Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013)
blogs.reuters.com
blogs.reuters.com
I have serious doubts about this. Maybe someone could provide additional insight. I doubt all time not working the fields was "relaxing during long holidays". It would likely be spent on other chores.
Food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explodes), so quaffing ale for a week is not impossible for a rich wedding, but unlikely in general. In my childhood I lived near rural areas (not US) and in the days when farm hands cannot do anything (rain; off season) they tend to just get drunk which, to me, hardly qualifies as a vacation time.
Bottom line: I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either.
The 14th century equivalent of unpaid vacation drinking malt liquor in a trailer isn’t my vision of a life of leisure.
Going to music festivals is sort of like pilgrimage as well. But I definitely count it as vacation. People do classic pilgrimages and call that hiking vacation nowadays. Amateur sports events, especially multi-day stage ones, are totally like pilgrimage. You get together with people with common goal, do shit and hang out. I sure as hell count that as vacation.
You are looking at this from the perspective of an atheist living in 2018 and not a deeply religious medieval peasant.
Even including religious component, I don't really see how it differs much from e.g. pilgrimaging to music festivals. I've done quite a bit of traveling where solo task was to see a specific artist. I do count that as vacation :)
What is your definition of vacation? What specifically stops pilgrimage from being a vacation?
You might be conflating shightseeing and vacation as time-off. On top of that, you might want to look into how pilgrimage or other religious get togethers look like.
It's not like people come and pray and do nothing else. In most cases shopping and getting together with people from afar is involved. People have and always had natural needs like roof for the night and food. And rest during the day. If a bunch of people got together at night having a similar goal, they'll probably have a chat and maybe even party a little. There's a reason why many religious sights were surrounded by shopping and entertainment. Even a long time ago.
For example, the very simple act of sunday church. Back when traveling took time, it was certainly a day trip for rural people. It was pretty much a tiny conference or festival for them. That's why market square a frequently next to churches and markets are held on sunday. People come, shop, have a chat... And go to church while at it. I'm talking not only today, but from historical perspective too.
Talking about vacation only as "diversion", I guess quite a few of my vacations wouldn't count then. If I was going to a music festival, diversion itself wouldn't mean jackshit to me. I went to many festivals where I basically got to the location in cheapest possible way. Stayed on festival grounds and then got home in cheapest possible way. I saw no sights nor diversion itself was the point. But boy if it was vacation :)
Same about amateur racing. I get to the location, I race, get some food, sleep it off and go home. Sometimes terrain/location is part of signing up for the specific race. Sometimes I go there just because it's well organised and my friends are going. More likely than not no sights are seen nor I are about location aside from race track much.
Sometimes vacation is purely to get out of daily routine and jut spend time with myself. Diversion itself ain't the point either.
I don't see how amateur racing and attending a concert can meaningfully be distinguished from diversions.
Sure, a super religious nut might make it one. But usually a closest church would provide a fix for that. Let alone that not all were super deeply religious in medieval ages.
What "objective practical need" do you see in Camino de Santiago? [0] It's more or less a spiritual journey, meditation shall I say? And a significant chunk of modern tourism is based on that too. I could definitely say I had "objective practical need" to go to certain concerts or do certain trips. I find especially the later is great way at maintaining mental health and finding peace with oneself.
There's a good saying by bikers that "all you need to solve a problem is a tank of gas". Does it make motorcycle riding (e.g. motorcycle roadtrip vacation) an "objective practical need"?
Your average medieval peasant was much more afraid of his local nobility than of god. Good part of nobility was much more afraid of mortal repercussions rather than the underworld. And clergy... Let's say today's clergy with their scandals is not that different from medieval times.
Do you think protestantism could have happened if people were so deeply religious both towards god and church? Even though god was much more real to many more people, church (and to extent - pilgrimages and church mythology) was seen as separate from god in many cases. There was plenty of questioning going on throughout history.
