Before you all get your panties in a twist, I know it’s technically not true.
That link is an unsourced opinion piece on a site belonging to something called the Adam Smith Institute. I’m gonna need something a bit more credible before I believe it tbh.
The Adam smith institute is a right wing free market think tank with likely very questionable donors. wiki It likely doesn’t really do research but takes sources that support their preexisting believes and retells them.
Certainly it was at least very hard to make the capitalist exploitation of the worker so all encompassing before the invention of the mechanical watch (Although there was likely a ton of housework and the general situation was garbage what with feudal lords and all that) . It then likely exploded with the industrial revolution and at least in places where the working class managed to emancipate themselves got somewhat cut back. Now especially for countries outside of the west and increasingly also the US and parts of EU it’s likely getting worse, especially with multi employment and precarious employment(gig work, semi self employment, 0h contracts, mechanical turk …).
Generally i feel work where you or your peers get to keep the total output of your work isn’t really a problem, it’s a problem when your work gets appropriated into this terrible machine and as a result you are alienated from the work.
Adam Smith Institute
I always find it kinda funny when the right turns to Adam Smith. Smith thought that the free market would free us from the monopolistic tendencies of the mercantile system. (Although he wouldn’t have written it as such, as the term ‘monopoly’ wasn’t nearly as taxonomically precise as it is now.) If he was alive today, he’d probably be rather dismayed at the failures of capitalism.
But then again, I guess that’s the right’s shtick: coopt any idea that they can and pervert it to benefit the ultra-wealthy.
Anyways, here’s Smith:
The object, besides, of the greater part of the bye-laws of all regulated companies, as well as of all other corporations, is not so much to oppress those who are already members, as to discourage others from becoming so; which may be done, not only by a high fine, but by many other contrivances. The constant view of such companies is always to raise the rate of their own profit as high as they can; to keep the market, both for the goods which they export, and for those which they import, as much understocked as they can: which can be done only by restraining the competition, or by discouraging new adventurers from entering into the trade. (The Wealth of Nations V.i.e.10)
There’s also the materialist take on capitalism that it’s a stage between feudalism and a more socialist or communist organization of society.
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. As much as reading and understanding smith and other philosophy is important for the individual, think tanks unfortunately seem necessary in a modern context aiming to transform, often quite unreadable, as your excerpt demonstrates, philosophical learning, into applicable law/policy.
As with everything this process is utterly captured by right wing and market fundamentalist interests. Just sort this list by Bias/Affiliation and skim some of the descriptions it’s a bit horrific, but it also might save you from reading an old school stochastic parrot with an inhumane agenda. Or if you actually find one you can agree with it might give you a reasonable first source.
Lol yeah, it’s definitely the “funny-because-that’s-how-I-cope-with-the-absurdity” funny, not the “I’m-actually-having-fun” funny.
Here’s my Luke warm take: It’s kinda a self fulfilling prophecy that think tanks are so “necessary”. They prop up modern thought because our education is so filled with practicality and specialization that there’s not enough time for proper philosophical education, which every person should be offered. And further, that is by design to maintain the status quo.
You certainly don’t get much hat tipping to the early greats, many of whom said in some form or other that the study of philosophy was one of the most important pursuits a person can have in order to live a good life and build a healthy society.
Warm take, because the corpus of human philosophy really is insanely massive, and realistically we do in fact need food and doctors and house builders and whatnot, and there’s too little time and too much to be done for everyone to get a B.A. equivalent in philosophy. Probably. Maybe a think tank has studied the idea.
Yeah this whole thing a bit maximized might be neatly wrapped up in this Hegelian insight rephrased in 2014 found on the wiki
“It is Hegel’s insight that reason itself has a history, that what counts as reason is the result of a development. This is something that Kant never imagines and that Herder only glimpses.”
In this way if not even the greats can do it how could a modern person or a think tank but at the same time does this not imply we currently need all three of them.
Also is the modern YouTube video essay channel sort of a think tank for terminally online people ? Maybe food for thought, maybe a joke who knows really.
Is there any think tank on earth that if all the members suddenly got heart attacks the world would be a worse place?
I think about all the people who I deal with daily and if any single one of them died things would be so much worse for me. They have value and you can see the value they add. How does the Adam Smith institute or CATO do jack shit for anyone? And if we can’t answer that, than why are the people on these committees being paid so well for what isn’t eben a full time job? And why the fuck are they tax exemption!?
Well I might look at this Rosa Luxemburg Foundation or perhaps this Heinrich Böll Foundation if I were in need to peddle some specific policy to someone that both cares and is powerful. It’s in many ways the same prisoners dilemma as with all of advertisement.
