I know this is going to be an “actually…” post, but I just find it too damn interesting and politically relevant. So, actually stone age tribes got by with 3 around hours of work every day on average.
So why do we have to work so much today to survive? …yeah, because we’re being fucking cheated.
Well… that and there are far too many people on the planet to be supported through a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Even when you get into the millions, you need agriculture and animal husbandry. And farming and herding is a lot more work.
With modern farming, 10% of the people can now produce enough food for everyone. And if everyone had equal income instead of the top 1% syphoning off half the wealth, we could globally support a middle class lifestyle by everyone working 20 hours a week, the same amount that hunters and gatherers “worked”.
Source? Everything we do is more an more complex. A TV show requires hundreds of people. A smartphone, millions if we include supply chains. Same for a car. A modern house requires dozens of highly specialized workers for weeks at a time, plus materials. People live much longer with better health, that’s a lot of labor in research, machines, drugs and raw manpower (nurses, surgeons, etc).
10% of the people, first of all, is around 800 million people. And secondly, that’s a lot of really hard work that can’t be done just 20 hours a week. I’m in Indiana. I know farmers. It’s not even a 40-hour-a-week job. It’s a sunup to sundown job.
So sure, everyone gets a break. Except farmers. Who earn the same amount as everyone else but have to work a lot harder.
If the required labor was split up more equitably then farmers wouldn’t have to work sunup to sundown.
The entire point of large scale agriculture is that it’s more efficient than individual peasants working a single field or whatever.
Nobody is saying that farming isn’t hard work, but modern farming should produce more food per man-hour than neolithic farming (or hunter/gathering), right? So why should it be that farm workers now have to work harder than prehistoric people?
So why should it be that farm workers now have to work harder than prehistoric people?
Do they? Because what has been said so far is that hunter-gatherers didn’t work as hard. Or do you mean pre-agriculture prehistoric people? Because agriculture predates written history by thousands of years.
Once we started farming and herding, the work was harder. But also necessary. That’s just how things are.
I agree with but for one thing. If we doubled the farm workforce then each farmer wouldn’t have to work as hard. And we certainly have another 800 million people to throw at it.
They said industrial farming is more effective per manhour at food production.
And it is. There are obviously further complexities to have everything else in a modern society, but that doesn’t change the fact that even modern productivity increases aren’t decreasing work loads for some reason
It was in response to my saying that you cannot support a large population via hunting and gathering. You need to work harder than that. It is only more food per hour of work if you are talking about a small population. There is a point of diminishing returns and then it gets harder and harder to feed a growing population via hunting and gathering.
Nobody is proposing we switch to hunter-gatherer jobs, we’re saying that the jobs we’re currently doing are producing extreme excess and that excess is either wasted (fast fashion landfills, dramatic food waste) or just hoarded by the capitalist class.
We can support our current population with our current technology and work a lot less.
Anyone that is unemployed could be taking some of your work hours. Many of our jobs are redundant. A different economy can be created where we all work way less than we do while retaining our quality of life.
To say we can’t is to buy into the propaganda that we need Musks and Bezos’ or we’d be subsistence farming. There are other things in between.
This is a bad faith argument or complete misunderstanding of the point and in either case the conversation can’t continue productively.
The point is that a democratic economy where workers own the value of their production would NECESSARILY improve wealth for those workers. Nobody is employed as a charitable act, you’re employed if and only if you produce more value than it takes to hire you.
Also, people tend not to die from infections anymore, or starvation (usually). One bad famine doesn’t wipe out everyone you know. The vast majority of babies survive to old age and only extremely rarely does a mother die in childbirth.
And the entire population of earth doesn’t live around areas where you can forage anymore.
Anthropologists at Harvard did an extensive multi-year study of the !Kung San people in southern Africa who still lived by hunting and gathering in the '60s and '70s. Despite living in near-desert conditions, they spent an average of about 17 hours a week in food-related activities. Granted, this yielded a diet of around 1200 calories a day, but they were relatively very small people and this amount was adequate. Mongongo nuts FTW. Whether this lifestyle (and that of other studied modern hunter/gatherers) is generally representative of pre-historic and pre-agricultural humans is an open question, but it’s hard to imagine that hunting and gathering in less marginal environments would have required more time and effort - especially when there were a bunch of big hairy elephants you could run off cliffs walking around.
