People supported families with single incomes with less than high school education for centuries before the 1950s.

All the other members of the family were active and produced useful things - both kids and women. The iddle lifestyle was limited to richer classes.

In foraging societies - ie, most people for the vast majority of human history - people worked ~15–20 hours/week on subsistence tasks. The rest was leisure or social time (ie, time for being a human later rebranded as 'idleness').

Industrialization has pushed inequality to extremes while raising hours worked - even as productivity keeps shooting up. There's no good reason for people to tolerate this; it's just exploitation.

Those hours worked are carefully defining a lot of work away. Most things people eat need hours of preparation that isn't counted in you 15-20 hours for example. When you relook at what people did most of the time you realize they had to work really hard for a lot more hours to survive.

Look man if you want to write a refutation of Marshall Sahlins' work, go ahead. I might even read it. But I'm not going to just take the word of a random commentator - are you even in anthropology?

Like, this is a broad consensus thing. There's not really much debate; ethnographic studies have backed it up. Where are you getting your info from?

There seem to be two main points of critique there:

1. That there was war and war sucked; disease; and also infant mortality was high - therefore life sucked back then. None of that really factors in to the debate of how much free time people had; and those thing are all still very much with us (especially in America).

2. That food prep and gathering firewood takes time. Well, gathering firewood is also known as 'going for a walk in nature', and it's actually good for you. You can chat with your friends while you do it. It's not like your average job. It might not be technically 'idle', but it's a lot closer to 'idle' than flipping burgers in a sweatbox.

Same with food prep - picking through some dried beans, or stirring a pot every 30 mins and making sure it doesn't boil over, while you tell stories around the table just isn't comparable to working in an Amazon warehouse pissing into plastic bottles.

It's critique, and you can buy it if you want; but there's nothing there I would call substantial.

1. how many hours a day would you work if it meant not watching 6 of your 7 children die.

2. How'd you get those dried beans out of their pods? Where'd you get that pot? Where'd you get the water?

3. You didn't actually read the critique did you, you the wikipedia paragraph characterizing the critiques.

1. The choice isn't between having free time and having modern maternity care. And it's not what was being debated. Like, yeah, antibiotics and anesthetic are great to have, but working 40+ hours a week isn't a prerequisite for them to exist so I have no idea why you're bringing it up.

2. Sitting around the table, singing songs, telling stories, or quietly reflecting; all working at my own pace, in the comfort of a home that's been owned outright for generations, surrounded by organic soil free from pesticides and plastic.

3. I read your link, not every cited article. I've personally lived that way, and I know what I'm talking about. There's a big difference between shucking corn with your family or stacking logs, and shuffling numbers at a bullshit job which exists to make two or three incredibly rich people thousands of miles away a tiny bit wealthier. That said, if there's something more you'd like to bring to the discussion, bring it.

Where'd the corn come from? hunter gatherers had teosint. How'd you turn a tree into logs? Where'd the house come from, where'd the table come from?

You've taken the position that there's some issue with original affluent society but none of the points you're raising run counter either to it or to the adjacent observation that modern quality of life almost certainly doesn't require anywhere near the hours worked at present. Unless you consider economic inequality to be a prerequisite for it anyway.

No, I'm taking the position that there are massive issues with the work estimates in "The Original Affluent Society" in response to a poster that seems to think a small farm in the 1980s is comparable to being a hunter gatherer 20-200kya

You’re not really responding to what he’s saying. You’re sitting at the middle of the story, where the family is no longer surviving, but rather thriving. It’s probably possible to do this, but it’s a difficult stage to reach, and maintaining it requires a LOT of resources.

And anyways, if you’re a hunter-gatherer, you’re following your prey, not sitting around growing corn to be shucked while you sing songs or whatever.

By the way, my buddies and I tell each other stories at work all the time? You can do this at work too, you know. What you seem to be doing is imagining a world where you’ve outsourced all your labor to “it’ll get done” land, then combined hunter-gatherer lifestyles with agrarian lifestyles

> Most things people eat need hours of preparation that isn't counted in you 15-20 hours for example.

Yeah, and we now expect women to work 40+ hour work weeks and house work on top of that. That is the thing causing societal reproduction rates to plummet.

Let's just do the math: a day has 24 hours. The recommendation for healthy sleep is 8 hours. Then, you work for 8 hours, with 1 hour added for the unpaid lunch break. That's the two largest blocks, leaving 7 hours to distribute... dedicate 3 hours for the "staying alive" stuff (preparing for going to work in the morning, aka breakfast, shave, getting dressed, preparing dinner, eating dinner, have a shower and at least some unwind time to fall asleep).

And that in turn leaves only 4 hours for everything else: running errands (aka shopping, dealing with bureaucracy, disposing of trash, cleaning), just doing nothing to wind down your mind from a hard day at work, hobbies, social activities (talking with your friends and family or occasionally going out) and, guess what, actually having sex.

Easy to see how that's already a fully packed day. Society just took the productivity gains from women no longer having to deal with a lot of menial work (washing dishes and clothing, as that got replaced by machines, and repairing clothes) and redistributed these hours to capitalism.