So yes if they were all gone it’d be better for everyone but as we unfortunately live in the system we live in I’d rather have the few that might actually represent me exist beside all of the garbage. Same with the political parties they are associated with as well.
The time was very different. Most people lived and worked in the country, not in cities, so de facto they couldn’t control them however they liked. Christian Church was also imposing morality over everything, which means they couldn’t enslave people as easily as today.
We are living in neo-feudalism. Your boss is a lord, and your only freedom is to choose a lord, provided this lord accept you.
Christendom was basically like the church was the structure of society, when you were baptized as an infant and written in the books that was like social security today. The anabaptists weren’t just so radical because they opposed theology, but because they protested the fundamental structure of how society was organized.
Also religion back then was like entertainment as well, people actually loved going to see preachers and they’d talk about them in the same way we talk about shows or movies now. It had that function in the society as sort of a language for discussing fundamental truths and life experience that people loved engaging in. They didn’t have a notion of a political or national identity, but they had a soul and all the stuff to do with that.
Removed by mod
If it’s consensus then there must be sources somewhere.
You got it the wrong way around: If it’s consensus, no one questions it anymore so you don’t need a source. If you start to question commonly hold beliefs, you will have to unlearn the whole field of economics. Do you want that?
In order to reach a consensus like that, you have to have supporting evidence that it’s true. Otherwise that consensus should absolutely be challenged.
It happens in all kind of scientific fields that things that feel logical and common sense, are taken for granted. I think SciShow made a video about it but I can’t find it right now.
We’re talking about anthropology/history here. People spend their entire careers researching things like this and publishing papers on it.
To make a claim like this requires evidence. Historical records would exist that some person at some point gathered together and published a peer reviewed article on.
If no sources or peer reviewed articles exist on the topic other than a few blog posts, then it’s extremely likely it’s a pile of horse shit.
I don’t think you got my point at all. My point is that even natural science, which is “hard science” and much easier falsifiable, this also happens. I found the video if you’re interested (It’s by Be Smart, I was wrong about the channel).
There is also a video about the history of work that is more on topic. If you don’t want to watch the video, you can just read the sources in the description.
But talking about anthropologists: here is a quote from David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs:
Feudal lords, insofar as they worked at all, were fighters—their lives tended to alternate between dramatic feats of arms and near-total idleness and torpor. Peasants and servants obviously were expected to work more steadily. But even so, their work schedule was nothing remotely as regular or disciplined as the current nine-to-five—the typical medieval serf, male or female, probably worked from dawn to dusk for twenty to thirty days out of any year, but just a few hours a day otherwise, and on feast days, not at all. And feast days were not infrequent.
He is an anthropologist who devoted his whole career debunking such claims and published a book together with a historian who does the same. It’s called “the dawn of everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021). You should check it out. I could look up more anthropologists to back my claim but I don’t want to spend too much time for people who talk down on me (none of these are block posts, surprised?) and you are yet to come up with all the anthropologists and historians (not economics, they don’t count) who support your claim.
This entire quote is actually a perfect encapsulation of orthodox economics, said with absolutely no self awareness.
It’s the system I’ve lived with my entire life!! How could it be anything but correct?! I’m a smart guy, I’m sure I’d have noticed if something were amiss.
Plus look at all these high-paid people who agree with me! Surely they wouldn’t be so rich if they were telling lies!
Economics is less accurate than astrology because at least if you are an astrologist who gets things wrong you stop getting paid. Sure it is cold reading and Barnum statements but it is still more accurate.
Removed by mod
You could turn down your douchebag levels quite a lot and still make a point.
It’ll make you look much less like an asshole when you’re wrong, which you are.
Removed by mod
I’m not the person asking for a source, but good job proving that you’re an asshole.
We have coins with his face on it.
It’s not historical consensus. It’s a claim made by some historians that went viral online.
Removed by mod
Is it? Okay.
no it isn’t.
Removed by mod
If that’s ok too, I have read a book by an anthropologist who claims the opposite (that in fact people in the past had more leisure than today). I can look up a good quote tomorrow. For the claim in the post, I’m afraid, there ain’t no good sources, as for most alternative facts.
I mean it seems like the sort of thing people are just ready to believe because “we have technology now so we must have better lives” despite loads of that technology being turned towards controlling us.
As for the book, it wouldn’t be Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, would it?
It was the first book I read by Graeber but not the last one. He mentioned it in other books too but yes, I was about to quote from Bullshit Jobs
Anyone wanting to read it can do so for free: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs
The official version I think is better formatted, but this one is functional if you can’t access the official one for some reason.
Medieval peasant’s idea of luxury was also “some butter”. Let’s not glorify the past.
Why can’t we have both? Why must we trade one for the other?