This view may or may not be affected by the fact that christianity came to my country only in late medieval ages. And took couple hundred years to be established. With remains of the old worldview still surviving in popular culture. People were more than aware that church teaching is not the single one available.
Of course there are more serious traditions of pilgrimage, but people are people, and for every one with a deep connection to their faith, there are others who will use the excuse of pilgrimage for a break from the routine.
Medieval peasants, as far as I know, did drink a lot of beer.
Yes, because you exchange work for money, and exchange that money for machines that do the chores for you. That's what the last 300 years have given us.
The single most significant living improvement in rural America in the 20th Century was - rural electrification. Because the housekeeper got almost their entire Wednesday back, no longer spent out on the washing porch scrubbing at the washtub, cranking the wringer and hanging/gathering wet clothes at the line. My Mom for instance.
Interesting definition. Needs expansion to address the number of hours required to perform chores. Having more hours available to do laundry isn't better if laundry takes significantly more hours. Peasant may have had a whole day per week available to do laundry, but indeed expended that whole day doing it ... vs laundry taking me less than an hour per week.
Because back then beer was safer to drink than water.
I'd go further than that. I would not want to swap positions with a 14th century monarch.
I never have. In fact if hospitals didn't exist and I never saw a doctor my entire life, I don't think anything would have changed.
I don't expect to live much longer than 60 as it is. Most 14th century monarchs, in the brief glance I did on Wikipedia before my answer, lived to 55 or 60 or so before they died of natural causes.
And since we're talking 14th century, there was also that Black Death thing that killed about half the population of Europe.
FWIW: I’d have (probably) died from pneumonia at age 5 without modern medicine. In reality it was curable trivially.
That's the lifestyle explicitly being referred to when talking about swapping with a monarch.
From this history.stackexchange[1] thread, on user found that the average age of death of monarchs to be 44 years in England. In the same thread it seem that it was 48.5 depending on how you made your calculation and 53.4 years if you made it to 20 year old. [1] -https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/43292/what-was-t...
On the other hand, power, especially over a large organization, and playing in a much bigger game is very interesting.
I spent 37 years largely without A/C, northern climate usually being below preferred room temperature. Heating, however, was essential. Moving south, both are surprisingly necessary as the area, while quite temperate on average, has annual temperature swings from about 25°F to 105°F - requiring HVAC.
Unless you're in an unusual situation, like high desert in a remarkably well-insulated home, I suspect HVAC is so prevalent in your life you've completely forgotten it's there out of familiarity. Mad King Ludwig of Neuchwuanstein Castle, however, would find much of the year uncomfortably cold - except that he'd completely forgotten it's there out of familiarity.
Traditionally heating was easier to come across than cooling, despite cooling taking less energy to have happen.
In fact, the only place where HVAC would be a "need" would be super cold climates, or super hot climates. Everything else is tolerable, just not comfortable. Plenty of places are hot, but people lived there just fine before we had electricity or any fancy cooling tech.
And a monarch would have more options for heating.
Now if you'd rather have a job which was notable in the 14th century, that's a different - and also interesting - discussion.
Sitting here in my study, I: teleconference with my team continent-wide, practically have more [e-]books than Vanderbilt's 25,000 volume library, enjoy a constant 74°F interior year-round, drink clean running water (so much available I literally irrigate my lawn & flush toilets with it), instant light & power, and can have darn near any product delivered to my door within 2 days flat. I may not have live-in servants but that's more a matter of law than ability (thanks, OSHA & minimum wage). Other luxuries would be nice, but are mostly impractical indulgences. ...and all this is available to practically anyone willing to get up & go to work.
Given all that, a 14th century peasant would consider my life a permanent vacation.
But the live-in servants have been replaced by external servants. People who are expected to be working when at 11pm I decide I want to eat a bite of food, yet are paid below what it takes to raise their own family and are working 2 jobs at once to make ends meet.
The boundary between nobility and servitude is more blurry, and yes there are a lot more ways to rise out of servitude than 7 centuries ago, but I'm reminded that all the niceties I currently enjoy are still coming at a price for those working in the system that supplies them to me.
