this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2025
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We get less of a percentage of our work, but certainly get more absolute value.
The gains in efficiency over the last hundred years have been insane. Today's crumbs are better than the whole cookie back then.
No more dirt floors, indoor plumbing, electricity, books, etc.
100 years ago, great grandpa was teaching little Appalachian boys who didn't wear shoes except in the winter.
82 years ago, grandad was a Torpedo Man 3rd class getting asbestos rained on his head every time my wife's ancestors scored a close hit.
45 years ago, at my other great grandpa's place in Louisiana, there were black families down the road living in shacks. However you're picturing a shack, it was worse.
38 years ago, there was a sport called "f** bashing". Hicks or punkers would wait for gays to come out the bar and beat the shit out of 'em.
38 years ago, we Gen X kids casually lived under threat of global thermonuclear war. Meh. No biggie.
Yeah, not only did efficiency go through the roof, everything got better.
I think the big thing is that they can and should be better than this, too. We shouldn't have to settle when we've made enough abundance for everyone.
Personally, I still want people desperate enough to do shitty jobs like dealing with trash and sewage and people. But I think we have enough to pay those people good money, give them good healthcare, an otherwise comfortable financial life, let them work 32 hours a week, and let them retire at 65.
Basically what unions would have given is if they hadn't been gutted.
At this time, i wonder, whether "union" is just another term for your local friendly anarchists fighting for your rights? Because that's how people use the term.
You're right, it's the should be better that's important. But I think we can say that about nearly every human culture in history. It's just that now we can see how fucked up inequality is.
i ... don't really think that "dirt floors" inherently are a problem. sanitation back then sucked but mostly for the cities between 1500 - 1800, because before then big cities weren't much of a thing and after that soap was invented. idk, maybe i am off about this. correct me if i am wrong.
(btw, does anybody know about the sanitary situation in ancient roman cities?)
but i agree with you.
Last time i went to the supermarket, i paid 18€ for a whole bag of food. it was more than enough for a whole day. When i thought how much i had to work for it to pay for it all, it's like 1.5 hours in total. That is not much. And the food is top quality. No toxins, rather fresh, very nutritious and very convenient to get everything in one place.
Soap was invented a long time ago - 2800 BC and the Romans made quite a bit of it. However it used lye so you wouldn't want to use it often.
The sanitation of Roman cities should have been pretty good by historical standards. Batthouses were common in the empire and people frequently visited them. Romans also had toilets with running water below them to take the waste away so in that regard they would have done much better than other societies.
The sewer system or lack thereof was the biggest sanitation issue for most historical cities. Back in the day it was difficult to create a sewer system since you need to minimize the slope at which the waste flows or else you have to do too much digging. Until Newton and Leibniz came around in the 1700s we didn't have calculus so you couldn't optimize a function mathematically and instead had to experimentally test it out. But, people didn't test things the way we do today - the scientific method was only formalized relatively recently as well. So this was more difficult to invent that you might think, and the invention has been lost several times over history.
Then once you figure out the minimum angle you have to discover a technique to dig at that angle. The simplest is to take two sticks and insert them into the ground, then tie a string between them that lies right on the ground. Then you can put the sticks this anywhere to see how deep you need to dig.
Since you mentioned 1500-1800, I'll mention that medieval London did NOT have a sewer system so people dumped their waste in the River Thames. Which is also where they got their drinking water.
And yet we stopped building public baths. We need to bring it back.
thanks, this answer deserves an award
yeah, sanitation is really important, and it's easy to understand that once you consider that our shit is literally 25% live bacteria by mass. that's more than a trillion, idk even what the name for numbers that big is. for bacteria, the quantity of bacteria you ingest plays a role (i think) in how dangerous the disease is that you catch, so if you eliminate the biggest source of bacteria, that reduces diseases a lot
It might also be important to mention that history isn't a line up. Yeah sanitation was great in Rome, but it had taken a nose dive by the time the empire fell and the Dark Ages in Europe started.
The other thing is that we're both using devices that the most powerful people in the world would have absolutely no possibility of using anything close to as recently as 100 years ago. So it's not just efficiency gains, but fundamental gains in what's even available.
There's a point in time where the amount of spices I have in my pantry would be enough to count me amongst the wealthy. Hell, dinner tonight would have made a king blush with how much pepper I used.
If you're talking about computers, computers were available in 1900, just that it was actually women (mostly) in an office doing the maths by hand.
Similar to the "AI" meme comment - "Actually Indians"
:) that's why I referred to available technology, not the word. "Computers" were available, both as people and as semi-algorithmic adding machines, but the speed, capabilities and operating principles were different to a degree that the only similarities are a name and an abstract mathematical model.
Although picturing the brigades of women with adding machines occasionally sending a telegram to create a 1900s Internet is amusing.
Hell, even 30 years ago
And the study that the claim is made from is fairly dubious. It really only applies to specific types of peasants, during a specific period of time, in specific locations, and counts certain types of infrequent religious breaks from work as a common place given.
