I agree about washing machines, which is why I emphasized them in my comment, but not necessarily about physical work in general.
To the first world office worker it may seem like modern life is practically incomparable to the life of a subsistence farmer, but consider where that worker’s clothes come from, who grows his coffee, who mines the materials that make his car. A lot of those people live in circumstances that are not unlike laborers in societies of the past. A good amount of them are even slaves.
Thanks to modern technology those workers produce far more per hour than they ever would have in the past, and the beneficiaries of their work enjoy wonders that people in the past could only dream of, but I’m not so sure the bottom classes physically labor much less if at all. It can just seem that way because the population is larger now, the hierarchies of civilization now stretch across the globe rather than just the local area, and the scribe class takes up entire countries.
Maybe the lower classes really are proportionally smaller than they used to be, I don’t have any statistics to that effect in front of me, but it could be the case. After all complex technology requires a lot of intellectual activity to create and maintain. But if that is the case I think there is still something to be said about how increased productivity wasn’t used to make the lives of the laborer class much easier, but instead to grow the size of the scribe class.
I’d say even globally we’re better off when it comes to amount of physical labour since the number of people being able to survive on physical labour of others has ballooned. Most of the world I’d say are service economies, people do office jobs instead of physical labour. Even fields such as construction are to large degree mechanized in many industrialized countries, same for agriculture, many factories have robots doing the actual physical activity and humans are more in supervisory role and so on.
Office work might be stressful and soul crushing, but it’s not quite the same as actual demanding physical labour.
Sure, like I said I just think its notable that we used the increased productivity to proportionally increase the size of the non-laborer population rather than reduce the per-laborer workload.
Like, to use an analogy, you know how in ‘The Jetsons’ George Jetson goes to work every day, pushes a single button, then takes a nap? I know that sketch wasn’t ever meant to be taken seriously, it’s just a joke, but think about how its implied that every family has a breadwinner husband like George with a similar job.
I feel as if, if it were like the real world, there would be a single guy frantically pressing buttons for 8 hours a day while about a billion people are supported by his effort. Though, granted, that’s a definite improvement over all of them having to work like that.
I agree about washing machines, which is why I emphasized them in my comment, but not necessarily about physical work in general.
To the first world office worker it may seem like modern life is practically incomparable to the life of a subsistence farmer, but consider where that worker’s clothes come from, who grows his coffee, who mines the materials that make his car. A lot of those people live in circumstances that are not unlike laborers in societies of the past. A good amount of them are even slaves.
Thanks to modern technology those workers produce far more per hour than they ever would have in the past, and the beneficiaries of their work enjoy wonders that people in the past could only dream of, but I’m not so sure the bottom classes physically labor much less if at all. It can just seem that way because the population is larger now, the hierarchies of civilization now stretch across the globe rather than just the local area, and the scribe class takes up entire countries.
Maybe the lower classes really are proportionally smaller than they used to be, I don’t have any statistics to that effect in front of me, but it could be the case. After all complex technology requires a lot of intellectual activity to create and maintain. But if that is the case I think there is still something to be said about how increased productivity wasn’t used to make the lives of the laborer class much easier, but instead to grow the size of the scribe class.
I’d say even globally we’re better off when it comes to amount of physical labour since the number of people being able to survive on physical labour of others has ballooned. Most of the world I’d say are service economies, people do office jobs instead of physical labour. Even fields such as construction are to large degree mechanized in many industrialized countries, same for agriculture, many factories have robots doing the actual physical activity and humans are more in supervisory role and so on.
Office work might be stressful and soul crushing, but it’s not quite the same as actual demanding physical labour.
Sure, like I said I just think its notable that we used the increased productivity to proportionally increase the size of the non-laborer population rather than reduce the per-laborer workload.
Like, to use an analogy, you know how in ‘The Jetsons’ George Jetson goes to work every day, pushes a single button, then takes a nap? I know that sketch wasn’t ever meant to be taken seriously, it’s just a joke, but think about how its implied that every family has a breadwinner husband like George with a similar job.
I feel as if, if it were like the real world, there would be a single guy frantically pressing buttons for 8 hours a day while about a billion people are supported by his effort. Though, granted, that’s a definite improvement over all of them having to work like that.