I know this is going to be an “actually…” post, but I just find it too damn interesting and politically relevant. So, actually stone age tribes got by with 3 around hours of work every day on average.
So why do we have to work so much today to survive? …yeah, because we’re being fucking cheated.
Eh, they didn’t have clothes, microwave food, video games, air conditioning, cars, air travel, days off, or healthcare though. No ty
That’s not what we would have to give up, what we would have to give up is a small portion of the population globe-trotting 24/7 on private jets and buying yachts for their yachts.
You’re fellating robber-barons and buying into the bullshit propaganda that without our hugely unequal economic system you wouldn’t be allowed to have a computer.
The numbers don’t add up. There are 2781 billionaires in the world with a combined net worth of $14.2 trillion. If you wiped them all out and spread that wealth evenly across the world’s 8.2 billion people that’s only $1731 per person.
Sure, that’s going to help immensely for people in very low CoL countries but it’s basically nothing for an average American.
It costs far, far, more to support a billionaire class than the wealth they personally hold.
Do you have numbers on this?
That paper is mostly talking about the richest countries, not individuals, and I don’t buy it.
Norway has nationalized all of its oil profits into a sovereign wealth fund that comprises the pension fund for all its citizens. Yet that doesn’t change the amount of oil they produced.
If every oil producing country in the world did as Norway did we wouldn’t have any oil billionaires but we’d still have to deal with climate change. These countries would still be the richest in the world, they would just have less inequality inside them.
The point isn’t just to take their money and redistribute it it’s to get rid of a profit driven and privately owned system in favor of a democratic economy where workers get the value of their labor.
Think of all the private enterprises that reproduce so much work between themselves. Why does every merger get followed by huge layoffs and restructuring? Because we have so much wasted redundant effort.
Consider also how much overproduction we have when it comes to basic needs. People don’t go hungry because of lack of food, we waste food on an industrial scale. People don’t go unclothed because of lack of clothes, we have dedicated landfills for “fast fashion” items that don’t even get sold before being tossed let alone worn once. We have more houses than unhoused by a double digit factor.
All of this waste because we let profit guide production and let private ownership reap all of the value. An economy for the people and owned by the people would give you more benefit than $1000.
I’m proposing a cooperative economy rather than a competitive economy. I’m proposing socialism.
Please always provide sources with such information. Otherwise such interesting content is quite useless and you have to just skip whole chain
Some unsung hero in this thread actually provided the source where I got it from, but yeah, I agree
(Laziness won me over though)
Well… that and there are far too many people on the planet to be supported through a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Even when you get into the millions, you need agriculture and animal husbandry. And farming and herding is a lot more work.
Okay, so how about medieval peasants also working 7-8 hour days, ~150 days per year?
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html
You do know they starved to death all the time, right?
As a consequence of the lack of technology, not the lack of work.
I think I remember reading that early agrarians probably worked about 20 hours a week
Anthropologists at Harvard did an extensive multi-year study of the !Kung San people in southern Africa who still lived by hunting and gathering in the '60s and '70s. Despite living in near-desert conditions, they spent an average of about 17 hours a week in food-related activities. Granted, this yielded a diet of around 1200 calories a day, but they were relatively very small people and this amount was adequate. Mongongo nuts FTW. Whether this lifestyle (and that of other studied modern hunter/gatherers) is generally representative of pre-historic and pre-agricultural humans is an open question, but it’s hard to imagine that hunting and gathering in less marginal environments would have required more time and effort - especially when there were a bunch of big hairy elephants you could run off cliffs walking around.
Early agrarians, however, probably had to bust much more ass to make a living, as the farmer’s toolkits of domesticated species were not as well-developed as today.
This seems like a cool statisti, got the source?
Ancient humans likely worked significantly less than modern humans to meet their basic needs. Studies of hunter-gatherer societies suggest that our ancestors spent around 15-20 hours per week (or about 3 hours per day) on work related to survival[1][3].
The Jo/'hoansi people of the Kalahari Desert, for example, spent only about 15 hours a week acquiring food and resources[3]. This left them with ample time for leisure activities like socializing, storytelling, and artistic pursuits.
This pattern of limited work hours appears to have been common for most of human history. For about 95% of our species’ existence, humans likely worked these shorter hours[2][4]. The shift to longer work weeks came much later with the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
Anthropologist James Suzman argues that hunter-gatherer societies were generally well-fed and content, with longer life expectancies than many early agricultural societies[4]. The abundance of free time allowed for rich cultural and social lives.
It’s important to note that while daily work hours were limited, life wasn’t always easy. Infant mortality was high, and people faced other challenges. However, in terms of work-life balance, our ancestors may have had an advantage over many modern humans[3][4].
This historical perspective raises questions about our current work culture and whether we could benefit from reconsidering our relationship with work and leisure in the modern world.
Citations: [1] Humans once worked just 3 hours a day. Now we’re … - Big Think https://bigthink.com/big-think-books/vicki-robin-joe-dominguez-your-money-or-your-life/ [2] For 95 Percent of Human History, People Worked 15 hours a Week … https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qbgihm/for_95_percent_of_human_history_people_worked_15/ [3] Our ancestors worked less and had better lives. What are we doing … https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/our-ancestors-worked-less-and-had-better-lives-what-are-we-doing-wrong/ [4] For 95 Percent of Human History, People Worked 15 Hours a Week … https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/for-95-percent-of-human-history-people-worked-15-hours-a-week-could-we-do-it-again.html [5] Customary naps, more holidays, less work pressure: Did our … https://www.tbsnews.net/thoughts/customary-naps-more-holidays-less-work-pressure-did-our-ancestors-have-better-work-weeks
The feeling when somebody asks you for the source of your data and somebody else provides it.
What’s the point of spending 8 hours a day on the internet if you can’t even name every single source everyone is referencing?
