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Working a 8/9-5/6 job is historically an aberration, and never in human history has the majority of workers been employed that way. Even now, as (a small minority of) people in the Global South are moving to that kind of labor, we see that very same system breaking down in the West. People usually work piecemeal and irregular hours, in exchange for locally-valid credit.

It's a pipe dream to believe that the height of human happiness and social justice is everyone sitting down at a 9-5 job five days a week so you can pay down the mortgage on housing you overpaid for because everyone else also bought into the same myth. Which is what mainstream political parties in all countries that I know of seem to buy into, just with variations on the theme.

I like Chesterton's vision and see it as more emancipatory than the industrial-corporate socialism/capitalism that we have, despite me being a left wing crazy.

Will have to check out Belloc.

My grandfather worked in carpentry and construction, ultimately working his way up to overseeing construction of bridges. There was a time when you could hardly drive anywhere in St. Louis without crossing over a bridge that he worked on.

And doing construction work, he paid for his family's house over the course of about five years. It wasn't a palace, but it was a nice house in a (then) nice neighborhood with a good-sized lawn. Today, people routinely spend twenty or thirty years to buy a decent house. Even dumpy houses in poor locations would likely take well over five years for many people to pay for.

Something seems very wrong.

It's because we are building so many other things.

The price of a house depends on how many people there are to build it (like your grandfather).

These days people build all sorts of other things, so the price of a house goes up. But on the other hand you now have so many other cool things that weren't available back then.

> Working a 8/9-5/6 job is historically an aberration

Very much so. It used to be from dawn until dusk.

When hours were first instituted, it was always compared to farm work, since that was understood to be the hardest work possible.

EDIT: I see there's a lot of academicians with opinions. Anyone here grow up on a farm? Would you like to tell us about how easy the work is?

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

Work wasn't considered something apart from social life. Basically, if something needed to be done, you did it. Things weren't nearly as compartmentalized as they are now. Agricultural lifestyles mean that life and work are much more integrated than they are now, because they had to be.

Which has pros and cons: people lived much more on the brink of survival, but a local area was also more self-sufficient. The trade we've made is to take risk of dying from starvation during a bad year where we are not self-sufficient enough for risks related to specialization, meaning we now have the equally uncontrollable risk of being screwed by a NYC financier or a DC bureaucrat.

It's also important to distinguish between different cultures and different time periods. A peasant in 15th century England lived a very different lifestyle than a peasant in 2nd century China.

Edited to clarify.

How is compartmentalizing work from home life related to "uncontrollable risks of being screwed by a NYC financier or a DC bureaucrat"? I'm not following.

If you're self sufficient, it doesn't matter how the economy is doing.

> but most historians don't consider dawn-to-dusk to have been typical agrarian working hours

Probably because they've never worked on a farm.

Ah, I didn't realize we were having an intellectual discussion at that level here. Your counter-argument to historical research is essentially, "fuck them ivory tower mothafuckas, I've got anecdotes"?

How true is this? Are you asserting that no historian or anthropologist has ever worked on a farm?

Or are you arguing that no living historian or anthropologist has ever been a pre-20th century peasant?

"academicians with opinions"? Really? Have we reverted to name calling?

Few people here have grown up on a farm. But even if you have, it's not representative of what historians and anthropologists study when they study peasant societies. Agriculture is thoroughly embedded in the market nowadays. You can't compare the experience of a struggling family farmer in Iowa, under siege by corporate interests and the demands of the market, with the experiences of the average pre-industrial peasant. A businessman running a gas station in Dallas has more in common with the Iowa farmer than the pre-industrial peasant does.

There are very few places in the world nowadays that are comparable to even the recent (several centuries) past. There is, however, a lot of evidence about how people lived back in the day. Enough evidence, actually, that tens of thousands of people study it.

Anyone here grow up on a farm?

I grew up in a very agricultural area, and many of my young friends' families owned farms.

