Hacker News Reader

Comment by nom | Hacker News Reader

We work harder? Seriously?

Most of the time in human history people were struggling to even stay alive. You had to work until you got enough food to feed your family, or you'd die. Live was not great, it was very stressful and inefficient (but people were used to it). This is still the case in most of the world, although overall not as bad as it once was, it is improving constantly.

We're the lucky ones who can sustain ourselve with 8 hours of work, food is cheap and abundant, we can afford luxury items like iphones even if a 300$ android smartphone would do the same job.

No, at average, people are not working harder now, because we don't have to. We managed to improve efficiency so much already and quality of life continues to rise.

View on HN

It's funny - you're both right.

Peasants (over 90% of the society) were usually working less hours but much harder than we do. And they were living in much worse conditions of course.

Farming (especially without modern technology) is very cyclical, most of the time you have too much labour and too little land/food. Then for a few months you have too few people to do everything that needs to be done.

And there was no easy way for vast majority of people to store surplus for more than a few years. And there was a real possibility of starvation if a few factors independent of you happen at the same time.

So the whole society and economy was structured around these constraints - that's why it doesn't follow our intuitions. It made no sense to increase gains by 10% if you had to increase risk by 1% to do that. It made no sense to work harder if you have enough and it's gonna spoil anyway. You're just risking injury to throw it all away later.

There was a great series of articles about it: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...

Hunter gatherer societies are theorized to have spent the majority of their time not working, which is partly why were evolved such a complex social dynamic. Hunters would patrol their territory and hunt, with mixed results on the hunting, and gatherers would spend a few hours gathering food. It didn't take much work to sustain their tribes.

I wonder how much that depended on the population density of a particular place vs its "carrying capacity". I imagine that our hunter gatherer ancestors who lived with more competing groups fighting over diminishing herds probably spent more time/risk defending their turf.

We haven't improved efficiency at all, it takes far more resources to keep a person going today than it did in the 14th century. It takes a couple decades of education before a person can even begin to enter the workforce. Raising kids was once an investment, now people can barely afford to raise 1 or 2.

Our inefficient stuff is made by people in foreign countries working in factories whose lives really aren't any better than middle ages Europe.

Also, People like farming and hard physical labour. In the suburbs every household has a little miniature hobby farm that yields a useless crop, and people farm it for fun over and above their regular job. When people don't have to do any hard labour as part of their job, they go to a gym and pay money for the privelege of moving heavy things around even though it serves no practical purpose.

All this inefficiency is destroying the planet, which is the dumbest thing of all.

>We haven't improved efficiency at all, it takes far more resources to keep a person going today than it did in the 14th century.

We very much have. We couldn't support our population with 14th century levels of efficiency. We wouldn't have enough farm land, fresh water, etc, etc.

He might mean energy efficiency. We just have access to way more energy these days, and we've been slurping that milkshake hard.

"Our inefficient stuff is made by people in foreign countries working in factories whose lives really aren't any better than middle ages Europe."

Life expectancy in the most typical manufacturing hotspots is actually better than Western standards of 1900. Even poorer countries today have much better healthcare than Queen Victoria used to have. Middle Ages is right out in this comparison.

These are gross generalizations.

> It takes a couple decades of education before a person can even begin to enter the workforce.

This obviously depends on profession. On the contrary, you no longer need to go to college or trade school since everything is online. Seriously, it's amazing how proficient some of these children can get just from YouTube videos.

> Raising kids was once an investment, now people can barely afford to raise 1 or 2.

Hey at least you have a choice now. Before, raising lots of children was almost a necessity in order to help around the farm. Now things are so efficient that you really don't need to raise children at all.

> Our inefficient stuff is made by people in foreign countries working in factories whose lives really aren't any better than middle ages Europe.

Can you provide evidence on this?

> People like farming and hard physical labour

Most people would probably disagree with you on this. There is a big difference between occasional hard labor and doing hard labor every single day. It takes an enormous toll on the body.

> When people don't have to do any hard labour as part of their job, they go to a gym and pay money for the privelege of moving heavy things around even though it serves no practical purpose.

Isn't the purpose to be healthy or look better?

Your confusing hardness of work with grimness of life. No one was working 200hrs/week to make polio vaccines from themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com