> In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze.
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.
>Bottom line: I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either.
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.
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".
When the land isn't producing (winter), and you're just living mostly off reserves, and you're not enjoying being pretty much trapped in a hut covered with snow, that counts as "unemployment". Sure isn't a "vacation".
You where not limited to your own hut. Further you where often staying with a large extended family so playing with children and telling stories etc. It was very different than staying home at a modern single apartment.
Making the best of a bad situation (the essence of unemployment) does not equate to choosing the manner & location of frolicking (the essence of vacation).
> The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.
It's certainly more relevant than "vacation", since it's time spent doing little because nobody would pay them for work (and even if they would, there was nothing they could feasibly buy to improve their meagre living standards), not a paid leisure break to spend ones salary on personal enjoyment.
The exact mode of payment is irrelevant. The point is they had to work for sustenance - whether it was trading skills for money, or producing goods and bartering them, or just producing direct necessities.
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 division between work-time and pleasure-time was not as rigid as "I'm in the office/vacation," but I don't see that that invalidates the argument. Hanging around drinking and dancing around a maypole is clearly not working.
Yes, I said as much in the previous post. They weren't wage labourers because local landlords and churches could call upon their labour for free, besides which when they were actually permitted to to sell their labour (and early Middle Ages European peasants often weren't) they had few skills to sell and little to buy with the proceeds. Thus those periods of downtime between agricultural seasons are a lot closer to the modern concept of periods of "unemployment" than they are to "vacation"
The salient fact about unemployment is that anyone who stays in that state faces destitution and is likely seeking some other work (we rarely talk about wealthy heirs being "unemployed"). For someone in a premodern agricultural lifestyle there wasn't really anything calamitous about this regular period of not-working.
Nothing calamitous other than the inability to compensate for crop failures which periodically left families starving. They didn't have to worry about repossessions of course, on the basis they were closer to being property than owning property. The salient fact about modern unemployment in developed countries is that unemployed people (and especially seasonally un[der]employed people) generally receive more through even the meanest form of state assistance or unemployment insurance than peasants ever did, they just have much higher expectations of a bare minimum standard of living to fail to meet.
Crop failures can just as easily happen under a capitalist mode of production; this seems somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether people not working in the off-season are "unemployed." Yes, I agree that the government is more effective at providing social welfare programs than it was in the past, although probably some of that was compensated for by the greater connection to neighbors and kin that someone would have had, as compared to today. I'm not trying to cast the Middle Ages as an idyll we've fallen from.
> Crop failures can just as easily happen under a capitalist mode of production; this seems somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether people not working in the off-season are "unemployed."
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.
I don't think it's very likely in a medieval context that, if you are experiencing crop failure, there is an abundance of food to purchase from someone else.
>>Bottom line: I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either.
> 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.
I don't think a vague sense that "they had it better" is necessarily what's at issue. The popular image of the peasant is that they must have spent most of their lives toiling away. What the historical record shows is rather different. I don't think any of us are arguing for regressing society to feudalism (well, besides [your least favorite political figure here] at least, ha ha), but looking at the disparity does give us something to interrogate -- why did we adopt the kind of hours we work now? Do they still make sense? (I think the first question is probably easier to answer than the second)
Agreed. Whilst touring Neuschwanstein Castle and Biltmore Estate, what struck me: for all the luxurious art & fineries & service kings & tycoons enjoyed, what we consider basic necessities were hard to come by, if available at all, for even the super-rich.
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.
Excellent point. We've basically just outsourced the servants. I show up at one of a proliferation of restaurants, and expect cooks & servers at my beck-and-call. I set my thermostat, and expect someone will ensure the temperature remains to my liking with hardly a thought on my part. I open the tap, and clean water is carried thereto. A litany of robots (!) perform assorted household tasks which I minimally contribute to.
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.
There have been external servants for as long as we've had nations... that's something you must get over if you're enjoying the spoils of a better off country. There's also a lot more trade going on because of better technology (seafaring, navigation, freight, etc), along with farming which is generally occupied by about 2 or so percent of the US population which was historically much higher.