Having lived in Europe and in the US, I'm aware that there's a tradeoff between having excellent service to the wealthy and decent living conditions to the poor.
The point of this thread: today's "decent living conditions to the poor" are now significantly on par with then-"excellent service to the wealthy". Outright luxuries, scale & elegance which doesn't really contribute to sustenance, remain a defining difference, but are more a matter of "money to burn" than contributing to survival & prosperity.
Let us not forget that your home would be staffed with a small militia of servants if you had to trade back your dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, fridge, and vacuum, etc.
But is that the issue here? What does that sentence even mean, or add to the discussion?
The article quotes the historian as finding that peasants in 14th century England put in at most 150 days of work per year. This was, according to them, an abnormal period of especially large wages. That tangent in preen-day America bears little relevance. Also when you say "food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explodes)", you're making a big oversimplification. There are other factors at work: diseases, warfare, etc.
> But is that the issue here? What does that sentence even mean, or add to the discussion?
I think the author of the article (not the author of the quoted research one level down) argues that an average medieval peasant had it better than an average modern worker; thus we should try to nudge in that direction, specifically by providing more vacation. Or at least that is how I read it and what the last sentence argues against. My 2c.
And that's overlooking how hard mundane existence was: heat required collecting firewood, cooling was opening a window, cooking was over open indoor fires, food was hard to preserve, beds were scratchy/lumpy/hard, clothing was hand-made mostly from raw wool (clean, spin thread, weave, hand sew) so wardrobes were sparse, water was often dirty & diseased (beer was more necessity a la purified water than entertainment), etc.
Hence the point: the notion of "they had more vacation than we do" is a non-sequitur when our "work" would appeal to them as "luxury vacation", and their "vacation" was prolonged unemployment with few resources. You wouldn't trade your "work" for their "vacation".
The core topic is "vacation", the concept of pleasurably not working while using reserves for sustenance. This in contrast primarily with "work" (the process of labor to create sustenance & reserves thereof), and raising the side contrast of "unemployment" (unable to produce sustenance, eating into reserves - or facing the prospect of none - in a decidedly UN-pleasurable situation).
Today we conflate "work" with "payment", as our society has become advanced enough that few indeed need produce the actual essentials of sustenance (ex.: by sitting here thinking for 8 hours, I can produce enough value to trade for a week's essentials - much more productive than simple gardening). The money (now mostly mere etherial bits, tacit agreements of trade) we earn should not obscure the fact that we're working for essential sustenance, plus surplus.
I grew up in a family which engaged in significant (though not complete) self-sufficiency. Heat? cut down trees, split logs, used wood stove. Food? grew half a year's vegetables & fruit. Clothing? made some of it, repaired much. That all wasn't "not working" just because a wage wasn't involved; it was hard work, not a vacation (and not unemployment).
The point was that if the people had employment opportunities, they'd be less likely to die from their own crops failing, either through acquiring savings during downtime to pay for food or being able to move out of farming when the crops failed. I mean, the seasonal pattern of agricultural labour still exists for millions in many developing countries, but none of them have any shortage of people who used to work on the land seeking work in their sweatshops.
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
Does not sound like the actions of a group desperate for more work.
You could also cross bodies of water over the ice much easier with cattle or heavy loads (like wood, big game meat etc).
Wars also took place in winter when the peasants had time off!
I'm glad to have anesthesia, antibiotics, and so on, but if they lived as we do today, the Earth, seas, and air would have been choked with plastic, mercury, greenhouse gases, and so on centuries ago.
We're externalizing our costs to future generations, who will have to pay to clean up our messes, or live with them.
Would you prefer living in a way that leaves the Earth as clean as you found it? If so, are you? Why don't you?
As the article notes, peasant life consisted of working only part of the year, with longer workdays during harvest season, and short work days (or no work at all) during the rest of the year. In some climates, like the Pyrenees and the Alps, people essentially "hibernated" during the winter: they stayed indoors, lived off their food stores, and expended as little energy as possible.