Early agrarians, however, probably had to bust much more ass to make a living, as the farmer’s toolkits of domesticated species were not as well-developed as today.
Early agrarians also likely would not have planted the monoculture fields we plant today. They would likely have worked with nature to encourage growth in an easier, more sustainable way. We do things the hard way because we grow with the intention to harvest a specific crop, not just to ensure there’s adequate food in your local surroundings.
Not so much any more. Even during the Harvard studies they did a lot of trading with neighboring horticultural peoples, sometimes worked for them and white settlers, and received some food aid at times. Today they’ve been largely resettled and only occasionally engage in traditional hunting and gathering activities.
Yeah, but if people only worked essential jobs, and not in stupid competitive ways that only make the owners of some of those companies rich, you could get by with much less work. Think about how wasteful industrial production is, and how many office building skyscrapers and malls are being built just for investors’ sakes that are not needed, and often lay empty.
If people only built what is actually needed for good lives, and not for greed, so much manpower would be freed up. Especially if they did it in sustainable ways that wouldn’t require everything being torn down or renewed again really soon.
Also, imagine crypto shitcoin peddlers being forced to do useful work like plumbing. There are so many people just getting paid for downright evil or at least useless shit.
So the malls are for investors or they lay empty? Those two things are quite contradictory…
And who decides what is needed for a good life? What if I want a garden? What if I want a convertible? What if I want to fly to Hawaii? What if I want to race cars?
3h per day doesn’t need to be portioned as such. Maybe you work 8 hour days for 6 months and take the rest of the year off until you’re back for your next project.
Fair enough but we can be charitable and consider it an average. Dismissing it by literal interpretation isn’t advancing the conversation. Apply the principle of charity and the point stands.
Ancient humans likely worked significantly less than modern humans to meet their basic needs. Studies of hunter-gatherer societies suggest that our ancestors spent around 15-20 hours per week (or about 3 hours per day) on work related to survival[1][3].
The Jo/'hoansi people of the Kalahari Desert, for example, spent only about 15 hours a week acquiring food and resources[3]. This left them with ample time for leisure activities like socializing, storytelling, and artistic pursuits.
This pattern of limited work hours appears to have been common for most of human history. For about 95% of our species’ existence, humans likely worked these shorter hours[2][4]. The shift to longer work weeks came much later with the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
Anthropologist James Suzman argues that hunter-gatherer societies were generally well-fed and content, with longer life expectancies than many early agricultural societies[4]. The abundance of free time allowed for rich cultural and social lives.
It’s important to note that while daily work hours were limited, life wasn’t always easy. Infant mortality was high, and people faced other challenges. However, in terms of work-life balance, our ancestors may have had an advantage over many modern humans[3][4].
This historical perspective raises questions about our current work culture and whether we could benefit from reconsidering our relationship with work and leisure in the modern world.
It’s so ingrained in people, we have such an uphill battle as progressives. People worship capitalism like a deity. If it doesn’t get its sacrifices we’ll have droughts and famine!
That’s not what we would have to give up, what we would have to give up is a small portion of the population globe-trotting 24/7 on private jets and buying yachts for their yachts.
You’re fellating robber-barons and buying into the bullshit propaganda that without our hugely unequal economic system you wouldn’t be allowed to have a computer.
The numbers don’t add up. There are 2781 billionaires in the world with a combined net worth of $14.2 trillion. If you wiped them all out and spread that wealth evenly across the world’s 8.2 billion people that’s only $1731 per person.
Sure, that’s going to help immensely for people in very low CoL countries but it’s basically nothing for an average American.
The point isn’t just to take their money and redistribute it it’s to get rid of a profit driven and privately owned system in favor of a democratic economy where workers get the value of their labor.
