In foraging societies - ie, most people for the vast majority of human history - people worked ~15–20 hours/week on subsistence tasks. The rest was leisure or social time (ie, time for being a human later rebranded as 'idleness').
Industrialization has pushed inequality to extremes while raising hours worked - even as productivity keeps shooting up. There's no good reason for people to tolerate this; it's just exploitation.
Those hours worked are carefully defining a lot of work away. Most things people eat need hours of preparation that isn't counted in you 15-20 hours for example. When you relook at what people did most of the time you realize they had to work really hard for a lot more hours to survive.
How many hours a day would you estimate that primates in the wild "work"? Without commenting on quality of life it seems readily apparent to me that many foraging animals have large amounts of leisure time.
> Most things people eat need hours of preparation that isn't counted in you 15-20 hours for example.
Yeah, and we now expect women to work 40+ hour work weeks and house work on top of that. That is the thing causing societal reproduction rates to plummet.
Let's just do the math: a day has 24 hours. The recommendation for healthy sleep is 8 hours. Then, you work for 8 hours, with 1 hour added for the unpaid lunch break. That's the two largest blocks, leaving 7 hours to distribute... dedicate 3 hours for the "staying alive" stuff (preparing for going to work in the morning, aka breakfast, shave, getting dressed, preparing dinner, eating dinner, have a shower and at least some unwind time to fall asleep).
And that in turn leaves only 4 hours for everything else: running errands (aka shopping, dealing with bureaucracy, disposing of trash, cleaning), just doing nothing to wind down your mind from a hard day at work, hobbies, social activities (talking with your friends and family or occasionally going out) and, guess what, actually having sex.
Easy to see how that's already a fully packed day. Society just took the productivity gains from women no longer having to deal with a lot of menial work (washing dishes and clothing, as that got replaced by machines, and repairing clothes) and redistributed these hours to capitalism.
And now, imagine a child on top of that. Add at least half an hour in the morning to help get the kid ready for school, an hour to drive the kid to errands (because public transit is more like "transhit"), and another two hours to help the kid with homework because that workload is ridiculous and you don't want the kid to fall behind kids of parents rich enough to afford private tutors. But... whoops, isn't that just about the entire "everything else" time block? And younger children need even more work, constantly changing nappies, going to the doctor's all the time because it's one new bug every new week and sometimes the bug also catches you cold...
You're inventing sexism where there isn't any. The men who expect their wives to work 40+ hour weeks are not (at least as a group) the ones dumping all housework and childcare on them.
The time constraints that come with a dual income certainly make the logistics of having children more difficult though.
> The men who expect their wives to work 40+ hour weeks are not (at least as a group) the ones dumping all housework and childcare on them.
I'm not talking about men, I'm talking about society itself. Try renting a family home on a single income in any moderate popular area. Owning a home is outright out of reach for even more people.
Yes I agree the dual income expectation is super backwards when it comes to raising a family. First your income isn't enough to have a family unless you’re earning in the top 5%. Second, as you point out, managing a home and a property takes time and effort, much more than just a few hours a week. Add kids in the mix and unless you have full time childcare it’s not feasible. You pretty much have to sacrifice one of the two incomes paying for labor you can otherwise do yourself. I understand the social reason we moved toward dual income but there’s still a lot to iron out. It’s a whole lot easier to have a family if society could figure out a way to support the homemaker during childrearing years—some of us actually want to raise our own kids. And we need to figure out how to make life accessible to single income situations. Inevitably since dual income has become an expectation the markets have adjusted to that reality which leaves single income households short.
Look man if you want to write a refutation of Marshall Sahlins' work, go ahead. I might even read it. But I'm not going to just take the word of a random commentator - are you even in anthropology?
Like, this is a broad consensus thing. There's not really much debate; ethnographic studies have backed it up. Where are you getting your info from?
There seem to be two main points of critique there:
1. That there was war and war sucked; disease; and also infant mortality was high - therefore life sucked back then. None of that really factors in to the debate of how much free time people had; and those thing are all still very much with us (especially in America).
2. That food prep and gathering firewood takes time. Well, gathering firewood is also known as 'going for a walk in nature', and it's actually good for you. You can chat with your friends while you do it. It's not like your average job. It might not be technically 'idle', but it's a lot closer to 'idle' than flipping burgers in a sweatbox.
Same with food prep - picking through some dried beans, or stirring a pot every 30 mins and making sure it doesn't boil over, while you tell stories around the table just isn't comparable to working in an Amazon warehouse pissing into plastic bottles.
It's critique, and you can buy it if you want; but there's nothing there I would call substantial.
1. The choice isn't between having free time and having modern maternity care. And it's not what was being debated. Like, yeah, antibiotics and anesthetic are great to have, but working 40+ hours a week isn't a prerequisite for them to exist so I have no idea why you're bringing it up.
2. Sitting around the table, singing songs, telling stories, or quietly reflecting; all working at my own pace, in the comfort of a home that's been owned outright for generations, surrounded by organic soil free from pesticides and plastic.
3. I read your link, not every cited article. I've personally lived that way, and I know what I'm talking about. There's a big difference between shucking corn with your family or stacking logs, and shuffling numbers at a bullshit job which exists to make two or three incredibly rich people thousands of miles away a tiny bit wealthier. That said, if there's something more you'd like to bring to the discussion, bring it.
You’re not really responding to what he’s saying. You’re sitting at the middle of the story, where the family is no longer surviving, but rather thriving. It’s probably possible to do this, but it’s a difficult stage to reach, and maintaining it requires a LOT of resources.
And anyways, if you’re a hunter-gatherer, you’re following your prey, not sitting around growing corn to be shucked while you sing songs or whatever.
By the way, my buddies and I tell each other stories at work all the time? You can do this at work too, you know. What you seem to be doing is imagining a world where you’ve outsourced all your labor to “it’ll get done” land, then combined hunter-gatherer lifestyles with agrarian lifestyles
You've taken the position that there's some issue with original affluent society but none of the points you're raising run counter either to it or to the adjacent observation that modern quality of life almost certainly doesn't require anywhere near the hours worked at present. Unless you consider economic inequality to be a prerequisite for it anyway.
No, I'm taking the position that there are massive issues with the work estimates in "The Original Affluent Society" in response to a poster that seems to think a small farm in the 1980s is comparable to being a hunter gatherer 20-200kya
A, being homeless and being in a gatherer society are very different things.
And B, even if you wanted to live that way you can't any more; because the commons has been relentlessly exploited past its breaking point for centuries.
I shouldn't really have to explain any of this, but people generally seem to have some weird ideas and blind spots surrounding our history as a species.
In many countries the only obstacle is the legality of living on government lands. In Canada there are people living a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle on crown land. The option is totally available for many people who chose not to do it.
> the only obstacle is the legality of living on government lands
Yes, the obstacle of living illegally on land that has been systematically over-exploited for centuries (or too harsh to bother), without any community or experience. Not sure I'm seeing your point.
People do it so it's definitely possible. Most people chose not to do it because it's a hard life with a horrible quality of life. Being a hunter-gatherer and living a nomadic life is not and was never easy or fun.
Industrialization has pushed inequality to extremes while raising hours worked - even as productivity keeps shooting up. There's no good reason for people to tolerate this; it's just exploitation.