The Mythology of Work (2018)

Co-ops are great, but they don't really work for any business that requires a large capital investment. Like farming might seem simple, but if you want to make it cost effective then you need a lot of expensive equipment like a $800K combine harvester. Where does that capital come from? It's tough to find members who can contribute that much money to join.

Great example, thanks. There must be realistic limits to scaling such models? Administrative, land to crop to member ratios, etc.? Exploitation/arbitrage must find its way in at some point where it becomes an economy... (Not trying to argue definitions, just thinking about practical governance to extend the model to practical human scales.)

> This co-op model is clearly less exploitative than standard labour relationships

Maybe, but it also can be much worse. Any of your owners can exploit the situation via fraud and if they hide it well you won't know until the whole fails and you lose whatever your investment was. Co-op is still a good model for some things, but beware it isn't clearly any better and can be much worse.

In some cases co-op is more exploitive because they use the "you are a member" line and get you to believe it and so you don't even realize how bad it is.

When a co-op is good it is good. However don't fool yourself, it isn't always good. So long as you are not fooled they can work very well.

Yeah, we'll have one guy who like, who like, makes bread. A-and one guy who like, l-looks out for other people's safety.

"far less" is not well supported. As much as people try to claim that today's norm of 2000 hours per year is akin to slavery, the reality is that average human working hours have fluctuated between 1500-3000 across most places and time periods for which we have data.

1500 is less than 2000, sure, but it's not like it was some kind of work-free utopia. And the important context is that the people working 1500 had no technology or department stores, so they were spending significantly more time than we do nowadays doing regular household things like chopping wood, making clothes and preparing food.

>like the Middle Ages, we were working far less.

I wish I knew more about what scholarship people are relying on to come to this conclusion. Can someone point me to a definitive source?

Subsistence farming is not an easy job.

>As in: about two days of necessary hunting-gathering was enough to sustain the group for the remaining five days.

When things go well. Then a random famine appears, and your descendants (what few survive) write horror stories about it for the next few centuries. Or maybe none at all, because they grew up feral illiterate orphans.

Modern society's longer work week is the "insurance" against the modern version of that. Without even knowing it, you and everyone else is invisibly squirreling away "extra" to keep yourselves from starving if things turn to shit. Unemployment insurance, savings, social safety nets, robust (even frantic) economies that have an excess of job openings.

That’s quite a controversial figure actually. The original paper that popularised this was the ‘Original affluent society’ paper by Marshall Sahlins. It marked a big shift away from the paradigm at the time, that saw hunter gatherers as having ‘Nasty, brutal and short’ lives.

The research that essay was largely based off was somewhat flawed though as it ignored time in camp processing food and crafting. So it only considered time spent actively hunting/foraging as work.

I say ‘somewhat flawed’ because work is a modern concept and applying it to a hunter gatherer context is quite difficult and comes with big debates on what is/isn’t work.

Missing context unfortunately, sorry!

This was about hunter-gatherers, neolithic levels of tech. So nomadic lifestyle, only as many possessions as can be worn/carried, and everything made of readily available materials.

So yes, mending the baskets and stitching the clothes - was it "work" vs "was it hobby" may forever be open to interpretation, but I believe the main point is that there was no external/personal pressure. You mend the basket so your (or other tribal member) work is easier, and if you enjoy stitching more than weaving I'm sure you could find someone with reverse liking and switch "work" with them.

And an interesting side point to this vs modern times is that everyone had to be a generalist (up to even the iron age). So everyone could do every job, but they were humans just like us - each had individual talents and preferences. So you would naturally really on John to cut trees down and Mark to hunt small game, but should John fell ill Mark will get you wood too.

And then even the notion of possession is highly unlikely to resemble modern sensibilities. Sure John had John's pants, but the baskets and hatchets were... tools, our tribe's tools, current tools. And so on and on...

> it just that work done during that time was _not necessary to immediate survival_

It depends how you define “work”. Is doing laundry work? It certainly isn’t fun or leisure. What about cooking? Cleaning? Dealing with administrativia?

For me 10 to 20 hours per week go into overhead like that. It’s awful. I consider it work because it steals from my time to do something else that I’d rather be doing. But it doesn’t bring any immediate benefit either. It’s just shit we all have to do.