Think of all the private enterprises that reproduce so much work between themselves. Why does every merger get followed by huge layoffs and restructuring? Because we have so much wasted redundant effort.
Consider also how much overproduction we have when it comes to basic needs. People don’t go hungry because of lack of food, we waste food on an industrial scale. People don’t go unclothed because of lack of clothes, we have dedicated landfills for “fast fashion” items that don’t even get sold before being tossed let alone worn once. We have more houses than unhoused by a double digit factor.
All of this waste because we let profit guide production and let private ownership reap all of the value. An economy for the people and owned by the people would give you more benefit than $1000.
I’m proposing a cooperative economy rather than a competitive economy. I’m proposing socialism.
That paper is mostly talking about the richest countries, not individuals, and I don’t buy it.
Norway has nationalized all of its oil profits into a sovereign wealth fund that comprises the pension fund for all its citizens. Yet that doesn’t change the amount of oil they produced.
If every oil producing country in the world did as Norway did we wouldn’t have any oil billionaires but we’d still have to deal with climate change. These countries would still be the richest in the world, they would just have less inequality inside them.
That’s not how that works either. Money is an artificial construct. Single billionaire doesn’t have any mythical wealth that could be redistributed because if it happened the wealth wouldn’t be created in the first place in the economic system where wealth gets redistributed.
Not to mention the wealth equals companies stocks. It is just paper, a database entry. It’s worthless but we all agreed that it isn’t.
Billionaire wealth is just imaginary situation maintained by sanctioned violence of police and state. There is no mythical wealth that would suddenly cure hunger or homelessness. There are just imaginary digits that would plummet to 0 the moment you want to take them out
A lot of those are out of reach for many as well still due to cost, or non existent (healthcare). I’m in a pretty stable point in my life and even I get scared by the electric bills related to heating and cooling. Growing up I recall the only option was to go to the mall since we could not afford AC.
I know this is going to be an “actually…” post, but I just find it too damn interesting and politically relevant. So, actually stone age tribes got by with 3 around hours of work every day on average.
So why do we have to work so much today to survive? …yeah, because we’re being fucking cheated.
Well… that and there are far too many people on the planet to be supported through a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Even when you get into the millions, you need agriculture and animal husbandry. And farming and herding is a lot more work.
Oh yeah? Industrial farming gives less food per hour of work than collecting wild nuts? Are you sure about that?
If you convert it to money inbetween and state and distributors take 2/3 of it, yes.
Please do show me the data that 8 billion people can survive on hunting and gathering.
With modern farming, 10% of the people can now produce enough food for everyone. And if everyone had equal income instead of the top 1% syphoning off half the wealth, we could globally support a middle class lifestyle by everyone working 20 hours a week, the same amount that hunters and gatherers “worked”.
Source? Everything we do is more an more complex. A TV show requires hundreds of people. A smartphone, millions if we include supply chains. Same for a car. A modern house requires dozens of highly specialized workers for weeks at a time, plus materials. People live much longer with better health, that’s a lot of labor in research, machines, drugs and raw manpower (nurses, surgeons, etc).
Maybe you meant a pre-industrial middle class?
10% of the people, first of all, is around 800 million people. And secondly, that’s a lot of really hard work that can’t be done just 20 hours a week. I’m in Indiana. I know farmers. It’s not even a 40-hour-a-week job. It’s a sunup to sundown job.
So sure, everyone gets a break. Except farmers. Who earn the same amount as everyone else but have to work a lot harder.
If the required labor was split up more equitably then farmers wouldn’t have to work sunup to sundown.
The entire point of large scale agriculture is that it’s more efficient than individual peasants working a single field or whatever.
Nobody is saying that farming isn’t hard work, but modern farming should produce more food per man-hour than neolithic farming (or hunter/gathering), right? So why should it be that farm workers now have to work harder than prehistoric people?
Because the tools are more expensive. But that’s only half of it.
Do they? Because what has been said so far is that hunter-gatherers didn’t work as hard. Or do you mean pre-agriculture prehistoric people? Because agriculture predates written history by thousands of years.