Citing Graham Robb's The Discovery of France: 'An official report on the Nièvre in 1844 described Burgundian day-laborers thusly: '“After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.” Entering this inactive state was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies.'
The time that they spent not working was not some leisurely edifying "vacation" that they enjoyed as a luxury; for French peasants in the 1700's and 1800's, being inactive was a survival strategy.
The parent article paints the time spent remaining inactive in a romantic light, remarking that "the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze." The reality is probably closer to the fact that he probably risked starvation if he regularly engaged in any sort of vigorous activity (no surplus calories to burn on frivolities like dancing or sports or other active forms of recreation), and it's quite possible that the afternoon naps may have felt more like an obligation than an opportunity to "relax." Lying around all day doing "nothing" sounds less like a vacation and more like a prison sentence (quite literally, in the sense that it probably resembles the life that some people live inside of modern prisons, doing essentially nothing as they wait for the days to pass).
I think it'll be obvious to anyone who's worked in a manual labour job e.g. construction, farming, etc, even with today's tools, you can't physically do these at anything but a "leisurely pace" and a limited amount of hours a day, with breaks for rest, food etc.
Specially in warmer climates. Claiming that this means that life was easy is a little bit dishonest here.
There's a limit to what's humanly possible, digging ditches with shovels for 8 hours a day is not equal to sitting in an office for same 8 hours. No matter how many breaks you have, and at how "leisurely pace" you're digging.
Construction work can be similar in places where harsh winters make it impossible to build anything during winter (frozen ground and all that).
Farming can be similar.
You also need to differentiate between just normal rig workers and deck hands and highly skilled professionals e.g. underwater welders.
So then, a fractious feudal nobility, the ruler, and the church, now fractious corporate powers and a more unified state, with the church faded to irrelevance in temporal matters. The only constant is the undiminished desire to order the lives of others in order to farm them for profit, to be the stationary bandit.
Even if matters were the same, however, the march of technology would still make the present a far better place to live than the past. It is technology, not politics, that is the greatest driver of quality of life.
Under communism, all surplus (or even the full total) is appropriated by the state. So working more and harder nets no extra benefit on the peasant. The incentive then is to exert as little effort as you can. NPR's Planet Money had a really good podcast on this recently [1]
I speculated that feudal peasant may have been subject to the same kinds of incentives as everything they produced belonged to the local Lord.
>because if he produced more food he'd be able to keep more of it
Under certain communist regimes (Soviet Union and Mao's China), that wasn't necessarily true. The state appropriated everything.
[1]https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/02/07/583999476/epis...
You're the one who launched into some weird capitalist whataboutism.
This correlation isn't all that direct in my experience.
What do you mean? That's certainly the case for hourly jobs where more hours equals more money.
Whose arguing that? All I argued: If you work 60 hours @ $10/hr you make more money than if you work 40 hours @ $10/hr. That is a fundamental difference between a market-based economy and a marxist one. In the latter, that equation does not hold.
>the route to advancement into better-paying work is rarely just being really efficient at your job.
Again, whose arguing that? I made a simple, shallow observation. You're trying to tie in some fuzzy nebulous concepts of 'better-paying work' and 'efficiency' and 'career advancement'. It has nothing to do with anything. Yes, some people work 80 hours and make less than other people who work 1 hour. Not the point here.
Because it isn't. And yet we still have people who believe Marxism can work.
I'm also not really sure what this all has to do with feudalism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value#Karl_Mar...
And I'm sure they were enjoying the extended vacations because of the strong contractual obligations that the landowners had to their serfs.
The US do have an issue with the amount of vacation time that they have but it's close to infantile to compare it so naively to the Middle Ages.
If you're going to compare it to Europe (which this is doing), how about comparing it to Europe in, say, the 21C?
Sure, between 20 and 30 days paid vacation depending on the country, illness isn't considered vacation and usually gets paid up to 6 months.
Oh then there is the paternal and maternity leave, up to two years, depending on the country.