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.
I don't have HVAC now and nor have I ever felt much need for it; I don't do much online ordering; and I don't spend much time reading other than frivolities online.
On the other hand, power, especially over a large organization, and playing in a much bigger game is very interesting.
You use no heating or cooling? That's unusual. Approximate latitude?
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.
A fair amount of the world has no "need" for heating or air conditioning. Mediterranean climates and all of Latin America qualify here, as does much of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.
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.
I grew up in a 200 year old cottage in the Irish countryside, the only heating was a fireplace (one, for the whole cottage). It wasn't a problem at all.
And a monarch would have more options for heating.
To say nothing of the fact that let's see the first time he gets an infection or disease or needs surgery given no vaccinations, antibiotics, or anesthetics.
When was the last time you got an infection or disease that would have struck you down without modern medicine?
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.
From Health A millennium of health improvement (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/241864.stm)
The average life expectancy for a male child born in the UK between 1276 and 1300 was 31.3 years. In 1998, it is 76. However, by the time the 13th-Century boy had reached 20 he could hope to live to 45, and if he made it to 30 he had a good chance of making it into his fifties.
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...
By the time you became a monarch you had usually already survived to adulthood (child kings existed but were the exception). This biases the statistics considerably.
FWIW: I’d have (probably) died from pneumonia at age 5 without modern medicine. In reality it was curable trivially.
You don't get infection or disease because.
1- most of the people (and probably you too) are vaccinated and prevent the spreading of such disease.
2- Most of our current developed world is sanitize compare to back them
3- a cut could be lethal or could meant amputation in the middle age, now you just need to put alchool on it.
4- you might had suffer from malnutrition even has a monarch, lack of vitamin C could lead to scurvy in the winter and lack of iodine in the food might cause Iodine deficiency (wich lead to Goitre or Cretinism)
If you your so keen of wanting to live that life style, you can find a sweet amish girl and go live in her community.
I can't help but feel that there is some mild trolling going on this thread :-) If not that, there are at least a couple of people who are seriously optimistic about their personal invulnerability in the absence of modern medicine, healthcare, and public health practices.
I think that things like herd immunity just aren't intuitively understood or respected by the people who think that just because they haven't had a health emergency in the modern world they haven't benefitted from their existence in the modern world.
The age of monarchs has a strong bias toward those who made it to adulthood. A huge percentage of children died historically of diseases that are mostly prevented by vaccinations today.
And since we're talking 14th century, there was also that Black Death thing that killed about half the population of Europe.
The fact that peasants did not work more hours is tied to the fact that they were agrarian laborers. Once you've brought in the harvest, what is there to do but lie around and wait until the end of winter? Indeed, "lie around" is most of what they did, and remaining inactive to lower their metabolism was actually a survival strategy to deal with the limited amount of food they had: burn fewer calories, eat fewer calories.
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).
In the Middle Ages nobody was taking a "vacation" in the sense we mean it; that's really a more Victorian idea. But enough people today can't actually afford to go away when they have time off.
Actually that's not quite true either. Pilgrimages were quite common, and although not necessarily a vacation as we would consider it, many even fairly poor people traveled quite far distances just for the spiritual pleasure of it.
It takes a really muddy definition of "spiritual joy" to argue that a pilgrimage to worship holy relics is the same as going to gawk at the Eiffel Tower and eat fancy food.
While fictional, the Canterbury Tales portrays pilgrimages as a kind of extended carnival, where some of society's normal rules are suspended. You can argue that tourism was born out of catering to pilgrims: http://blog.museumoflondon.org.uk/pilgrim-badges-birth-touri...
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.
That's a fair point. It'd be interesting to see a comparison with the modern phenomenon of the Hajj, which seems like the best point for comparison of something in the modern world. People do, of course, do tours of Christian holy sites too, but I think that, in general, the seriousness of purpose of the average Hajj-goer is likely greater.
