours control in open plan office. The fear however may not have anything to do with the reality.
This article isn't about office workers. It's about workers. Laborers are doing 8+ hour days, too, and they would not be equally productive in half the time. There's a reason it tends to pay by the hour.
Let's compare apples to apples. Office jobs didn't exist in the medieval period, but labor jobs still exist today.
Cut the shifts in half and people work less individually while more people overall have job opportunities. As a benefit, working shorter shifts would result in more rested workers who would theoretically be more productive or at least have less chance of mistakes.
This would either halve incomes or double labor costs. Any improvements in individual productivity would be offset by the new logistical nightmare (especially for knowledge workers) of coordinating with twice as many team members to accomplish the same amount of work.
This seems like a recipe for skyrocketing costs.
But those were the people that could actually read and write. Most people were illiterate. Only those privileged with status and wealth could have access to reading materials (and they would be the only people that would even desire them), and they were only men.
The small number is irrelevant. The OP said office jobs did not exist in medieval times. This is quite clearly an incorrect statement. I am perfectly happy to debate whether pointing this out is relevant to the point being made, but I stand by my assertion.
With coders, that's clearly not the case right? Coding requires immersion. Same person working on same thing 60 hours per week will make a lot more progress per hour than if he worked 20 hours.
In the freelance world, this is name of the game: recruiters want people to work as much per week as possible for this reason, freelancers want to work as little as possible (that improves their skills quicker by working on many things at same time, plus provides job security of having 3-4 clients at same time so they are unlikely to all fire at same time).
Some kinds of coding do benefit from lack of interruption, so that's can be an argument for very focused work. But one way coding is different than, say, factory work or service work, is that our errors accumulate. It takes just seconds to put a bug in, but hours or days to take it out again. So anybody working long enough to get tired will very quickly hit diminishing returns. There's a nice presentation on this from a while back: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...
I also have come to be suspicious of the "hyperfocus for many hours to get large amounts of state into my head" approach to coding. Code I have to be extremely clever to write usually ends up being a giant pain in the ass to maintain. These days I think it's better to use things like unit tests, pair programming, and very frequent releases to get things done.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber. He goes into detail on why and how people have so much work to do yet so little of it translates into practical or social value.
I'm not waiting for society to change to live a better, more normal life, I've already abandoned the classic work sphere and its crazy carousel, and it has a long time since I have accepted it.
All those findings done in that research confirms a lot of how I'm feeling already.
It's true that I don't "see" as many people as people who work, so I socialize less and I don't meet many people, but:
* I learned that having several friends can be "come and go", it's not an essential part of life (like many people would pretend), and many people told me it can be difficult to keep having those friends. Friendships can be hard work. Introversion is not a flaw.
* I realize that work won't necessarily improve your social life, a lot of the time it can make it worse.
Work is never forced, there are welfare programs and other way to sustain yourself, and once you realize that people who work 40 hours a week consent to it, it allows you to benefit from the mainstream belief that work matters. If you think about it, nobody will send you to prison or punish you for not working. Most people go to work because it's a habit, because they want to see and talk to their colleagues.
The article argues that even when they had a chance to work more they didn't. Maybe they were all being shortsighted, or maybe that happened in a brief climactic golden age.
42 hours in Switzerland is IMHO a lie. I’ve seen and experienced tech and pharma setting expectations so high that people have to work at least 50-60 hours.
Don't you have anything like the Working Time Directive? I know Switzerland is not an EU member but then neither is Norway but we adhere to it as part of the obligations that we have regarding access to the Single Market.
Access to opportunities for more income also didn't exist either. The article specifically references serfs(!!!), possibly the most difficult economic class to escape, as the example.
Cars, computers, phones, and health insurance also didn't exist back then, and neither did social mobility.
Give people visible improvements to quality of living and also the opportunities to attain them and it seems logical to me that people on average would work more, not less.
Note that I am one of those people who would predict that UBI would not reduce people propensity to work because it just doesn't make sense economically. I think most people's utility curves want the benefits of extra income OVER the benefit of leisure. It's security over enjoyment, which is not out of the ordinary for human value functions.
> Give people visible improvements to quality of living and also the opportunities to attain them and it seems logical to me that people on average would work more, not less.
this is not how it happened and quality of life is not an objective measure.
factory owners needed workers so they lobbied to have common land used for grazing and growing crops to be grabbed by land owners and forced people into cities to fill factories with cheap labour.