This should be the focus of the compare and contrast because it's a valuable comparison.
I've seen a few of these, Monty Python-esque, comparisons recently. There was one in the Guardian that asserted (wildly incorrectly) that female life expectancy had decreased since the 19C.
If I was prone to paranoia, I'd be concerned that they are planted by folk that want the status quo and are making these cartoonish comparisons to make it easy to lampoon.
Is this true? In the UK, 'standard' holiday entitlement for most jobs starts at 20 days annually, and that doesn't include official days off such as Xmas, New Year, Easter etc.
I have a job in the US that offers 25 paid days of vacation, plus the standard 13.
> One of capitalism's most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil.
What about the Communism? Why would they spread this durable myth? Because I remember hearing the same story in the Soviet school.
The paper does not make a real effort trying to consider different evidence and honestly investigate the subject. Most of the sources are related to the UK (specifically, England) with a couple referring to the US in XIX century. How do we know how much the Dutch, German, French, Russian peasants worked, let alone those in the rice-growing Asia? Finally, how about trying to research 1600s and 1700s in North America to compare apples with apples?
Even in her own paper, the results appear a bit, ahem, uneven:
> 1988 - Manufacturing workers, U.K.: 1856 hours
> 1400-1600 - Farmer-miner, adult male, U.K.: 1980 hours > Calculated from Ian Blanchard's estimate of 180 days per year. Assumes 11-hour day
Yes, it's 180 days, but 11 hours each. Did she actually try working 11 hours on a backbreaking menial job? Does she actually believe that 11 hours being a miner in 1500s is the same as 11 hours in the office or even a modern assembly line?
Did you find any figures or arguments in the original paper that I overlooked? Like, Chinese peasants, German peasants, etc.
That would be a highly creative way of summarising my post.
My problem with the paper was that it started what was supposed to be a historical research with a slogan-like claim that a particular ideology propagated it (literally the first sentence).
As in, there was no misunderstanding, no misinterpretation, or lack of evidence, but evil dudes came and lied to us all.
I countered that I witnessed firsthand how the competing ideology was "propagating" the same "myth", which, simply put, makes the author's assertion a sheer nonsense.
E.g. suppose I said "One of bowling's most enduring myths is that wearing a bowler's hat improves your score". Does this imply that a cabal of bowlers spread propaganda? Or simply that the myth exists within the bowling community.
But even if it were the case, the fact that the same idea was commonplace in the USSR means that it's not inherently connected to capitalism.
And, obviously, I am still wondering why people decided it was about capitalism vs. Communism.
However, you've concluded that because the author described a problem with capitalism but not the equivalent problem with communism, the author must be a marxist.
I generally dislike the word "capitalism" because (like the word "man") it's ambiguous. By capitalism do you mean Private Ownership? a market economy? deregulation? Laissez Faire? Regardless of its definition and etymology, people irl use it to signify different concepts. Which dilutes the semantics and relies on context to properly resolve. In the article, perhaps "capitalism's most durable myths" should have been replaced with "industrialized-societies' most durable myths". But nobody except you seems to have interpreted the article as having a political agenda against Private Ownership.
> we are asked to imagine
not by a cabal, but by "The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption".
How? Why? Where?
I am merely saying that since the opposing ideology makes the same statement, the claim that it's a "myth of capitalism" makes no sense.
The moon landing can actually provide a great example. Take the "moon landing hoax" conspiracies. One of the first counter-claims is, if it were really a hoax, wouldn't the Soviets shout about it from the rooftops?
In our example, claiming that the American workers work more than Medieval serfs would be an excellent point for the Soviet propaganda. But since they didn't, and since in my school, the capitalism (otherwise hated) was taught as a step forward, the reduction of working hours clearly isn't a "capitalism's enduring myth".
My main issue, like I said many times by now, is why bring -isms to the study in the first place? Publish the figures, bring more sources from all over the world, make conclusions, THEN try to explain why it emerged. But no, that's not what the article says.