And now, imagine a child on top of that. Add at least half an hour in the morning to help get the kid ready for school, an hour to drive the kid to errands (because public transit is more like "transhit"), and another two hours to help the kid with homework because that workload is ridiculous and you don't want the kid to fall behind kids of parents rich enough to afford private tutors. But... whoops, isn't that just about the entire "everything else" time block? And younger children need even more work, constantly changing nappies, going to the doctor's all the time because it's one new bug every new week and sometimes the bug also catches you cold...

You're inventing sexism where there isn't any. The men who expect their wives to work 40+ hour weeks are not (at least as a group) the ones dumping all housework and childcare on them.

The time constraints that come with a dual income certainly make the logistics of having children more difficult though.

> The men who expect their wives to work 40+ hour weeks are not (at least as a group) the ones dumping all housework and childcare on them.

I'm not talking about men, I'm talking about society itself. Try renting a family home on a single income in any moderate popular area. Owning a home is outright out of reach for even more people.

Yes I agree the dual income expectation is super backwards when it comes to raising a family. First your income isn't enough to have a family unless you’re earning in the top 5%. Second, as you point out, managing a home and a property takes time and effort, much more than just a few hours a week. Add kids in the mix and unless you have full time childcare it’s not feasible. You pretty much have to sacrifice one of the two incomes paying for labor you can otherwise do yourself. I understand the social reason we moved toward dual income but there’s still a lot to iron out. It’s a whole lot easier to have a family if society could figure out a way to support the homemaker during childrearing years—some of us actually want to raise our own kids. And we need to figure out how to make life accessible to single income situations. Inevitably since dual income has become an expectation the markets have adjusted to that reality which leaves single income households short.

How many hours a day would you estimate that primates in the wild "work"? Without commenting on quality of life it seems readily apparent to me that many foraging animals have large amounts of leisure time.

You can still do this now, it's just called "being homeless" and it actually sucks.

A, being homeless and being in a gatherer society are very different things.

And B, even if you wanted to live that way you can't any more; because the commons has been relentlessly exploited past its breaking point for centuries.

I shouldn't really have to explain any of this, but people generally seem to have some weird ideas and blind spots surrounding our history as a species.

In many countries the only obstacle is the legality of living on government lands. In Canada there are people living a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle on crown land. The option is totally available for many people who chose not to do it.

> the only obstacle is the legality of living on government lands

Yes, the obstacle of living illegally on land that has been systematically over-exploited for centuries (or too harsh to bother), without any community or experience. Not sure I'm seeing your point.

People do it so it's definitely possible. Most people chose not to do it because it's a hard life with a horrible quality of life. Being a hunter-gatherer and living a nomadic life is not and was never easy or fun.

Who said anything about the idle lifestyle?

Implied by "single income".

In reality in most families all family members were contributing something to the household income.

Income in this context means trading labor for cash.

In the past, huge amounts of household work were done without any such exchange.

Today, child raising, cleaning, cooking, provisioning, and more remain unpaid household labor. The people who do that work were not idle 800 years ago, and they are not idle today.

Women and kids would tend to animals and food came directly from the animals. They both would tend the fields when work did not required physical strength - and thre was plenty of such work too. The crafts women did were for sale or trade. They would also sell on the market whatever excess household produced.

If we are talking about "centuries" quite a lot of people including men did not worked as in being employed for salary. But their work was economical - necessarily so.

Being stay at home mom today is mostly battling boredom and demotivation. Or then, making up things to do. It is not the same as milking cows or making cheese.

> Being stay at home mom today is mostly battling boredom and demotivation. Or then, making up things to do. It is not the same as milking cows or making cheese.

I was a stay at home parent for my daughter. It was extremely far from battling boredom (except perhaps for first year and a half, if that, and even then anyone who is actually interested in child development will not find it boring) and it was the opposite of demotivating.

Rather than speak in such broad generalizations, I think it would be better to restrict your claims to specific, real stories.

No they didn’t, read some history. ‘Cottage industry’ and ‘child labor’ are good search terms to use.

Children helped support their families, I don’t see the face value problem with that. The fact remains that humans have been having kids in their teens and 20s for millennia, until very recently in western liberal societies.

For most of human history, there were no formal schools.

> Obviously the answer is "1950s america".

And the 50s to 80s anywhere else in the civilized world.

It does not have to be a replica of of 50s society though. In particular, I do not think the model of "men go out to work, women look after home and kids" is a great one.

There are lot of alternatives. Men can be primary parents (I was, once the kids got to about the age of eight or so, and was an equal parent before that) and they could stay at home (I continued working, but I was already self-employed and working from home, and my ex never worked after having children).

I think the ideal set up (it would have been so for me) would have been for both parents to work part time.

Of course it still comes back to, you should be able to raise a family on the equivalent of one full time income.

Of course, if the leisured society predicted a few decades ago had come to pass it would be one part time salary.

> I think the ideal set up (it would have been so for me) would have been for both parents to work part time.

Beautifully said, very progressive also!