Natalie put her hands up. "You know, I've heard the term 'tragedy of the commons' like a thousand times and I've never actually looked it up. What is it? Something to do with poor people being tragic?"
"That's commoners," Hubert, Etc said. Something was awake and loose inside him now. He wanted to kick the pizza off the coffee table and use it for a stage. "Commons. Common land that belongs to no one. Villages had commons where anyone could bring their livestock for a day's grazing. The tragedy part is that if the land isn't anyone's, then someone will come along and let their sheep eat until there's nothing but mud. Everyone knows that that bastard is on the way, so they might as well be that bastard. Better that sheep belonging to a nice guy like you should fill their bellies than the grass going to some selfish dickhead's sheep."
"Sounds like bullshit to me."
"Oh, it is," Hubert, Etc said. The thing was moving in his guts, setting his balls and face tingling. "It's more than mere bullshit. It's searing, evil, world-changing bullshit. The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn't to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren't overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone's, because once he's running it for profit, he'll take exquisite care to generate profit forever."
"That's the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because, that way they'll make sure they're better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story."
That mostly meant rising earlier, with the light, rather than the arbitrary hours of today enabled by artificial light. Only during the depths of winter or those in the most northern or southern latitudes had appreciable shortening.
"Consider a typical working day in the medieval period. It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as the Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent - called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner."
I would argue it's a flawed thinking then. If you are required to be there for 16 hours, even if you work only every second hour, I consider it 16 hours of work - you cannot do anything in between anyway. It's a bit like your if job is to sell cars and your boss only counts your time when there is a customer there and you are talking to him.
Well work is done more or less to pay for the interest, that is created on top of the money, that is also created out of thin air. That is why politicians keep talking about more jobs, because people need to pay the interests on government loans. More work, more taxes.
How production has been automated for 100 years we should be working 1 day a week. No such luck. We work for 5 days and some pedo looks after our kids in the mean time.
So soon we work for 6 days a week and still get the mandatory "unforeseen" market crash every 10 years, so that what ever we can save up can be transferred to the banks&corps.
Just waiting for the big crash to come and us moving into cashless society. I bet it comes around 2021 and get rid of Dollars&Euros. You behave or you don't eat. Everybody is chipped and talking against the government is considered "domestic terrorism" like the FBI already announced.
This new electronic currency is backed by gold that they have taken from WTC, Libya, Egypt and Iraq. There is still time, so add Syria and Iran to that list.
If you still live in the "matrix" this all sounds a like wild conspiracy theory to you, but you will eventually see it. Maybe it is too late then.
I wonder how much more egalitarian forms of government are a factor.
If you have a fixed amount of land to farm, there's only so much work you can do. If you give the king or the bishop your excess crops, there's only so much motivation to work.
Whereas with good abstractions and maintainability, software can grow the pie/field significantly. It's not completely irrespective of hours and is totally contextual to how innovative/novel the challenge is. But there's still the potential for a multiplier that doesn't exist in farming, short of biological breakthroughs.
I feel there is an implicit assumption in the article, which is that work time is defined as time that you give away from your life to serve someone else. What if work time was more like a paid hobby or time spent with like-minded adults on intellectually stimulating topics?
Surely I don't like all aspects of my work and surely there are rainy days, but on average I like my work. I like the people I meet at work, the challenges that work exposes me to. My boss often asks me for favours ("can you take this customer call during holidays"), but also makes sure that the emotional account is balanced ("you want more salary or an extra holiday?"). Also, the so-called 40-hours week includes coffee breaks and 1 hour per week of sports (I'm living in Sweden).
I see nothing wrong with people working long hours assuming they do it because they want to, not because they have to. I would much rather like to compare the number of hours people had to work in pre-industrial times (which is likely 100% of their work time) compared to today.
> called to a halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also midmorning and midafternoon refreshment breaks.
They didn't exactly have a choice with the food. It's needed if you genuinely spend a hard day working. People used to make drinks for laborers containing things like molasses here in the US.
I admit we've lost the afternoon nap, but I'm not sure why. It does happen elsewhere. The China office at previous job worked long hours and all napped at their desks in the afternoon.
If you look at hours per worked per family, things have gotten even way worse since woman were drafted en mass into the salaried workforce post ww2, going from a 40hr week to well over 70hrs.