Seriously, does the word "Communism" work like a magic incantation that makes people ignore everything else?
>> we are asked to imagine
> not by a cabal, but by "The implicit -- but rarely articulated -- assumption".
Just read the article.
The article isn't bringing "-isms" or ideologies into the article. The article intended to contrast the Modern West's economic system [0] with the Feudal System. But you are interpreting the article to have contrasted Private Ownership with Public Ownership.
> the claim that it's a "myth of capitalism" makes no sense.
It makes sense under an interpretation you seem to have missed. Colloquially, "Capitalism" means different things under different contexts. Furthermore, it's possible to classify types of economies along boundaries other than Private Ownership vs Public Ownership. Analogously, there's more colors in the rainbow than just Red and Green. Attributing a property to Red doesn't necessarily attribute the opposite property to Green. Consider the possibility that your interpretation of the text was not the intended interpretation.
[0] which in reality is not a Free-Market Economy, but more accurately described as an Industrialized Mixed-Market Economy.
I don't think that is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Etymology
"The initial usage of the term "capitalism" in its modern sense has been attributed to Louis Blanc in 1850 ("What I call 'capitalism' that is to say the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others") and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1861 ("Economic and social regime in which capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who make it work through their labour").[22]:237 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to the "capitalistic system"[29][30] and to the "capitalist mode of production" in Capital (1867).[31] The use of the word "capitalism" in reference to an economic system appears twice in Volume I of Capital, p. 124 (German edition) and in Theories of Surplus Value, tome II, p. 493 (German edition). Marx did not extensively use the form capitalism, but instead those of capitalist and capitalist mode of production, which appear more than 2,600 times in the trilogy The Capital."
Interesting how it was first used in a disparaging way but today is a relatively neutral term.
Here's some food for thought: If you don't work an additional hour, because the economic environment you are in has provided you no meaningful economic task that would be worth doing in that hour, are you better off than someone who does have that opportunity and works for benefit in that time?
It's difficult to compare across such time spans meaningfully. I've often thought if we could bring someone forward in time from, say, a thousand years ago and give them a tour of your local 7-11 that it would re-align a lot of people's perspectives on our modern societies. (I'm not even picking that for the cold drinks or snacks, either; it's things like "here's a tube of cream that you can buy for roughly 10 minutes labor, tops, that when you smear it on a cut makes it so the cut won't kill you anymore". Or, "condoms", that work reliably. I'd expect tears from our visitor and a high likelihood of violent resistence if you try to send them back.)
Plus, the meaningfulness of the task sometimes is beyond economic; many people code in crazy hours because they love the job. I doubt it was the same with miners 500 years ago.
But all these nuances aren't even looked at in the paper.
The future is amazing (on average right now). That doesn't negate the value in considering ways in which the future has not improved upon the past.
Here's another equally meaningless "food for thought": we bring a native American from a thousand years ago to today. They go from a life of being very connected to their community, the environment, fairly plentiful sources of food, and so on, to a society where, statistically speaking, they have a high chance of living in poverty, being systematically discriminated against in ways that prevent them from pursuing education/employment/etc., facing substance abuse, being confined in meaningful ways to an arbitrarily defined "reservation", etc. etc.
Do you still expect tears and violent resistance if you try to send them back?
You can basically expand this thought experiment to most populations who are not upper middle class white people. Would you rather be born as a random Incan citizen, or a modern day coal miner in Peru?
I'm not so sure. See the antropologist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Good_(anthropologist) He married a native girl named Yarima, but after several years in Western society she choose to return to her tribe in the rain forest. Life as a Medieval peasant seem to me to be inferior to life in a hunter gatherer tribe, but I think it is far from certain that the peasant would refuse to go back.
Peasants' work output were calorie-restricted. 11 hours backbreaking were the norm during harvest, but not in the less busier seasons. In the northern countries, snow and lack of sunlight made working impossible for several months per year. Instead, they ate very little food slept through most days.
Why not address the point of the article instead of talking about communism, which nobody mentioned?