Once we started farming and herding, the work was harder. But also necessary. That’s just how things are.
The question I am posing is not “do modern farm workers labor harder than prehistoric hunter gathers” (they do).
Instead, the question is “should modern farm workers labor harder than prehistoric hunter gathers”.
Farming is more efficient than gathering. That’s why we farm. So why is it the case that modern farm workers are working harder?
Have more farmers …
What if you can’t find more than 800 million farmers?
Then there’s a problem. However we somehow manage to employ a few billion people currently.
300 years ago 90% of the planet were farmers. Surely you can find enough people.
I agree with but for one thing. If we doubled the farm workforce then each farmer wouldn’t have to work as hard. And we certainly have another 800 million people to throw at it.
They didn’t say we could.
They said industrial farming is more effective per manhour at food production.
And it is. There are obviously further complexities to have everything else in a modern society, but that doesn’t change the fact that even modern productivity increases aren’t decreasing work loads for some reason
It was in response to my saying that you cannot support a large population via hunting and gathering. You need to work harder than that. It is only more food per hour of work if you are talking about a small population. There is a point of diminishing returns and then it gets harder and harder to feed a growing population via hunting and gathering.
Nobody is proposing we switch to hunter-gatherer jobs, we’re saying that the jobs we’re currently doing are producing extreme excess and that excess is either wasted (fast fashion landfills, dramatic food waste) or just hoarded by the capitalist class.
We can support our current population with our current technology and work a lot less.
Anyone that is unemployed could be taking some of your work hours. Many of our jobs are redundant. A different economy can be created where we all work way less than we do while retaining our quality of life.
To say we can’t is to buy into the propaganda that we need Musks and Bezos’ or we’d be subsistence farming. There are other things in between.
Why would farmers in impoverished countries want to retain their way of life?
This is a bad faith argument or complete misunderstanding of the point and in either case the conversation can’t continue productively.
The point is that a democratic economy where workers own the value of their production would NECESSARILY improve wealth for those workers. Nobody is employed as a charitable act, you’re employed if and only if you produce more value than it takes to hire you.
Also, people tend not to die from infections anymore, or starvation (usually). One bad famine doesn’t wipe out everyone you know. The vast majority of babies survive to old age and only extremely rarely does a mother die in childbirth.
And the entire population of earth doesn’t live around areas where you can forage anymore.
Little things like that
Infectious disease became a lot worse than in hunter gatherer societies since animal husbandry and sendentary living.
Only since the advent of germ theory has it been better.
Okay, so how about medieval peasants also working 7-8 hour days, ~150 days per year?
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
You do know they starved to death all the time, right?
You do know people today starve to death all the time, right?
Compared to the middle ages?
As a consequence of the lack of technology, not the lack of work.
and, like, the nobles stealing their food, forcing them to go to war, etc etc…
I think I remember reading that early agrarians probably worked about 20 hours a week
This is probably a misleading average. Outside of sowing and reaping, farms need pretty much no work
But when they need it, they need A LOT of it
So let me take it easy and do hobbies and participate in the community for 9 months of the year and bust ass writing software for the other 3
Anthropologists at Harvard did an extensive multi-year study of the !Kung San people in southern Africa who still lived by hunting and gathering in the '60s and '70s. Despite living in near-desert conditions, they spent an average of about 17 hours a week in food-related activities. Granted, this yielded a diet of around 1200 calories a day, but they were relatively very small people and this amount was adequate. Mongongo nuts FTW. Whether this lifestyle (and that of other studied modern hunter/gatherers) is generally representative of pre-historic and pre-agricultural humans is an open question, but it’s hard to imagine that hunting and gathering in less marginal environments would have required more time and effort - especially when there were a bunch of big hairy elephants you could run off cliffs walking around.
Early agrarians, however, probably had to bust much more ass to make a living, as the farmer’s toolkits of domesticated species were not as well-developed as today.
Early agrarians also likely would not have planted the monoculture fields we plant today. They would likely have worked with nature to encourage growth in an easier, more sustainable way. We do things the hard way because we grow with the intention to harvest a specific crop, not just to ensure there’s adequate food in your local surroundings.
