[vadimberman]

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?

[jerf]

"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.)

[GuiA]

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?

[bjourne]

> 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.

[abandonliberty]

It used to be said that you weren't a real woman until you lost a child.

The future is amazing (on average right now). That doesn't negate the value in considering ways in which the future has not improved upon the past.

[vadimberman]

I absolutely agree.

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.

[vertex-four]

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.

[astine]

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.

[rhcom2]

> The word 'capitalism' was invented by communists

I don't think that is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Etymology

[astine]

From your own link:

    "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'.

[nickbauman]

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.

[tremon]

socialist /= communist.

[refurb]

Interesting didn't know that.

Interesting how it was first used in a disparaging way but today is a relatively neutral term.

[vadimberman]

It's wonderful that there is someone with mind as unclouded by propaganda to enlighten me and improve my limited world view.

Did you find any figures or arguments in the original paper that I overlooked? Like, Chinese peasants, German peasants, etc.

[vertex-four]

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".

[vadimberman]

> 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.

[Double_Cast]

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.

[vadimberman]

It could be possible theoretically if not the context of the article. "We are asked to imagine" and so on.

But even if it were the case, the fact that the same idea was commonplace in the USSR means that it's not inherently connected to capitalism.

And, obviously, I am still wondering why people decided it was about capitalism vs. Communism.

[bjourne]

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.

[_khau]

Your second sentence is literally whataboutism.

Why not address the point of the article instead of talking about communism, which nobody mentioned?