It may be "work" but it's not the same work. Your boss is your family and its well-being when you do housework. It's not the same as someone who doesn't care about you.
I hate housework WAY more than “work work”. At least work has the possibility of being something new/interesting rather than the grinding tedium of washing the same plates, floors, furniture and clothes day after day after day.
I specifically mentioned 'salaried' work, as monetary income has a direct impact on prices. 2 salaries is now expected and often required for many families.
Not to mention that the work that had previously been the full time focus of the stay-at-homer (cleaning house, gardening, doing dishes, grocery shopping, misc shopping, cooking breakfast, preparing work lunch, preparing dinner) is still being done. Only now it’s being done after traditional working hours or on weekends.
>If you look at hours per worked per family, things have gotten even way worse since
No, they've got markedly better because of child labor laws. Kids during pre-industrial revolution time periods didn't just go of to daycare, football camp, elementary school... they did as much work as they were capable alongside their parents.
In fact, this still happens to some extent even in the United States on family owned farms. Once you're old enough to handle chores, you're out there mucking stalls or feeding horses/chickens/pigs, then when you're older and more capable you are driving equipment, mending fence, replacing fence posts, moving hay, servicing equipment.
For an easy look at this, just do a Google dive into FFA (Future Farmers of America). 670k kids across the country doing their various farming activities with the motto "Learning to Do, Doing to Learn, Earning to Live, Living to Serve"
"One day's work was considered half a day, and if a serf worked an entire day, this was counted as two days-works." I've been saying this for years with programming and tickets! 4 hours a day is a full days work. If you can get a 4 hour ticket done each day you are right on pace. If you can get two 4 hour tickets done in one day, that's double pace!
This article is somewhat surprising. It does not seem to account for variation in the intensity of work at different times, for example planting and harvest. At those times it's hard to imagine that people worked anything less than dawn to dusk to ensure they had food for the next year.
> Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.
I think the point the above poster is making is that "working hours" logged in these sources are very vague. Does the "175 days" in the English manor mean that these people had free time for the rest of the year? Or did the go and work second or third jobs to get by? Remember, only have the manor's records.
They had other gods to serve besides Mammon, and that was part of public life. Today, the only god left to be taken seriously, is Mammon. Serving him earns you respect. Every other deity, pity at best.
People have realized that the revolutions to overthrow the old order were advocated by merchants and finance. The dystopian hell we live in now is the result of avarice being turned into a virtue.
I have talked to relatives who, in living memory, established and ran farms on the plains. Sod huts, the whole deal. They worked way more than 40 hours a week. A 40 hour week would likely have led to loss of everything or maybe even death. Even after mechanization, a 40 hour week was not in the picture.
Factory workers used to work 6 12 hour days. Then 5 12 hour days. Then 5 10 hour days. Now, more like 5 8 hour days.
We live better than kings and plutocrats did 100 years ago, with luxuries undreamed of in history, and with amazing freedoms.
It seems like they’re just excluding domestic labor from their calculus. The fact that people had breaks from farming tasks doesn’t mean they were filling that time with medieval Netflix.
I believe at the height of Imperial Rome, workers almost had one day off for every day worked. The Romans did use a lot of space labor, so that may also have something to do with it.
Imperial Rome enslaved the martians, and as a result creates an entire lower caste of space laborers. Over time they could not adapt to earth and their species went extinct. This resulted in the dark ages.
The author clearly misses the mark. Not all hours are created equal.
Or is it physical labor under the sun, constant exposure to the elements or a furnace more "leisurely" ...than sitting on a desk with air conditioning?
This kind of comparison is exactly what gets you into financial crisis. Reading the data is only 1 side of the equation. Understanding its implications is, sadly, a major failing of most academics outside of risk management
it is a shell game. I spent the best years of my life, my 20s and early 30s, building a career that was formidable and lauded by peers and colleagues, in a contracting industry. a nervous breakdown from work/life dysfunction led me to graduate studies in contemplative Tibetan Buddhist psychology. I have not worked a day in five years. there are mediating circumstances of privilege, position and inherited /accumulated wealth that have permitted me to choose not to partake in the power-oriented dynamics and economics of the modern "free market" wherein one has no choice but to subjugate free will unto the institutionalized corporation (at center of Western life) and its requisition of children consumers--who lack free will or organized behavioral/stimulus response to reject consumerization behavior mod. Therein the slaves remain working for unseen pharaohs and praying for unnecessary Saviors.