My knowledge might be influenced by video games, but wasn’t crop rotation something discovered in the middle ages?
But they still do?
Not so much any more. Even during the Harvard studies they did a lot of trading with neighboring horticultural peoples, sometimes worked for them and white settlers, and received some food aid at times. Today they’ve been largely resettled and only occasionally engage in traditional hunting and gathering activities.
Even medieval peasants under Feudalism worked less than we do, too.
Lol we decided plumbing and electricity were cool, and that shit takes work
Yeah, but if people only worked essential jobs, and not in stupid competitive ways that only make the owners of some of those companies rich, you could get by with much less work. Think about how wasteful industrial production is, and how many office building skyscrapers and malls are being built just for investors’ sakes that are not needed, and often lay empty.
If people only built what is actually needed for good lives, and not for greed, so much manpower would be freed up. Especially if they did it in sustainable ways that wouldn’t require everything being torn down or renewed again really soon.
Also, imagine crypto shitcoin peddlers being forced to do useful work like plumbing. There are so many people just getting paid for downright evil or at least useless shit.
So the malls are for investors or they lay empty? Those two things are quite contradictory…
And who decides what is needed for a good life? What if I want a garden? What if I want a convertible? What if I want to fly to Hawaii? What if I want to race cars?
Yeah generally.
But if folks are unmotivated for the work they are forced to do, then you get shit work.
If people.just chase profit, you get what we have now.
There’s no way we are maintaining the standards of modernity on 3h a day where folks are dictated by some outside force into what labor is most needed
We chase money because this equates to goods and services. Well there’s a huge excess of money being produced and horded.
This excess production is a result of … work (plus machinery, efficiency improvements etc).
Obviously. That was the edit “what we have now” I referred to.
I’m not idealizing the current system, I’m saying 3h of “whatever needs to be done” isn’t going to keep us anywhere near a western standard of living
3h per day doesn’t need to be portioned as such. Maybe you work 8 hour days for 6 months and take the rest of the year off until you’re back for your next project.
Top comment referred to 3h per day.
Fair enough but we can be charitable and consider it an average. Dismissing it by literal interpretation isn’t advancing the conversation. Apply the principle of charity and the point stands.
Nup! Spoiler alert - it was agriculture.
Gotta farm that wifi my guy
This seems like a cool statisti, got the source?
Ancient humans likely worked significantly less than modern humans to meet their basic needs. Studies of hunter-gatherer societies suggest that our ancestors spent around 15-20 hours per week (or about 3 hours per day) on work related to survival[1][3].
The Jo/'hoansi people of the Kalahari Desert, for example, spent only about 15 hours a week acquiring food and resources[3]. This left them with ample time for leisure activities like socializing, storytelling, and artistic pursuits.
This pattern of limited work hours appears to have been common for most of human history. For about 95% of our species’ existence, humans likely worked these shorter hours[2][4]. The shift to longer work weeks came much later with the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
Anthropologist James Suzman argues that hunter-gatherer societies were generally well-fed and content, with longer life expectancies than many early agricultural societies[4]. The abundance of free time allowed for rich cultural and social lives.
It’s important to note that while daily work hours were limited, life wasn’t always easy. Infant mortality was high, and people faced other challenges. However, in terms of work-life balance, our ancestors may have had an advantage over many modern humans[3][4].
This historical perspective raises questions about our current work culture and whether we could benefit from reconsidering our relationship with work and leisure in the modern world.
Citations: [1] Humans once worked just 3 hours a day. Now we’re … - Big Think https://bigthink.com/big-think-books/vicki-robin-joe-dominguez-your-money-or-your-life/ [2] For 95 Percent of Human History, People Worked 15 hours a Week … https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qbgihm/for_95_percent_of_human_history_people_worked_15/ [3] Our ancestors worked less and had better lives. What are we doing … https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/our-ancestors-worked-less-and-had-better-lives-what-are-we-doing-wrong/ [4] For 95 Percent of Human History, People Worked 15 Hours a Week … https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/for-95-percent-of-human-history-people-worked-15-hours-a-week-could-we-do-it-again.html [5] Customary naps, more holidays, less work pressure: Did our … https://www.tbsnews.net/thoughts/customary-naps-more-holidays-less-work-pressure-did-our-ancestors-have-better-work-weeks
The feeling when somebody asks you for the source of your data and somebody else provides it.
