Timothy Birdnow

Here is an example of junk science and how liberals make things up to suit a given narrative - or at best, to get some attention.

According to the article:
"Research from Juliet Schor, currently a Professor of Sociology at Boston College, from her text The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, shows this isn’t the case. The average American worker in 1987 was working about 1,949 hours annually, while an adult male peasant in 13th-century U.K. racked up approximately 1620 yearly. Schor provides details in the text about how working hours have changed over centuries, and why.

You might be thinking, "that’s nice and all, but it isn’t the ’80s anymore — how are we doing in the 21st century?”

Well, the average American employee now reportedly works slightly less at 1,811 hours annually, based on information from a Pew analysis of 2015 Labor Department data — the most recent data available."

End excerpt.

First, they did not keep time sheets during the Middle Ages so we do not know exactly how much a person worked, and to boldly state people worked 1620 hours a year back then is the purest sophistry; Schor simply made that number up. Then, as now, not everyone worked the same amount; farmers worked many more hours during the spring and fall and few hours in winter. Blacksmiths likely worked hard three of the four seasons, with winter being a bit slower. Merchants worked fewer hours, no doubt, than farmers. We don't have any way of KNOWING how many hours these people worked. We have better recoreds now, but even now we don't know exactly how much people work.

There is such a thing as the underground economy, and work done for cash will not be recorded.
But back in the Middle Ages it was all work for cash. And no OSHA or HHS, or any such agency to keep a close record.

The reality was, the average person's life revolved almost entirely around work back then. People only quit working when fatigue overtook them, or they couldn't because they ran out of light. Now we have artificial light so people can work at night, but we also have far more leisure activities to enjoy, so people WANT to work less. They had to back then.

And of course this study no doubt take into account the labor-saving technology we enjoy which makes everyday labor so much easier. If you want to wash your clothes you might spend fifteen minutes on it today; back then you had to spend hours,T going to a river or getting water from a well and scrubbing with a rock. Food had to be procurred, skinned, carved, and cooked; there was no deli department in a local grocery store. There were no restaurants. You had to heat with firewood, which had to be cut and stacked. You had to patch clothes by hand, and even make your own. There were no vaccuum cleaners, no dishwashers, no clotehs dryers, no crock pots, no mixers or blenders, no refrigerators. You stored food in a cellar and hoped it didn't go bad before you ate it. Even lighting was accomplished through candles or oil lamps that had to be cleaned and prepped every night. The basics of living was very time consumming, and if you technically didn't spend as much time "working" as now (as this study claims) it can easily be argued it was because you didn't have time; you did nothing but work in your non-sleeping hours back then.

The idea that we are overworked is a sideways attack on capitalism. The intent is to say that capitalism is exploitative, that we can have as much or more and work far less if we only adopt socialism or another such pyramid scheme. The whole point is to trick the unthinking into dissatisfaction with the status quo. But capitalism is the reason we have everything in our modern world. Nations that have experimented with socialism or alternative economic schemes quickly become impoverished. Yes, they have free time - until the lack of material goods forces them into the daily labor of living comparable to the Middle Ages. But you are not going to have nice things; no good cars, hip clothes, electronics, i-phones. Few Millenials seem to understand that fact, and studies like this are intended to increase dissatisfaction among the already disaffected eternal adolescents.

But the study bandies about statistics and that will convince many. Well, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. If you start with a made up stat you can make any sort of case. Just look at Global Warming, where we are told to panic over a fraction of a single degree of warming. The headlines scream 400 PPM!!! on co2, but they fail to explain that means PARTS PER Million. What does that mean? four out of every ten thousand molecules in the air are co2; a trace gas, and that increase was less than one molecule since the dawn of the industrial era. THAT is what we are supposed to panic over.

This is more of the same.

Science is supposed to help us better understand the world, but it has become a tool, an arm of the political class.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:24 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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