[pandapower2]

I'm not sure that is true.

Firstly, what are you working in exchange for? Are you performing some kind of useful work for someone else, receiving nothing in exchange then going and being a hunter gatherer for some reason? Probably not.

>You didn't work for a few hours then order food for dinner

Money has existed for a very long time so purchasing food ready to eat isn't so far fetched assuming your life took you near a non-trivial population center. Bartering goods like food, clothing etc has existed for even longer.

>You probably worked a few hours, then spent the next many hours either harvesting and/or creating all the requirements for life. Maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer, then an hour creating clothing, then an hour cooking, then an hour mending the hole in your roof, etc.

It reads as if you are assuming that a given individual is going to have to do everything, which doesn't seem to have been the norm for most humans. Most people didn't live alone. Instead of doing all of that maybe you spent 2 hours hunting a deer. Meanwhile someone else created clothing, someone else cooked, someone else mended the roof.

Its also worth noting that all of these jobs have a very well defined point of being done. It doesn't matter if it takes you 2 hours or 20 minutes to acquire food. Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.

[Mirioron]

Most farmers lived on farms. They actually did have to make a lot of their stuff themselves. Yes, you had a large family, but you needed that to be able to survive.

>Once you have as much as can reasonably be consumed before it goes bad you are done. If you catch a deer within 30 minutes you are done. If someone else did well fishing then there is no value in going hunting at all.

You would salt and preserve the meat/fish and consume it in the future.

Imagine how you would live, if you could only buy metalworks from the store. Basically everything else you'd have to make yourself.

[pandapower2]

>You would salt and preserve the meat/fish and consume it in the future.

That is very environment specific.

Depending on when/where you are salt was expensive or extremely laborious to produce. Salting, smoking etc is itself laborious, can require special purpose equipment and can take weeks. Its entirely possible that the effort to obtain the supplies and equipment to preserve your surplus food exceeds the effort to simply obtain more food in the future.

There is a reason why salting/pickling/fermentation was common in places that had winters severe enough to impact the availability of food Vs anywhere closer to the equator. People did it when they faced a large chunk of the year when starvation was a serious concern.

[kortilla]

You should look into inflation. Most jobs pre-industrialization absolutely would not provide you food with delivery or several shirts in exchange for a couple hours of unskilled labor (which is what you can get today).

[wutbrodo]

I'm not sure it's what the parent comment is doing, but it's beyond baffling to me when I see this view in the wild. You'd have to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, economics, and basic arithmetic to think that historical incomes were anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods, and yet I see this very often. (Not to be mistaken with more reasonable arguments that rely on the differences in utility derived from goods whose prices have gone down and goods afflicted by cost disease)

[coldtea]

Well, one also has to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, culture, and social understanding, to think that historical cultural concerns where anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods and buying more stuff...

You could be perfectly content (and more happy than most office drones with 1000x the stuff) with a couple of clothe articles, food and a basic home...

[wutbrodo]

> Well, one also has to be completely ignorant of staggering amounts of history, culture, and social understanding, to think that historical cultural concerns where anywhere close to what we have today in terms of consumer goods and buying more stuff..

Uh, sure? This is a complete non sequitur, as nobody is making the claim you're describing. If you actually read my full comment, I address this directly by saying that it's a much more reasonable argument that utility from all goods isn't equally distributed and the important ones haven't gotten easier to get at the same rate as the unimportant ones.

That doesn't mean that it's not incredibly factually inaccurate to think that access to consumer goods hasn't become mind-bogglingly higher

[synthmeat]

And even if you replace "office drone stuff" with more highbrow items... You really don't need a lot of books either. I'd die an accomplished man if I grokked what's on ~2m of my modest bookshelf. Hell, if that was all what was available at me, I'd probably get there sooner.

[coldtea]

Yeah, the universal things more people crave after the basics (food, shelter, health) are covered are, I'd say:

- a sense of meaning - a sense of purpose - the ability to influence their environment - community - companionship - love - sex

And those are not to be found in consumer goods, and would be a problem in 1200 as much as in 2019 (if not more so)...