I think a big part of the blame is the promulgation of Calvinism and it's "work ethic" by early industrialists. It was also used as justification for removing access to common land under the guise of building the character of a "lazy" population by forcing them into cities and factories to fulfil labour shortages
I was lucky enough to get 4 months severance once - thanks you stronger New York labor laws, and I took 3 of those months off. I have to say, going to back to a 10 to 6:30 gig was torture. I am still not recovered from it. Once you see the Matrix, the day to day slog to your retirement becomes meaningless. Don't enter the Matrix.
I can measure my output quite effectively and could, if allowed by my boss, adjust my hours to ensure some constant level
of output - ie work less when Inwas being more productive.
However my boss cannot measure that output - it's generally too complex, too uncertain too ... software-y
Until we fix that, which is possible, we are stuck with "work 8 hours"
Your boss cannot measure that, I would argue, because he's incompetent (assessing progress of subordinate is a primary management function)
As a boss myself, if my developers finish early, they are free to go. I can read their code and pull requests, I know who is pulling their weight.
When I worked at Google, all of my bosses (including project managers) could read code at a superficial level, and accurately assess progress, so it's certainly not unique to my org.
1. The work is never finished. As such no matter how productive you are or not there is more to do. So when do you say "Ok go home early?"
2. My view of productive may differ from my boss - and that gets further afield as the hierarchy goes up - so let's say you were working on Google+ (insert corporate white elephant) - no matter how productive you were in the small, it was ultimately a waste.
3. Output can be measured by reading code, yes absolutely- but it can also be measured by outcome of code (ie the report now runs five tones faster)
these last two is measurement by value - and that gets hairy.
So it's not quite "pointy haired boss" is bad
So does google allow folks to go home early? it is that like the "as much holiday as you like" uncertainty ploy?
No, my developers have a list of tasks to do for the day, and if they finish it, I let them go home. It's that simple.
If you keep pushing work onto developers forever then you're rewarding hard work by giving them more work causing incentive mismatches.
This only works if management has the ability to evaluate the work by reading the code. I can spot when something has a bug in it just by reading the code, I can spot when an interface boundary has been designed badly, and I can spot when there's problems. I can evaluate my developers results, and I can evaluate the developers themselves.
So you hire good developers who have the right attitude and don't game the system for their own benefit, fire the under performers, then everyone goes home at 1PM on friday because their work is done and they are proud of what they built.
Lots of developers might find it hard to believe that everyone wouldn't just do something quickly and go home early, but thats because most developers are near burnout and they just need a break. If you give them 2-3 very light months of work, they recover and then start enjoying their work again ... then nobody games the system and puts their best foot forward.
I also think measuring by value is particularly difficult. How do you compare complicated solutions against elegant solutions when the elegant solution is so nice it makes the problem look trivial?
If anyone has read "Walden Two" by B.F. Skinner, it promotes an interesting premise of work that is assigned based on how tasteful or distasteful it is. For example, gardening only counts for 0.25 credits per hour, while cleaning counts for more.
Also, all workers are assigned a small portion of manual labor to stay in shape.
I don't quite understand why anyone considers it a good idea to drive to their destination, by looking in the back mirror and arguing about what they see in there.
Maybe we should have a look at who's behind the wheel and where they're driving us.
I think this whole x hours per week system is completely flawed. If I can deliver the same amount of value in 20 hours, why would I have to work for 20 more hours and all profits go to my boss and nothing to me?
Slavery isn't abolished, you've just stopped recognising it. was an ad for a local SUV over a decade ago.
- Spending is good for Capitalism
-- Spending on products with short-life is even better
--- Everyday dependency on short-life products is a gold-mine.
Break nation in to major groups based on colour, religion, language, jobs, social status. Break each group into families, families into nuclear & nuclear into individuals. Coz, "I'm Unique" is the best catalyst for consumerism. "I did it my way", reminds us so.
Growing population is the best reinforcement out there for consumerism.
BUT, Democratic-Republics & Capitalism are best out there for people in general.
We accept long working hours coz, we're chasing a dream; sadly a dream aptly set by others. But, most likely we're in debt; monetary advances we received to chase our/their dreams.
make a list of things you own that you haven't used over a month; you might want to share them with others if you don't like long working hours
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
On the other hand, I read that archaeologists have studied the bones of American colonists and found evidence of very hard labor. They didn't live very long, either.