I don't think it's a "different spin to the same old human need;" I think it's a phenomenon entirely different in kind. This is, I think, as clearly as I can possibly state my argument.
It's not different at all. It's traveling somewhere afar without objective practical need.
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.
Well, we still have religious people doing pilgrimages. Both christians and not. At least some of them sure do treat them as vacation. On top of that, plenty of people in medieval time were not that deeply religious. Even in clergy or among monks.
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?
To someone religiously devoted it's not an impractical diversion but something deeply practical. It seems to me in some sense more akin to traveling to a renowned hospital -- you might take in some sights while you are there, but diversion isn't the point.
So you're saying vacation is only if it's impractical and the diversion itself must be the point?
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.
And how is traveling for religious purposes an "objective practical need"?
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"?
I think you just are not capable of understanding religious thinking if you have to ask these questions. Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone premodern for whom God is every bit as real and present as the natural world. Even the most religious today are, in some respects, not on the same level as medieval people in this way.
I think you're not capable of understanding religious thinking of medieval people.
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.
> I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either.
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?
If you owned land, and did not experience natural disasters, you could eat very well. Chickens are easy to take care of and growing enough vegetables is not that hard. The biggest worry was catastrophic crop failure of staples like wheat or potatoes due to weather, or disease or pests. The other worry was stored food spoiling over winter in cellars. Beans and pickled fruits/vegetables like cabbage is what got you through. Harvest time was busiest season. Winter you more or less bundled up and stayed indoors as much as you could, venturing out to take care of your animals. I spent my childhood at my grandmas farm. Due to communism, life was very primitive.
> I don't know that I see the relevancy of the chores, though. Do they go away if you work longer hours?
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.
Or you exchange that money for other people to do those chores. Home cleaning services, landscapers, electricians, plumbers, car mechanics and drivers (including Uber/Lyft/taxi), cooks or restaurant/takeout food (often plus a third party to deliver same), nannies, dog walkers, and so on. Specialization is the name of the game. I can do some of these things myself, but I can also earn enough in one hour to pay for multiple hours of other people's time and expertise (and amortized equipment). That's a pretty big win compared to a 14th-century tradesperson, or even most nobles.
It wasn't. But the article is comparing points in time (14th century vs. 21st century), so the path from one to the other doesn't matter for this discussion.
They get automated away, reduced in time demand and reduced in strenuousness. Clothing becomes the click of a button, not sewing for 80 hours. Washing those clothes becomes 5 minutes of sorting and throwing it into a washing machine & dryer, not hours of exhausting manual labor. And so on.
Standard of living == hours available for chores. So the hardest-working lowest peasant on poor land wore rags. Because they 'couldn't afford' to make any better with the time and energy they had left over.
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.
Well, if you're not paying for health and dental, and you don't have any corporate training programs, and there aren't OSHA requirements and other costly regulations, you really have to give something up as an employer to retain good help.
"Leisure" might not mean exactly what we think it means today.
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.
Work on oil rigs, fishing (Deadliest Catch guys?), underwater welding etc. are usually done for a couple months a year and taking the rest off, (at least from anecdotal data from folks I know).
Construction work can be similar in places where harsh winters make it impossible to build anything during winter (frozen ground and all that).
Depends on the type of construction specialty. I have a neighbor who is in heavy construction (i.e. drives backhoes, etc.) and he's typically off for the winter--though he sometimes does various other things.
A lens to look at this through is the struggle for control over the population. The competing factions in the Middle Ages were very different from those now - so the manifestations of authoritarianism naturally differed in the Middle Ages. Large numbers of holy days (holidays) went hand in hand with simony and temporal power emanating from Rome. The church was just as rapacious and self-interested as the lords who claimed ownership over the peasantry.
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.
This sounds like it could be explained by the same structural problems that communist nations went through ... in that if you don't own the land, and the proceeds of what you make don't really belong to you and there is no incentive to make more than what your neighbour makes ... why not put in the least amount of work you can.