Now here’s the thing that breaks comparisons to older cultures: They didn’t have laundry. It was too expensive to do laundry. Most people had 1 set of clothes that they washed about once a month. Even kings and queens rarely had their clothes washed. Without modern plumbing it’s just too cumbersome.

But I kinda like having clean clothes every week. It’s nice.

There’s a lot of things like that where making them cheaper has made them take more time out of our lives. Because we like the up-side and the down-side has become bearable.

Is that how you read it? It seemed more to me that he was making bank from his website.

This will sound weird, but I work close to the waste collection industry and there are decent reasons why loading bin vans can be enjoyable:

* Great exercise.

* Builds local knowledge.

* Cameraderie with a tight-knit team.

* Driving trucks and planning routes (assuming role rotation).

That sounds like a perfect use case for my new collaborative diagramming and whiteboarding app!

Sure, subsistence farmers didn't work the way we work now, with hyper division of labor. If you think it wasn't work, though, you're kidding yourself.

Many researchers (labour historians, anthropologists, sociologists etc.) draw a distinction between labour and work, as well as the different kinds of work [0].

[0] https://ilostat.ilo.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Capture.p...

This site is a cess pool of libertarian axioms and nit picks by people that believe they are the next Mark Zuckerberg. Anything remotely critical of capitalism is piled on. It's their culture.

> No one said anything about "no work"

What straw man ? It's written in the essay: "everything got done without work". Nope, it never happened.

The first step is being honest about if the problem is even solvable, and second if it is solvable would people really want what the solution means.

This article is dishonest in using a definition of work that excludes the vast majority of work people have done over history. The sexist view that women never work because watching kids, making clothing, washing clothing, preparing meals (all traditional things women did in various societies) was not real work, while the things men did (hunting, fishing) was real work.

It doesn't - if I have zero dollars in the US, I have no guaranteed food/water/shelter, and people will tell me to go get a job.

you may stifle improvement on technology. If 4G is free for everyone what does that do to the market?

This "mutually beneficial" transaction only seems so simple and obvious if we refuse to investigate the many unstated assumptions here.

It would require far less labour to secure these living standards if all the land in the world weren't already claimed and violently defended by a property-owning class. Looking back through history, it's plainly evident that most ownership, especially of land, was acquired through violent means that most would condemn today.

If there were some great reset where we could all agree on a fair system in which no one had any benefits or disadvantages due to some historical events, there is no way the same labour trade "deal" would be maintained.

The authors speak about denial. Thinking that something unfair is fair is denial, when it helps you cope with your reality. Finding a solution to being homeless doesn't make your life fair. It can mean you're being exploited though.

If putting those 12 hours towards making food and shelter works then it’s not fair. If you need multiples of those 12h to make yourself a shelter, you’ve just invented capital.

In real terms: if every renter received equity in what they pay for rent (- maintenance) then housing would be more fair as both rent prices would come down as well as purchase being more affordable as landlords start selling the stock

Edit: note that I guess i’m replying to both you and the original commenter

Keep the thought rolling: "Hey boss, someone has an idea to make my work less unhealthy to body and mind. I figured you make a lot off my pain and might want to implement some of those ideas. I understand the fairness of my work and compensation but you have not compensated my pain thus far. Nice custom car, btw, and I really like the size of your house. Maybe you want to build a school in there or something?"

Pain compensated. Environmental consequences hit the fan. Documents disclosed: catastrophe was avoidable with a few dollars investment ...

And then there's the issue of sponsoring schools, hospitals, services and all kinds of shit not even remotely as often as it should be done even though the Pyramid of the benefits is stacked exactly that way.

I mean there is scarcity of kindergardens in some places, shitty meds, hospitals don't have what they need, supply chains are full of hazardous nonsense and there are scientists and journalists and citizens hunting all of that but there are walls of insurance people and lawyers as well.

So yeah, the whole "fair" thing is cool and all, but the entire system is a bit over-engineered against it.

Oh, you don't want them to waste the taxes. Got 'ya, corruption and bloated administrations, of course, lack of efficiency, uh-huh. How about more control mechanisms for just those financial mechanisms? No? Why not?