I am a big fan of the 4-day work week (for the same amount of money as 5 days), it's been transformative for my life. The extra energy and focus you get from that 1 day translates to higher productivity in the 4 days where you do work. Sadly, the current "squeeze em', bleed em' dry, and drop em'" brand of capitalism is incompatible with the majority of the people to experience how good life can be like that.

I certainly ain't looking forward to them raising the retirement age to 1337 by the time I get to retire.

It's like a race where they repeatedly move the finishing line because the organizers took the medals and sold them, while waiting for you to drop dead so they don't have to give you what you are due.

Who wouldn't be a fan of 80% of the work for 100% of the pay? It's a built-in raise equal to or greater than what you'd get from changing jobs, without the switch in seniority or experience.

A 4 day work week can always be implemented as 4 10 hour days instead of 5 8 hour days.

> Who wouldn't be a fan of 80% of the work for 100% of the pay?

If you, as an employer, want a motivated, energetic workforce who are not slacking off, it's also in your interest to give that opportunity to your employees, as multiple experiments have shown that 4-day work results in increased productivity and employee retention.

Knowledge work does not have 1-1 correspondence between time spent and productivity. Things get VERY non-linear, to the point that more than 50 hours of real knowledge work a week is often LESS productive than 40 hours.

The model of men work while women watch the kids was most of history. Of course is completely ignors 'womens work' which was very needed for survival and defined by things you could do while also watching kids. for the first few years kids eat from mom so she cannot get far from them (after that she is probably pregnaunt again thus restarting the cycle). Mens work was anything that needed to be done that could not be done when pregaunt or nursing a kid.

today men have the ability to watch kids thanks to formula (though it is better for the kids to eat from mom - this is rarely talked about because it is easy to go too far and starve a baby to death in the exceptions).

You might want to brush up on your history.

Aside from the peer comment pointing out the bleedingly obvious, there's also a bit of history here:

  In 1907 Justice Henry Bourne Higgins, President of the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court, set the first federally arbitrated wages standard in Australia.

  Using the Sunshine Harvester Factory as a test case, Justice Higgins took the pioneering approach of hearing evidence from not only male workers but also their wives to determine what was a fair and reasonable wage for a working man to support a family of five.

  Higgins’s ruling became the basis for setting Australia’s minimum wage standard for the next 70 years.

that you're clearly unaware of.

* https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/harvester-...

* https://www.fwc.gov.au/about-us/history/waltzing-matilda-and...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvester_case

Can a man support a family of 5 on minimum wage in Australia, or did it stop working?

Minimum wage is more complicated in Australia. There are effectively minimum wage levels set per profession, known as awards.

This is the list of awards: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/employment-conditions/awards/lis... it's pretty extensive

Each award is also complex, and covers a range of issues in the employment. For example, this is the Professional Employee award: https://awards.fairwork.gov.au/MA000065.html just working out what the minimum wage would be for a graduate engineer with 2 years experience is a complex, detailed matter.

But yes, probably, for most professions you could reasonably expect to support a family of 5 on the award, depending on location and definition of "support". Affording a house would largely depend on an additional inheritance, though.

Is "inheritance" used in a different way here similar to how "award" is, or are you saying you often need to inherit money from your family in order to be able to buy a house in Australia?

> or are you saying you often need to inherit money from your family in order to be able to buy a house in Australia?

Tell me a place in any Western society (outside of run-down rural areas/flyover states) where an average employee (i.e. no ultra-rich tech hipster bros) is able to afford a home before the age of 30 purely by his own savings and income. That is frankly no longer a reality for most people.

You seem pretty defensive over me asking whether a word was used in the way I expect it was.

No, it's used in the same way as elsewhere in the Anglosphere. And yes, as in the rest of the Anglosphere, generally you need an inheritance to be able to afford to buy property.

"in the high cost of living areas" is the rest of that sentence.

It is perfectly doable, even common, to buy a home in low and medium COL areas without any assistance from family, living or dead. The fact that you can't do this in NYC or SF is not an indictment of anything other than NYC and SF.

And yeah, you can buy a house in the bush in Australia if you want.

But there aren't any jobs there, so you're going to need an inheritance to support your family of 5.

Huh? Maybe that’s when you saw people on TV for the first time.

High school was advanced education in 2000. Basic education ended around grade 6-8.

No reasonable person considered high school advanced education in the 70's let alone 2000. If 85%+ of people get it for half a century, it is by definition not advanced.

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Grad-ra...

Whoops, that was a typo, i meant 1900 :)

I don't know the 1900 stats but I bet in that case you're right :)

Whether something should be the case has little bearing on whether it has been the case for any length of time particularly in something as flexible as the organization of society. It should largely be fine to point at something and say "I would like things to work this way" and try to organize society in that direction.

That was only true for 1950s USA if you were a white male with a pretty good job and a wife staying home taking care of the kids.

In less wealthy countries, usually the compromise is that husbands are significantly older than their wives. A woman is ready for marriage at 16-20 but a man isn't ready until 25-35. Also they don't own single-family homes unless they're in totally rural areas.