Why is work a religion in America and you are expected to agree as if it were natural?!

[MrMan]

As a result of this prosperity and improvements in agricultural productivity. Your average worker in 1450 only needed to work 20, 8 hour days to feed one person for a whole year. A family of six only needed 120 days of work to feed and food back then would have been your primary expense. As a result of this, your average peasant in the 1400s only worked about 27-28 hours per week. Although in practice it would have looked more like 150-210 days of work at about 6-8 hours on each of those days. Even then, peasants were known to take naps in the middle of their shifts or leave work to get a drink at the tavern.

Overall history is a lot more varied then it’s made out to be. Some eras of history people suffered a lot but other eras they may have been even better off than people today are. Course a 15th century peasant was not as engaged in consumer culture as people today are but that might actually be a positive because people back then got more happiness through their relationships with each other instead of materialism.

But no running water, no microwave oven, hand-scrubbed clothes, and no toilet paper. When the kids were small with long-term incentives for having lots of children and a low population, 27 hours a week to feed one person could be a lot of hours. Imagine having to dig, too.

If we are talking about England, manual labor would have been tough, but a 72-degree day is a hot day in England.

[Outcast9428]

As a result of this prosperity and improvements in agricultural productivity. Your average worker in 1450 only needed to work 20, 8 hour days to feed one person for a whole year. A family of six only needed 120 days of work to feed and food back then would have been your primary expense. As a result of this, your average peasant in the 1400s only worked about 27-28 hours per week. Although in practice it would have looked more like 150-210 days of work at about 6-8 hours on each of those days. Even then, peasants were known to take naps in the middle of their shifts or leave work to get a drink at the tavern.

Overall history is a lot more varied then it’s made out to be. Some eras of history people suffered a lot but other eras they may have been even better off than people today are. Course a 15th century peasant was not as engaged in consumer culture as people today are but that might actually be a positive because people back then got more happiness through their relationships with each other instead of materialism.

But no running water, no microwave oven, hand-scrubbed clothes, and no toilet paper. When the kids were small with long-term incentives for having lots of children and a low population, 27 hours a week to feed one person could be a lot of hours. Imagine having to dig, too.

If we are talking about England, manual labor would have been tough, but a 72-degree day is a hot day in England.

It wasn’t 27 hours a week to feed 1 person. It was 20 days worth of work to feed one person for an entire year meaning that feeding a family of 6 only required 120 days worth of work. With the 10% tax rate all your expenses would have been paid for with 130-140 days of work. Everything after that is discretionary income so a lot of people only worked like 200 days out of the year for about 6-7 hours on each of those days.

True they wouldn’t have had a lot of today’s technology but it’s all relative... They wouldn’t have been able to conceive of microwaves or washing machines.

In the industrial revolution on the other hand the average person would’ve had to work 12 hours a day, 6 days out of the week. Ironically part of the Communist backlash during the 19th century against capitalism cited the working conditions of the 15th and 16th centuries as what they hoped to return to.

Kind of ridiculous though given that the 15th and 16th century working conditions were highly libertarian in nature and were not communist at all.

[Winston]

Wow Outcast9428. How do you have so much insight when you're only in your early 20s? I certainly didn't at that age.