"Wage slave" is a term that should return to the popular vernacular. It very accurately describes the relationship most Americans have with employment.
Poverty is usually measured relatively to the perceived average of your environment’s wealth because that is how poverty affects your life.
You can be 100 times as rich as some poor soul in a third world country and still be so poor in your own society that you are constantly struggling, fighting for survival, skipping meals and inheriting that struggle to your kids who are born into them without much chances of getting out.
This could be because the poor soul can maybe life decently within their society off a hundreth of the cost you have (sometimes you even just need to be a good hunter and be able to build some shelter).
The average societal wealth definition of poor used in sociology is not without critics of course, but you can ask yourself if 30 times the income buys 30 times as much rent today and helps you to sustain 30 times as many families (all costs and benefits considered). The income gap between rich and poor is higher today than it ever was under any industrial rule — I wish I’d be able to share your optimism, but considering the average top manager’s salery (including bonuses for failing upwards and fucking shit up) my optimism about the altruistic nature of today’s wealth distribution seems to vanish just a little too quickly..
We’re arguing semantics, but if a working poor in the US has to work 50 hour weeks and 3 jobs (due to low status maybe —- livable income but high costs for transport, rent, debt and healthcare ect) to get food and shelter, that’s still poverty. A farmer in Eastern Europe could have much more freedom over their life while still earning less in absolute terms.
There’s no inherent reason why relative low status has to turn into slavery in practice, that’s a choice made by society.
The question of absolute material wealth is still relevant and interesting, but it is mostly a different question.
I didn’t come up with that definition of poverty, it is the definition used by UNICEF,
UNDP (The United Nations Children's Fund) and the OECD.
And there certainly is discussion about that definition, but other poverty definitions also fail to capture certain aspects of poverty (e.g. the World Bank’s poverty line).
It isn’t status, when bith of your parents work full time and you still don’t get to eat on the last days of the week. That is poverty.
First of all, I don't know why we're discussing the word "poverty". I talked about "30x the income", never mentioned "poverty".
But let's talk about the word.
By the UNICEF/UNDP/etc definition of "poverty", poverty can never be eradicated. There will always be people below average, as any math teacher can explain to you.
In a "Richistan" society comprised only of dollar millionaires and billionaires, the least wealthy millionaires will be living in "poverty".
> It isn’t status, when both of your parents work full time and you still don’t get to eat on the last days of the week. That is poverty.
...but now you've jumped to absolute poverty measures! Those "Richistan poor" could easily dine in fine restaurants every day.
And I invite you to ask yourself why UNICEF uses “my” definition.
I nowhere said that I don’t see that definition without problems or that I wholeheartedly stand behind it. Another definition used by the World Bank is the poverty line, which fails to capture other aspects of poverty (e.g. two parents with full time jobs unable to pay the rent in a rich society).
The definitions of poverty are a huge topic in sociology and economy and if you feel they misrepresent reality, go ahead and make a better one.
> That's not really true. Once you exclude people who died in childhood the average life expectancy shoots up.
An entertaining use of the word "true".
Yes, if you exclude a lot of the data, the average changes :)
Sarcasm aside, that is an important point in average life span statistics, but doesn't change the point that preindustrial life was "Nasty, brutish and short", as the old saying goes.
Also, 1850s England was the richest place on earth, almost a century into industrialism. Already a vastly elevated existence compared to our "natural state".
Your own numbers say that the richest population in the world in 1850 - way into industrialization - died at 55 on average, after ignoring child mortality. Which BTW means they watched maybe 1/4 of their children die.
If any population lived like that today, their lives would certainly be called nasty, brutish and short.
OK, the nasty and brutish part might not have been huge.
Modern medicine is great, but it turns out to not add that many years to our life spans. Mostly money does. Or more likely, the healthy lives money buys.
Put in other words, it's much better to not get sick than to have great health care!
(I'm not just bullshitting here, this is what the data shows (not that I have any links with proofs to show (so feels free to not believe this :)))
Maybe? It depends on whether that extra income makes people happier. I know people struggling to get buy on $4-500k/year. And I know people who live happily on a much smaller amount.
For me, the marginal value of a dollar diminishes pretty quickly, so the extra effort typical of the American schedule is definitely not worth it to me.
