I've heard that it's even worse (better?) the more you go to the past. Bret Deveraux [argues] (https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...) that this is one reason why lots of farmers choose to stay in subsistence level, because there's not really better things they can buy anyway. So they just conserve energy and time (which some outsider may see as lazy) and focus on long term resiliency (through building horizontal and vertical social relationships) to ensure that no disaster may pull them down all the way to starvation.