But even basic amenities that could be easily built in this time period were difficult to come by. Entire villages might have to share a few pieces of furniture, like a stool.
These people may have had a lot of "time off", but they spent it in horrible poverty, many months of the year near starvation, even within the context of what was available to them in their own time.
I would hazard to say that many modern office workers rarely actually accomplish 40 hours of productive work in a given week. They may be physically present, but how often are they chatting, goofing off, or standing around waiting for an interaction. Modern business is built upon availability, not necessarily toil.
And death was omnipresent. Most of your kids would die in young age, folks around you were killed by random infections or flu regularly, and there was not much to look forward to in life.
As I type this comment, there are 55 other comments in this discussion, not one of them using the word "union". That's the only feasible method I can see to enact large scale change. CEOs and other executives aren't going to change out of the kindness of their hearts, as evidenced by the fact that they could start at any point and still choose not to.
I was just going with the "up to 1/2 the year vacation" from the article.
And insulation is not nearly as good as today, so you need to sleep more for the cold.
We can have our cake and eat it too. And in passing, we would likely save planet earth doing so.
> In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity.
Work smart, not hard.
Isn't something like output/time
[edit] Parasites are always the most productive if you don't measure in absolute terms. The same happens among countries.
I, for one, would accept half pay for half work. And I suspect others too.
Could you elaborate a bit and tell us what other costs you are thinking about?
Of course, if you can just use gig workers...
That is if you work more and earn less then whoever captures the difference in value produced would have augmented their productivity. It all depends where you measure the ratio and in which terms.
Parasites are always the most productive if you don't measure in absolute terms. The same happens among countries.
MUST BE BECAUSE THEY ARE LAZY! /s
(disclosure: I'm a piig)
Productivity is the ratio between man work and output. So if someone works only 1 min a month and earns for that minute $30 you could say of that person that he is extremely productive. Compared to that person someone who works 24h a day and earns a million would have very bad productivity.
[edit]
So countries who find their competitive advantage in labour intensive industries and processes will by definition have lower productivity compared to industrialized economies. Germany being a very industrialized economy will have higher productivity by the nature of their business.
One of the reasons for Germany's high productivity is that manufacturing is a large sector there.
And agricultural output in PIIGS countries having been destroyed by EU regulations, goods are literally wasted because of quotas.
For example consider a family that owns a plantation powered by slave labour. If you look at their gdp/work its close to infinity. Then you go to the plantation and measure the productivity ratio of this as an economy and it would be very low.
So it depends a lot who captures the value of work and how you measure that as well. The more capital you have and the more you can extract wealth without working the more productive you will be.
Germany's median net wealth per adult is below that of the US ($47,000 vs $56,000 for 2017). Given the US isn't renowned for how well its middle does these days, that implies something has gone wrong in Germany.
Per the OECD figures, the US is the third most productive in terms of GDP per hour worked, at around $73 for 2017.
Excluding Norway, the best off country in terms of a combination of GDP per hour worked, least hours worked per week, and highest median net wealth is... Belgium.
They have $161,000 median wealth per adult, about 30 hours worked per week and a GDP per hour worked just a notch below the US.
Here's how the OECD ranks hours worked per week:
Mexico 41.2, South Korea 40.7, Greece 39.1, Chile 38.2, Russia 38, Latvia 36.7, Israel 36.3, Iceland 36.1, Portugal 35.9, Lithuania 35.8, Estonia 35.6, New Zealand 33.8, Czech 33.8, Slovakia 33.7, US 33.6, Hungary 33.6, Ireland 33.5, Italy 33.1, Japan 33.1, Canada 32.8, Australia 32.7, Spain 32.5, Slovenia 32.5, UK 31.9, Finland 31.6, Sweden 31, Austria 30.9, Switzerland 30.6, Belgium 29.8, France 28.2, Netherlands 27.4, Norway 27.3, Denmark 27.2, Germany 26.3
Ever tried to buy a (non fast-food) meal in Germany and in the US? Your purchasing power is way higher in Europe.