...what? Almost all of that 30x is because of better technology, not the number of hours. We could switch to something like 32 hour weeks, 40 work weeks per year, and still have a truly enormous GDP.
The value of extra income drops the more you have. All else equal, more money per hour should decrease the number of hours worked. The biggest exception is when you're taking advantage of a great deal to save up now and retire or half-retire early, but even that is still reducing your lifetime average work hours per year.
Humanity is stupendously rich, by the standards of all previous generations, and yet most of us work like crazy, certainly including many of the richest ones.
Or maybe we're talking about slightly different things?
I don't think this is about "your employer owning you". I also don't think this is about capitalism (which is just private property, economic freedom, and a government to enforce those two things). Instead, I think the pressure to work so much comes from society, which wields incredible control over all of us.
More specifically, I believe that the 40-hour work-week is a consequence of the ascension of wealth creation as the primary goal of our societies. Past civilizations, rich and poor, did not see the creation of wealth as their raison d'etre. Modern civilizations do and, as a result, we're sacrificing everything else (autonomy, privacy, free time, family, etc) at the altar of wealth-creation.
It's not all bad: wealth makes people's lives better. But there are downsides (like overwork, the feeling that you have no control over your life, the feeling that your life lacks meaning, lack of meaningful social relationships, and so on).
I'm borrowing this argument from Hannah Arendt. I find her incredibly convincing: she sees this whole process as having kicked off with the Reformation, which resulted in the expropriation of ecclesiastical property in Europe that had been serving as the commons. Since then, we've never had much of a commons and wealth creation has slowly become the primary goal.
An owners only real goal (sometimes enshrined in law!) is to increase private profits for himself.
At a certain point you run out of ways to do with for a single product or service so you're left with reduction of labor to lower margins. So in a way we can consider this article to be a very clear documentation of what people mean when they say capitalism is "efficient."
I have a hobby: when I meet Americans I'm starting to tell them how lazy we Europeans tackle working. I mean the work / life balance for us means nothing since we do life first then work.
And I'm telling them another thing: for me it seems in America everybody is working. The president, the millionaire, the middle and lower classes. Nobody does the `healthy meaninglessness`.
Of course all these are friendly provocations. What surprises me is the cognitive dissonance they cause.
On the topic of "healthy meaninglessness" and somewhat related to the discussions around Universal Basic Income, I think Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" is a mandatory read.
Common usage indicates that "than us" is just fine. Remember English grammar doesn't come from a grammar book - grammar books are merely imperfect attempts to describe common English usage.
Carl Sagan did, I recall a quote of his talking about the composition of the brain and he says something along the lines of "to consider that we live in a universe which permits the construction of biological machines as intricate and as subtle as we"
EDIT: These downvotes confuse me. It is a matter of fact that there exists an entire non-trivial linguistic school of thought which holds a belief completely incompatible with what GP just presented as more or less indisputable. GP's authoritative tone is unjustified, regardless of which camp you happen to agree with.
If I was to visualize a Venn Diagram of people who write articles such as this on mit.edu and the people reading them, and my other circle being people who get the short end of the stick of capitalism, I see very little overlap.
It's true there are skilled workers that love what they do, and their jobs allow them to exert influence -- so they are motivated to work long hours (versus, say, a worker assembling widgets on a factory line).
Something about that dichotomy of the people who have the luxury of choosing how much to work, writing about how we work longer, is something I find interesting. The management class of workers are the ones who have the most influence on the working hours of an organization's individual contributors.
And every year 4% of them died from measles, and every now and then half would die from a pandemic. In between pandemics their growth and mental development would usually be stunted, to some degree, by malnutrition.
This explains the system of values that revolve around it, such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time.
The servant was not expected to leave its master, that was not OK.
Or that you are expected to be available at all times, even though the contract only mentions 40h, and that is perfectly OK and even interiorized as acceptable by most people, which will even go to the extent of defending that state of affairs.
What I see in the workforce is a desperate need for people to continuously prove the need for their own role, as automation and informatization eat away more an more jobs.
It's a game of face time, who sends most emails past midnight, and who is willing to sell more of their personal life and squeeze other people out of theirs, often to do "important" tasks that are often completely unnecessary.
I had a couple of jobs where I was working overtime, running for deadlines all the time, sending emails left an right, meetings, you name it. One day I had enough and I left, and to my surprise, I was never replaced :-)