Comment by ciconia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ciconia | Hacker News Reader

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One important fact to take into account is that the cost of labor in the middle ages cannot really be compared to today's minimum wage. The calculation based on $7.25 an hour, coming to $3500, is a bit of a hyperbole [1].

In fact, even today in many places in the world (India and Africa come to mind), artisans still produce fabrics, clothes and other low-tech products by hand for way less than American minimum wage [2].

I'm not a historian by any means, but it is my understanding that before the industrial revolution the major cost of production was the cost of materials, and the cost of labor was marginal. Contrast this with modern production, which is continually occupied with reducing the cost of labor, either by automation or by offshoring to third-world countries.

[1] Of course, any kind of cost comparison across 8 centuries is suspect. A quick search produced this: http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng240/medieval_prices.html

A peasant's linen chemise is listed as costing 8d in 1313, which is equivalent in purchasing power to anywhere between GBP 22.30 to 5970, depending on the index, according to this:

http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/result.php?year_sour...

[2] http://www.bls.gov/fls/ shows cost of labor for different countries in recent years. According to the site the average hourly compensation in India in 2010 was $1.46.

It doesn't matter whether $7.25 is hyperbole. What matters is whether or not 479 hours is hyperbole.

Let's see. IRL, I own around ten t-shirts, and they seem to wear out in 2-4 years, so let's say around 100 wearings. I'll stretch that out to 730 wearings, because I'm "wearing it until it disintegrates".

I'll hope to buy a shirt on odd-numbered years, and new pants on even-numbered years. I won't buy any other cloth goods.

If I work 40 hour weeks, I have 2080 hours of labour in a year.

Suppose I am equally economically valuable to a spinner, such that I can trade one hour of my productivity for one hour of theirs.

If I need a new 479-hour garment every year, then I need to allocate nearly a quarter of my life to buying clothes, even though I wear clothes until they disintegrate, and only own one shirt and one pair of pants. That is fantastically expensive.

Your shirts wear out much faster then theirs. The fabric is much thinner for one, and you wash (and worse tumble dry) it often.

Your calculation of 40 hour weeks is quite wrong. 100 hour weeks were completely normal back then.

So it took a month to make a shirt, and it should expect to last 10 years or so.

The Talmud says that a poor person had a budget of 50 zuz per year per person for adult clothing (not including shoes). Someone calculated based on the price of bread that 50zuz is equivalent to $166. Other calculations find 50zuz to be $1000.

One zuz was the average daily wage for an unskilled worker. So it would take you about a month and a half to get clothing.

I agree that 40 hour weeks was silly. ;) 100 hour weeks are also silly, however, especially when you consider the religious proscriptions against working on the Sabbath. 100 hour weeks is almost 17 hours a day (six days), leaving 7 hours for all sleep, eating, hygiene, recreating, family care, etc. Pretty much physically impossible. Also, as I understand it (though I am no expert), accounts of medieval life show that aside from sowing season and reaping season (when everyone DID work 100-hour weeks for very short periods), there was lots of leisure time. Let's compromise at 60-80 hour weeks.

I also agree with your points about my shirts (thin and tumble-dried). On the other hand, my shirts are woven/knitted from a very consistent fabric, which might help, and they're exposed to very little mechanical abuse outside of the dryer (I do not do physical labour, I'm very sessile, and for that matter I don't get much acidic sweat on them). And my shirts _are_ usually showing multiple (small) holes after those ~100 days of wear. You really think their shirts would last 3650 wearings, 36 times as much as my shirts? Thirty six times? Nonsense. My 7x might be low, but I bet it's closer than your 36x.

Also, as I mention in a cousin-post, I think the author screwed up her math twice, such that I think the correct number given her inputs is 879 hours, which I'm gonna call 10-15 weeks of labour. And then once we account for other clothing, as I did in my previous comment, by assuming that all non-shirt garments collectively are as expensive as one shirt, we're up to perhaps 25 weeks of labour total.

So it takes four months to make a set of clothes, and the set lasts a few years. So I'm no longer saying "one quarter of your life", I'm saying "more than ten percent". When you wear your clothes until they fall off you.

The Talmud reference is very interesting. You say 50 workdays (that's 8 weeks... you agree that the people referenced in the Talmud didn't work the Sabbath, right?) for 52 weeks of clothing, which is one sixth of one's life.

Sounds like our estimates agree.

Yah, we do mostly agree.

A few points:

I've worn shirts for longer than 100 days with no holes. T-shirts are very thin and don't last. Thicker fabric lasts exponentially longer, not just a bit longer. And the dryer is really hard on fabric.

I stand by my 10 year guess-timate - especially when you include repair.

I don't think there was ever any real leisure time. Instead it was low-energy time. For things like spinning and making cloth, but not hard work. So 90 hours a week might actually be right. (100 was too high.)

The Talmud numbers are for a poor person, not an average person. Those are the numbers below which someone should get social help. Most people would spend more I think.

The 1 zuz a day is income from outside work. A person would also work at home, so their income could be another 50% on top of that (not as money but as made at home goods). I assume the 1 zuz a day is for the poor person, not the average.

I do wonder if other people worked 7 days a week, and the Tamlud figures are not representative of the majority.

One thing that is in historic accounts, is that people used to die in the street in London quite frequently. This is probably related to the fact that their dwellings were so small.

If the person died in a not-so-good area street gangs would strip the corpse of clothes because they were so valuable.

That alone speaks to the relative value of clothes. Most of us wouldn't wear a piece of clothing we found, even if it was in good condition.

The numbers seem to be based off current days knowledge of old world methods. I'd imagine after spending so much time doing a task, they must have found a way to be at least a bit more efficient at using their own tools to do the job.

Yeah, that's the crucial question in the estimating.

Here are some other issues.

She claims 2 yards of tie-off for every 4 yards of fabric, in both the warp and the weft. You only weave 4 yards before re-warping?!? Bullshit. And you don't use tie-off at all on the weft, as I understand it. So instead of 33% of thread being wasted to tie-off, I think 0% is a close approximation.

On the other hand, if I read the post correctly, it claims that there are 72 inches in 6 yards. So increase the thread requirement by 3x!!!

If I'm correct about both of these errors, a better figure would be 879 hours. Yikes.

Depending on the era and location, slave labour totally skews the calculation too.

It doesn't change the calculations. All other things being equal, that slave would then sacrifice 100% of his life to provide clothing for four people.

It (drastically) changes the ethics of the situation, however.

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