Because medieval peasantry ain’t exactly all that great. There’s a reason why we grew out of it.
We’ve had the 40h work week for about 100 years and more or less exponential growth for that time, too. Why did that never turn into more leisure time?
No one is asking for feudal society. Just more leisure
They loved showing off what spices they had, like “yo this is a nutmeg pie, that’s right I got nutmeg bitches.” Some of the recipes are actually hilarious cause they seem to be based around showing off your spices, the original lasagna for example.
What’s also funny is the foods peasants could afford and eat, were at least to our modern diet a lot healthier than what the lord would eat. They’d be eating root vegetables, cabbage, squash, porridges. Cheese as well because it was a method of preservation and the separated whey had it’s own uses, lot of peasants made their own cheese. Meanwhile the lord would be eating marrow and fatty salted meats, hunting his own game, or more like wanting people to believe he did so trying to curate that image of himself. Maybe commission a “morning hunt” portrait of himself in case you weren’t sure.
All I need is some cheese to be happy. And a tip from my tenants. (Just kidding, I’m not a landlord, please don’t kill me)
More time off to take care of the fourteen children you need to have to keep your farm going.
And almost succumb to some form of the common cold
If one dies, I’ll just pop another out, right in the field. Cut the cord, and he can get to work.
There was a much higher likelihood of dying during childbirth too.
Families with more than 4 or 5 children were almost certainly blended families.
.
Childbirth was the primary cause of death for women in the middle ages
Your great grandmother had the benefit of centuries of modernization that the women we’re talking about did not. And even then, she was probably an outlier.
You’d be having sex in the same room as all your kids and animals lived too
Redditors thinking that having time off as some dirt fucking poor peasant in the Medieval Era is all fun and games.
At least ye’d probably get to eat yer daily porridge next to a fuckin’ goose. May not be your goose, or the village goose, but a fine goose and an important part of peasantry nonetheless. Better than serfs get… Eatin’ their porridge next to a mule and a rake.
Dies at 46 after a minor cut gets infected
*26
You don’t want to go back to the past. At least not before germ theory and anesthesia.
Nothing wrong with some whiskey and biting down on a stick when you need your leg amputated.
I do. Common sense would take care of me better than this healthcare system. All the knowledge we have serves capital, not me, day to day, in my silly little life.
There was a recent report (rather exagerrated but still) which claimed that in the 1930s it took 65 hours of human labour a week to run a household. Today it takes 3. Things were worse back in medieval days.
Doubt.jpeg
Only way that is acceptable is if they missed a 0. Even then 30 is pushing it
there were no cameras in the Middle Ages. Checkmate shitposters.
Also that woman clearly isn’t middle aged.
It’s still bullshit.
Actually medieval people got wayyy more time off across the board. It’s because they all died by 45.
OP I thought debunking the Adam Smith Institute claim would be easy, but you’ve just introduced me to Tim Worstall and he might be based: We Can afford UBI, and its better than the cruel welfare state - Tim Worstall
That’s a great read, thanks for sharing.
It’s holiday season, we got pies and ale, a new preacher is coming to town and we’re getting shitfaced. Nobody has plague yet and life is good.
I already work less than a medieval peasant.
Just don’t tell my boss.
I do too. My boss is an asshole though, spends all her time on lemmy shitposting and then tells me to work harder. But then again, I am my own boss, so PEBCAK.
They also had an average life expectancy of about 30 years, so I’ll stick with the current Era thanks.
Common missconception: people didn’t just die in their thirties, the average is brought down somewhat hard by lots of infant death, childbirth complications and the like.
@Prunebutt says it right, it’s the advancements in medicine, but thats more reactively treating diseases than proactively lengthening the lifespan.
I hate those type of stats that sound good but don’t actually express what they seem to express.
Instead of looking at the average age at death, I’d be much more interested in the average age if the population alive at a give point in time.
Oh that doesn’t sound bad at all
/s
That’s because of advancements in medicine, not because we work longer hours.
I would have been dead for 10 years by now. Sweet.
No way in fucking hell it takes 3 hours a week to run a household. I do that daily.
Clothing, kids homework, meals to cook, cleaning, shopping for food, kids extracurriculars, bills.
6:00 pick up kids from aftercare
6:15 Get home with kids, take care of pets, reheat dinner
6:30-7:00 kids eat dinner and I do laundry
7:00-8:00 kids homework and cleaning
8:00-8:30: violin practice
8:30 - 9:00 whatever subject they are lagging in or if nothing shared reading.
9:00 - 10:00 kids bath and ready for next day. Around 9:20 or so I eat dinner
You also do it alone.
People generally used to live with their extended families.
The tasks you’re describing were generally spread out between 4-8 grown-ass adults.