You really can't make any kind of comparison between modern farming versus old-timey farming. For example, you can now ride in an air-conditioned combine harvester where you can't chat with your friends, but you're not out in sweltering heat. You can clear vastly many more acres, but is it more or less 'work'?

Also, the amount of work would seem to vary tremendously based on season.

I think it's more interesting to look at pre-industrialized, non-agrarian life. Like, a shoemaker in a city. According to a historian on a Planet Money podcast, you might go a couple of days without doing any meaningful work. Just sort of hanging around the shop, going to chat with friends, and so on. Then, someone would have a need for boots. So, you measure them up, get to work, and a couple of days later you hand them their custom boots. The guy's claim was that these sorts of jobs involved quite a lot of just waiting around for your next customer/project.

I've read a lot about the history of the work, and what you say isn't described by any of the historians -- until the advent of the industrial revolution, that is.

The time spent by hunter-gatherers is the least of all. Agrarian times -- when everybody farmed their own -- were more demanding but not all of the time for sure as the other commenter has pointed out.

During times when people were required to work for an "employer" (e.g. landowner) for rent, and then subsist on the time left, yes, they worked hard, but that is not unlike what we have today (just much more extreme).

As Clay Shirky describes in Here Comes Everybody, and you'll find in many other books as well, many skilled people would choose only to work as much as they had to get by, and spend the rest of their time in leisure or drunk.

I suspect that hunter-gatherers did "worse" on other metrics like quality and duration of life. Obviously, no metric is somehow objectively better than another, but many people will argue that working harder is worth it if you live longer and healthier (i.e. you rarely or never have to truly worry about having enough food to survive).

Clearly some (most) hunter-gatherers found that organized food production was a better alternative, since they were obviously the ones that became farmers.

It's complicated, but hunter gatherers typically lived longer than the first agriculturists. Infant mortality was the really brutal thing there--most people who made it to 15 would have a pretty long lifespan, comparable to what we. (Infant mortality was also very bad among the agriculturists, while they did not do as well in the years after 15.)

Beyond that, it wasn't a one way street--people regularly transitioned from farmer to hunter gatherer. Neither was a particularly hellish existence, except in times of plague, famine, or war (all of which hunter gatherers usually could avoid more easily, through lower population density and less demand on natural resources).

The hard evidence, as far as it exists, suggests that the typical hunter gatherer was, if anything, actually better off than the typical farmer. And for ages it was a constant back and forth. Where farming civilizations massively surpassed hunter gatherers was in the creation of the State and its associated violence-producing and self-perpetuating capabilities. Quantity (of people, of swords, of food) has a quality all its own.

See Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake of the Human Race" for an interesting perspective. http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

I'm quite familiar with that article, and I really like the hypothesis. I suppose it really comes down to what "satisfaction" or "happiness" or "better off" actually means. The popular book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" discusses this a lot as well, although the author seems to realize the futility in calling certain lifestyles/societies/governments "better" than others.

Let me tackle your last argument with another example:

Clearly some (most) junk-food-eaters found that eating junk food was a better alternative, since they were obviously the ones who kept eating junk food.

That kind of argument simply doesn't hold water. Humans do things which negatively impact them in the short term and the long term, repeatedly, consistently, and with relish.

"I can say that no third world country makes it as hard to be self-employed as we do in the US"

I don't know what kind of self-employment you're talking about, but in some of the Third World countries it's pretty hard.

Here in Uruguay, unless you fall in the special category called "monotributo" (only for very low income), you have to jump through a lot of hoops (or pay a lot for a pre-made company), and pay lots of taxes, most of them are of the kind "pay now, we'll reimburse you later" and are reimbursed in tax credits mostly (not actual money).

Of course, you can also work illegally, and that's what most people did, that's why the "monotributo" tax was created, to make people pay at least a little tax and social security.

The same happens in Argentina, and Perú had such a huge illegal infrastructure that liberal economist Hernando de Soto made it his field of studies (at the beginning, it took 400 steps to be a legal company in Peru).

Professionals (such as engineers and programmers) fall under a different scheme, but it also entails several regulations and you usually always fail something in the eyes of the IRS equivalent (DGI) and have to pay fines.