Not quite. There is still a direct correlation between work and benefit, as in if you work more, you make more, but you keep more. In Communist economies, that isn't true. If you work more, you make more, but you don't get to keep more.
And working your field doesn't provide for your life? The relationship between a peasant's effectiveness at his work and the rewards he reaps is actually more, rather than less, direct than that relationship for someone stocking shelves, because if he produced more food he'd be able to keep more of it -- what was being rewarded was the result rather than the number of hours he spent in the fields.
>And working your field doesn't provide for your 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.
The subject of this discussion is feudalism, so I'm not sure why you've launched into a rebuttal talking about China and the USSR in the 1960s. It isn't true that "everything that [peasants] produced belonged to the local lord."
I literally just wrote: "I speculated that feudal peasant may have been subject to the same kinds of incentives as everything they produced belonged to the local Lord."
You're the one who launched into some weird capitalist whataboutism.
Right, but that speculation is based on a misconception of the nature of feudal production. The capitalist comparison is relevant since it's the system we live under today and your original post strongly implied, although it did not outright state it, that the problem you were describing is unique to societies which aren't capitalist (in fact I can remember hearing in middle school the exact same argument as an explanation of the eventual triumph of the First World over the Second, which I think is at best a wild oversimplification).
The relationship between hours worked and work done is not direct and, more importantly, the route to advancement into better-paying work is rarely just being really efficient at your job.
>The relationship between hours worked and work done is not direct
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.
People not working "enough" hours isn't a structural problem if they're producing enough. If your argument is just that "people will spend more hours at work if their incentives are aligned exactly to making them do that," then I don't disagree, but I also don't find it revelatory.
I'm not sure where you are getting the idea that Marxism says that people should not be incentivized to work more hours. If anything, I think Marx's labor theory of value[1] would be more likely to lead to the opposite problem, people being incentivized to work rather than being incentivized to produce value.
I don't think your argument works unless you actually go back and tie the hours thing to productivity. If I go to work and goof off for eight hours is the system working?
I'm also not really sure what this all has to do with feudalism.
Precisely. There are countries, working under very similar constraints to modern day US, that are trying, and succeeding, with other arrangements.
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.
> As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually.
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.
Yes, this is true for the average American white collar worker at the start of employment, sort of earning fractional vacation hours per hour of work. Service worker - not sure about that - is that the same as zero hours contract employee? Low unemployment has forced companies to start offering paid vacation to employees in fast food restaurants in recent years. Many teachers in public schools famously don't have to work for three months a year, but don't get paid for those three months a year.
It's not true. It's tough to find a job that doesn't offer 2 weeks and most white collar jobs offer 3 weeks (15 days). That doesn't include the typical 13 stat holidays.
I have a job in the US that offers 25 paid days of vacation, plus the standard 13.
Good (and apparently unaddressed) point. We get several more hours per day for leisure precisely because "daylight" can be continued indoors indefinitely.
Ugh. The paper reeks of political agenda. The very first sentence is:
> 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?
"The paper does not make a real effort trying to consider different evidence and honestly investigate the subject."
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.)
Heh, your food for thought is a cherry picked, fairly detached piece of speculation.
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'd expect tears from our visitor and a high likelihood of violent resistence if you try to send them back.
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.
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 argument is not capitalism vs state socialism ("communism"). That you seem to think it is, shows exactly how well propaganda has worked on you, from both of those sources.
The word 'capitalism' was invented by communists, so the moment that someone uses the word in a disparaging sense it makes conjure up the 'capitalism vs state socialism' debate. Even if that weren't the case, the GP's point would still stand. Bringing up 'capitalism' in this manner reeks of political agenda. Whether that agenda is communism is irrelevant.
"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."
Louis Blanc was a 19th century socialist. Marx and Engels went on to popularize the term and concept. Marx's main work is Das Kapital, in which he criticizes 'capitalism'.
Yes, and Marx's use of the term was as a criticism of 19th century British industrialism. One of the many reasons why using these terms in polemic ends up leads to increasingly meaningless debates.