Take energy costs as one example. US natural gas prices are half that of Western Europe. Electricity costs are half or less that of Western Europe. In Germany, electricity is about $0.35 kilowatt hour. In the US, it's $0.12.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.js...
The US is a great place to be if you are in prime working age with in-demand skills, no health problems, and no kids.
The US middle class's problem isn't that they don't have enough cash in the bank, it's that they're one firing/health issue/missed mortgage payment/... away from losing it all. Someone with $47,000 in the bank in a country with single-payer healthcare, job security, tenant security... is much better off than someone with $56,000 to their name but no social safety net.
> Excluding Norway, the best off country in terms of a combination of GDP per hour worked, least hours worked per week, and highest median net wealth is... Belgium.
I find that completely plausible, what do you think it proves? Belgium is similar to western Germany in many ways, and doesn't have the former DDR to drag its average down.
Just look at countries that don't. Like the Baltics. Or CIS. They have to go where the jobs are, en masse.
It was still cheaper to produce locally, but German lobbies knew well that if they sold below cost, bribed government officials and pushed strong advertising campaigns , they'd manage to shut down the industry of Europe and make everyone reliant on their production.
Was it "smart"? I guess so, they fucked over everyone in Europe, and still do (the Euro was obviously the deathblow for South Europe and much of the East). But this has nothing to do with "working smart". If you visit germany you'll realize that the image of the hard-working, incorruptable, efficient German is just a lie.
In countries like Greece or Poland, average worker does much more hours in a year, but it’s not because he is working less smart. It’s just the high productivity industries are simply not there, so he must work harder to earn the same money.
All modern people have a choice about how much time they spend at their jobs. I've switched to 3-day workweek sometimes, raking 50% cut in salary; turns out, if you're not in a leading position, it's painfully obvious to negotiate. People in first world countries don't need to work 40 hours a week to avoid starvation. We do it out of our own free will, because we want more stuff.
And, out of this personal experience - because we don't really have anything better to do with our time. Even a regular, a bit boring job beats sitting around the house and watching TV. Driving your own personal projects requires a significant amount of motivation and willpower, and most of us would be too ashamed to admit that we lack it.
There is a far larger group of people working in low-skilled jobs whose entire salary is not enough to cover their outgoings, and must also rely on consumer debt and government assistance to support themselves and their families (think Walmart workers on foodstamps). What's more, the balance of power with their employer is such that they have absolutely no leverage to negotiate shorter working hours, even if they wanted to. A low-skilled worker is expected to be at the beck and call of their employer up to, and often beyond, the legal limit of work. When you can be fired from a job you've held for years for being 30 seconds late, you're not going to get far asking to work two less days a week.
It's nice that you were able to arrange an easier lifestyle for yourself, but don't mistake your privileged situation for the norm.
The article claims the american worker gets 8 days of vacation annually. 52*2 > 8 last time I checked.
I do believe though that with more automation, workers should be getting more vacation time.
I'm really lucky that I don't generally want more things, and the things I do want are cheap. Living in the future is freaking amazing if you enjoy making things.
Because the geld was assessed on landowners, it only applied to free men who owned land, and thus serfs and slaves were exempt.
Later on the income tax got invented, and was generally 1/10 to the king. I wish I only paid 1/10 to the feds.
Tired citizens are not engaged citizens, they don't have the energy to organize and push for their interests.
Workers being less productive is a small price to pay for employers when all your productivity gains go to them anyway.
Here's an excerpt of Alan Greenspan’s Feb. 26, 1997, testimony before the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee:
"The performance of the U.S. economy over the past year has been quite favorable. … Continued low levels of inflation and inflation expectations have been a key support for healthy economic performance. … Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now, and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity. The willingness of workers in recent years to trade off smaller increases in wages for greater job security seems to be reasonably well documented. The unanswered question is why this insecurity persisted even as the labor market, by all objective measures, tightened considerably."
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...