What’s the point of spending 8 hours a day on the internet if you can’t even name every single source everyone is referencing?
Please always provide sources with such information. Otherwise such interesting content is quite useless and you have to just skip whole chain
Some unsung hero in this thread actually provided the source where I got it from, but yeah, I agree
(Laziness won me over though)
came to see what the comments were as the same thing was going through my head.
The comments leave something to be desired imo
Yeah, a lot of capitalist realism, the way we do things now is the best possible way we could be doing them bullshit. No vision whatsoever.
It’s so ingrained in people, we have such an uphill battle as progressives. People worship capitalism like a deity. If it doesn’t get its sacrifices we’ll have droughts and famine!
Eh, they didn’t have clothes, microwave food, video games, air conditioning, cars, air travel, days off, or healthcare though. No ty
That’s not what we would have to give up, what we would have to give up is a small portion of the population globe-trotting 24/7 on private jets and buying yachts for their yachts.
You’re fellating robber-barons and buying into the bullshit propaganda that without our hugely unequal economic system you wouldn’t be allowed to have a computer.
The numbers don’t add up. There are 2781 billionaires in the world with a combined net worth of $14.2 trillion. If you wiped them all out and spread that wealth evenly across the world’s 8.2 billion people that’s only $1731 per person.
Sure, that’s going to help immensely for people in very low CoL countries but it’s basically nothing for an average American.
The point isn’t just to take their money and redistribute it it’s to get rid of a profit driven and privately owned system in favor of a democratic economy where workers get the value of their labor.
Think of all the private enterprises that reproduce so much work between themselves. Why does every merger get followed by huge layoffs and restructuring? Because we have so much wasted redundant effort.
Consider also how much overproduction we have when it comes to basic needs. People don’t go hungry because of lack of food, we waste food on an industrial scale. People don’t go unclothed because of lack of clothes, we have dedicated landfills for “fast fashion” items that don’t even get sold before being tossed let alone worn once. We have more houses than unhoused by a double digit factor.
All of this waste because we let profit guide production and let private ownership reap all of the value. An economy for the people and owned by the people would give you more benefit than $1000.
I’m proposing a cooperative economy rather than a competitive economy. I’m proposing socialism.
It costs far, far, more to support a billionaire class than the wealth they personally hold.
Do you have numbers on this?
For example: https://www.oxfam.ca/news/richest-1-emit-as-much-planet-heating-pollution-as-two-thirds-of-humanity/
That paper is mostly talking about the richest countries, not individuals, and I don’t buy it.
Norway has nationalized all of its oil profits into a sovereign wealth fund that comprises the pension fund for all its citizens. Yet that doesn’t change the amount of oil they produced.
If every oil producing country in the world did as Norway did we wouldn’t have any oil billionaires but we’d still have to deal with climate change. These countries would still be the richest in the world, they would just have less inequality inside them.
That’s not how that works either. Money is an artificial construct. Single billionaire doesn’t have any mythical wealth that could be redistributed because if it happened the wealth wouldn’t be created in the first place in the economic system where wealth gets redistributed.
Not to mention the wealth equals companies stocks. It is just paper, a database entry. It’s worthless but we all agreed that it isn’t.
Billionaire wealth is just imaginary situation maintained by sanctioned violence of police and state. There is no mythical wealth that would suddenly cure hunger or homelessness. There are just imaginary digits that would plummet to 0 the moment you want to take them out
A lot of those are out of reach for many as well still due to cost, or non existent (healthcare). I’m in a pretty stable point in my life and even I get scared by the electric bills related to heating and cooling. Growing up I recall the only option was to go to the mall since we could not afford AC.
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