No, I generally agree that we've shifted things around so that most workers now are generally a bit better off than before in many ways. I think they could be better off still under alternative systems. I was however responding, primarily, to your apparent argument that anyone criticising capitalism can only be a Soviet-era state-supporting "communist".
> your apparent argument that anyone criticising capitalism can only be a Soviet-era state-supporting "communist"
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.
I don't think the quote intended to imply that Capitalism propagated a myth. I think the quote intended to imply that the subject of the myth was Capitalism.
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.
Suppose the article had said "One small step for man, one big step for mankind." You are responding with the equivalent of "What about womankind? There are female engineers at NASA. Isn't the moon landing a big step for women too? Neil Armstrong is clearly a misogynist." We can debate whether to replace "mankind" with a more gender-neutral term. But nobody would interpret Neil Armstrong as having a political agenda against women.
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".
> 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.
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".
> why bring -isms to the study in the first place?
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.
The excerpt doesn't come from a paper -- it comes from the book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, by Juliet B. Schor: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w... If you want to be snarky, get the details right.
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.
The comparison ignores the blistering daily poverty of a medieval peasant. This is not merely a lack of technology - that would be a historical argument.
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.
I'm going to duplicate a comment I made in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16652952), because it applies equally well here and I'm quite disappointed that I seem to be the only one pointing this out (after that thread reached more than 340 comments, a mere two other people made a similar comment to mine):
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.
While I am sympathetic to the idea of unionizing development and IT work, I have a hard time imagining a practical path. Vaguely libertarian ideologies seem to be the norm in these professions.
They got up to 1/2 the year off, sure. But my guess is they had to work more than 2000 hours the other half. They just compressed the hours worked into the growing season. Modern farmers do the same thing (from a rural farming community).
In winter you still need to care about animals, repair stuff, sew, chop wood, cook, etc. Peasants had to create a lot of things that we buy nowdays. They did not slacked whole winter.
From what I read, it really was no slacking. For instance, all sewing was done by hand - that includes stuff to put on bed and cover your self with. That is huge amount of time consuming work. If you had daughter you had to prepare things she will need after marriage - so even if you are fixed, you are preparing things for that. Anything from wood is done by hand too.
And insulation is not nearly as good as today, so you need to sleep more for the cold.
The problem with so many of the comments here: Of course you would sacrifice your vacation time to avoid the pains of the middle ages and to gain the advantages of today. But those advantages are not the mere consequence of us working more. They are the consequence of centuries of technological advancement. If we started working as little as medieval peasants our standards of living would not just suddenly drop to their levels but they would stay much higher.
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.
Germany has the whole EEU working menial jobs for them. So in Germany VW workers slack off and even protest to get reduced work week, while in EEU German managers walk over a car plant with watches and time each manipulation in order to fulfill their quotas. Yet the sales are reported in Germany, so productivity metrics goes way up there. It's really naïve to think they aren't benefiting from what is essentially softer colonialism.
People really dont understand the term productivity. Productivity is produced value / hours of work. So usually people that work the hardest will have lower productivity that does not mean less value produced. Something can have very bad productivity but be very profitable and generate a lot more value than something else with bigger productivity.
It never makes sense for the worker. But most of the time is more profitable for the one squishing the work out of the people if people are cheap enough.
[edit]
Parasites are always the most productive if you don't measure in absolute terms. The same happens among countries.
I never understood this. Pay people half the wage for half their time, hire twice the staff. Get a significant increase in value produced for the same money.
I, for one, would accept half pay for half work. And I suspect others too.
If you think about it the less "productive" you are the more "productive" the people extracting the value from your job will be.
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.
If you are paid by the hour (as most low wage jobs are) time in the "office" does translate into more returns. There are many people (mostly immigrants) working long hard hours so they can afford to send their children to better schools. The returns don't make sense in any short term sense, but their ~grandchildren tend to get rich as we know from history.
Isn't labor productivity measured per-time, though? If there are diminishing marginal returns on labor (as there are on everything else) then it would make sense that those who work the least are the most productive. It doesn't mean they produce the most, though.