Most of my experience here has been in Indonesia and Malaysia.

As a chronically self-employed person, I'm curious why you believe it is so difficult to be self employed in the US. The World Bank lists the US as #4 on the Ease of Doing Business list [1].

Anecdotally, I've found it very easy to do the proper paperwork to become officially self-employed. For under a thousand bucks you can even have someone else do it for you if you're so inclined. Another personal example is how a man I met from Italy could not believe that I owned my own one-man business, as such a thing would be nearly impossible in his own country.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_Doing_Business_Index

There's a difference between ease of getting into business, and the ease of making a living doing it. The debt economy ties people to jobs, particularly because of the fact that if you become self-employed, there will be a few years where you will likely not be able to cover your expenses and we have very little support for that. So unless you are already financially independent, you need financial help from someone else.

A lot of the legislation is a bit of a mixed bag. On the whole PPACA makes it easier perhaps to become self-employed because you can forego health insurance during the critical starting time, only to buy it if a real need arises or once one is making more money. On the other hand, the mandate to buy it later, imposes an additional burden on top of things like high self-employment taxes. On the whole I think PPACA does more harm than good because it can be very hard to predict when downturns will be sufficient to cause one to be able to cut health insurance out of one's budget.

Finally most of the ease of doing business factors are primarily about corporate business. It doesn't tell you much about being self-employed.

There's paperwork? I was independent pulling in random 1099 work for 5 years and the only extra paperwork I did was "Schedule C".

I assume that owning a business proper would require a ton of forms and licensing. But just doing odd jobs for oneself? I didn't think anything special was required.

> I assume that owning a business proper would require a ton of forms and licensing. But just doing odd jobs for oneself? I didn't think anything special was required.

You don't need anything at all to do odd jobs under a 1099. I probably should not have said "officially self-employed" as that isn't really a thing. I meant I've gone through the hoops to become a sole-proprietor business.

If you wanted to incorporate you basically just file a few forms and sign on a few lines. It does not involve a great deal of paperwork, and even that can be reduced to signing on a few lines if you use an accountant.

I'm not an expert but the reason that I believe a lot of people in your position (1099-ing it for N years) incorporate is three-fold:

First, liability. Your corp can get sued into bankruptcy but your personal assets are safe. If you're not incorporated someone can sue you directly with more disastrous results. I'm not a lawyer but this is what I'm lead to believe is the case.

Second, tax-wise it can be in your favor to be a corp.

Third, it just keeps everything separate. Having a company account that I can pay myself out of keeps my books clean.

The reason capital concentrates and hires labour is that Coaseian transactions costs render a complex economy of independent contractors uncompetitive and infeasible.

could something go wrong when workers are "freed" from protections?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsof...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Labor_p...

Why overlook unionization as a solution to the Capital-Labor power imbalance?

The problem is the Capital-Labor divide, not the imbalance. If you are going to look to unionization as a primary solution (rather than a solution of last resort) tackle this problem like they do in Germany: make sure the union has access to the business's financial records, and a seat on the board of directors.

"Indeed no developed nation does either"

Are you kidding?

"I can say that no third world country makes it as hard to be self-employed as we do in the US. Indeed no developed nation does either....."

You are flat-out wrong there, my friend. Someone else pointed out how hard it is in Uruguay. Indonesia and Malaysia are not the whole of all 3rd world countries -- so your travels don't support your statement of "no third world country".

I can point out how hard it is all across Europe.

Being self-employed in the US is extremely easy.

Meanwhile most of those other first-world nations still offer their self-employed people healthcare and other safety net benefits.

I am sure that's why so many people are self-employed in most of these countries.

Also despite the issues in Europe, I understand that in many EU countries (including both France and Germany), there is a higher success rate of self-employment than here in the US.

I can't tell, are you being snarky?

I never said it discouraged anything or that people failed. It is simply 10x the complexity, hoops to jump through, legal paperwork, and tax rigamarole.