[ajuc]

It's funny - you're both right.

Peasants (over 90% of the society) were usually working less hours but much harder than we do. And they were living in much worse conditions of course.

Farming (especially without modern technology) is very cyclical, most of the time you have too much labour and too little land/food. Then for a few months you have too few people to do everything that needs to be done.

And there was no easy way for vast majority of people to store surplus for more than a few years. And there was a real possibility of starvation if a few factors independent of you happen at the same time.

So the whole society and economy was structured around these constraints - that's why it doesn't follow our intuitions. It made no sense to increase gains by 10% if you had to increase risk by 1% to do that. It made no sense to work harder if you have enough and it's gonna spoil anyway. You're just risking injury to throw it all away later.

There was a great series of articles about it: https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...