Average productivity in the economy is just ratio of hours worked to GDP. It doesn’t mean that all, or even most of the workers work harder or smarter. In countries like Germany, the high productivity industries pull the rest of the economy behind them. The German janitor is not likely to be any more productive that janitor in poorer countries, his wage is just higher than there, because the economy provides better job market, and so the companies must pay higher wages to find employees.
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.
I happen to agree with you broadly. However, two data points to bring to the discussion.
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
> 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.
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.
I disagree, the US famously has a low cost of living compared to developed nations in Europe. That includes everything from energy prices to housing prices to food prices. When adjusted for the higher US wages, that imbalance is even more dramatic.
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.
Depends on your definition of "smart". Germany undercut and closed down most factories from around Europe. Ask anyone you know in the EU, they'll tell you how things were going well in the 70s and how their country actually had a lot of manufacturing plants for electrical and mechanical equipment (fridges, car parts, machinery etc). Then, near the 70s, globalization hit hard.
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.
The sad thing is that this kind of propagandistic sentences are crafted to make people believe that. Usually people don't understand producitvity so they understand what you said from the sentence. A German reading that will think "Ha we work less and produce more" but that is NOT what productivity means.
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.
I think it has more to do with education. In Italy, Portugal and Greece students find themselves being overqualified for the antiquated production methods of industries in their countries, together with no investments from the government (e.g. italian 110m startup public investments against France's 60 billion)
And agricultural output in PIIGS countries having been destroyed by EU regulations, goods are literally wasted because of quotas.
The problem is with productivity is that its that counter-intuitively, it might only be a measure of efficiency in absolute terms.
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.
Conditions in Europe in the 14th century were mostly due to the Black Plague (Black Death), which killed ~50% of the European population. The result was a variety of infrastructure, institutions, and economic systems designed for a much larger population. Used goods and housing were available at very reduced rates. Labor was a scarce commodity. It took a while before Europe regained an economic system that matched its population.
Is this surprising? People in the past had much more time and much less resources. This isn't just medieval workers. It might have applied to the last two generations, before the information age allowed us to check work email first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
Because he didn't have a choice. If he could trade this vacation for more food, medication for his children, or many other resources, he gladly would - but I don't think that as a peasant in the winter you really could make anything out of your time without a capitalist society and other jobs.
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.
By "all modern people", you apparently mean the relatively small group of middle-class professionals who can earn a decent salary on a shorter working week, and are in a position to negotiate 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.
Right, but if you could have health insurance and a decent standard of living while working part-time, who's to say that would still be the case? That's so far from the world we live in that it is hard to imagine it.
I don't think it's true that peasants would have worked more if given the option, nor that most people have a realistic option to negotiate to work less hours today.
Note the significant difference between "leisure time" as in "playing games, socializing and making merry" and just "huddling in a primitive hut waiting for a chance to work more." It's not like he's having much fun (unless you include all the begatting that must have gone on during the winter months...)
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.
They paid substantial taxes in grain. They were pretty much considered the private property of their landlord. If they wanted to get married they first had to be allowed so by their lord, and then pay him as compensation for being so nice to them. Then there's debt-servitude, invasions, and all that fun stuff.
Serfs and slaves weren't so much exempt from paying taxes as exempt from earning income, whilst still being obliged to provide labour for other people alongside trying to meet their own subsistence needs.
Oh, the joy of the marginalist supply and demand theorem!
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."
Could it have more to do with agriculture? during certain times of year you probably didn't have work . waiting for things just grow or thaw. before you can begin plating or harvest?
I would prefer just the facts. Is it true that medieval peasants got so much vacation? When, where and how exactly? The article mentions many things, but they're left quite unsubstantiated. I know I could do the research on my own, but probably the article would be more valuable with more of the what and less of the why.
The links to the resources are black, without an underline. So, if you search for the phrase "the economist Juliet Shor" it takes you to a book review by MIT CSAIL.
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.