No, we get more convenience
In exchange for indoor plumbing, we don't have the time to do our chores. In exchange for concrete foundations and plastic floors, the entire world is poisoned and we no longer have community bonds. In exchange for electricity, we lost nature
We work far more than we ever have, and for what? To destroy our bodies and live in anxiety of losing what we have?
What truly matters in life?
I'm not saying it's all bad, but there's a balance. We live in the most exciting times in history - it's so absurdly convenient, but it's also deeply horrible
You also don't have to cobble your own shoes or darn your only pair of socks.
It isn't a serious perspective to say that medieval peasants had it better than anyone in a first world country today.
Genuinely, I think your examples are negatives
I love the act of creation. I love molding the world around me. I would rather fix my shoes and repair my shirts than have shitty, unrepairable clothes made from plastic that just dissolve after a couple years
I think the connection between you and your personal things is good when it's a long relationship of maintenance and restoration. I think it's horrible when it's short and replaceable
Then why don't you? There is literally nothing stopping you from doing that.
Your clothing probably isn't made of plastic. It's probably made of cotton. If you're buying unrepairable clothing that's a choice you made, since I think all of my clothing is repairable and it wasn't purchased with that intention.
I know why I don't spend my time patching holes in my hand made underwear: it would be uncomfortable, and it would take more of my time than a 5 pack of underwear costs.
We didn't invent all this stuff because we're stupid. We invented it because owning one pair of pants for your adult life is just absolutely miserable.
I'm literally wearing a shirt from a decade ago right now. It is made of 100% cotton, and the underarms have ripped recently
Why? Because my more recent clothing dissolved we when I tugged at them gently. Just fucking fell apart, not even at the seams, just tore like paper
So I practice on the plastic bullshit so I can sew up the cotton when I need to
I actually don't believe you. Like I don't think your shirt fell apart like that, and I don't think you bought a plastic shirt.
Fabric lasting a long time isn't odd. I've got a synthetic fabric gym bag from 20 years ago that's fine. I've got a 10 year old synthetic blend shirt that's never had an issue. I've got cotton shirts in the same range.
Synthetic fibers tend to be more expensive, and are more durable for the fabric weight. It's why they use them for safety equipment.
You're acting like none of us are familiar with clothes. Where are you buying disintegrating shirts, and why ? I've never encountered that and I've been wearing clothing for quite a while. I've only had any type of clothing tear like that if it snags on something like a nail.
again, that’s a choice you made… you can make your own clothes out of linen and the tools to do it are more available to you because they’re not hand crafted, but you choose not to because you want to save time
heck, you can buy a shirt that’s 5x the price that will last but you choose the cheap shirt so you can have 5 of them
this is the same argument that we don’t build the coliseum any more and therefor we’re not as good at making concrete as ancient romans… modern society is built on engineering, and engineering doesn’t build things that lasts 2000 years that’s true, but that’s not what engineering is for
engineering isn’t about building bridges that don’t fall down: engineering is about building bridges that barely stand up so you can have more of them
the same goes with clothes… modern clothes aren’t made to last your entire life because they’d cost 5x more… people don’t actually want a shirt from their 20s when they’re 70 - people don’t even really want a shirt from their 20s when they’re 30! they want 5 shirts in their 20s and 5 more in their 30s, and they want to be unique and personal and they want to spend no time to acquire them
Then you can get that with technology. Because where computer stuff is concerned, we're still cobbling our own pi-holes and smart home setups.
I agree. I think personal mastery over your devices is a wonderful thing. Even when ephemeral - if you transfer a concept from device to device, I think that's beautiful
I definitely agree. It's because we live in the most interesting times in history that there is so much work to do. It is not normal that the work never seems to end, there's always just more work to do, and it's because of all the inventions that are constantly made. They demand human labor to be developed, and that's why we're spending all our time in laboratories or office spaces, or in service industries serving these fields. It's all caused by progress, and progress itself demands all of our attention. That is why we have no nature, not because of electricity. I guess
It's not actually because of electricity, that was just poetic license
We can have everything we currently have... Just not like this.
The most profitable work in existence, hell an enormous chunk of human labor, is just playing with money. An imaginary thing. We do math on it, we gamble on it, we tuck it away to run interest functions on it... But it's not real. And we spend so much time on it
We made it the fuck up, and it rules our existence. It causes people to starve while we burn food. It makes us sleep on the street while homes sit empty. It enslaves us, year over year it controls more of our lives
If we just stopped, just flipped our priorities the other way around, we could feed and house everyone tomorrow. We could glorify the farmers and the workers, and we could spit at the finance people living in extravagance but doing nothing useful
IDK...I just wish everyone could see what I see for a single day, we'd never go back. The world is insane, but it doesn't have to be
yeah that is a good point, but not 100% accurate i guess, at least not if you consider "workers" like typical factory or service workers
there was a lot of maths being done the last 60 years, if you consider software development a type of applied maths (which it formally is), and that doesn't really fit into the categories of "farmer" or "worker", since it's non-routine task with no clear goal other than creativity, for which you might or might not get paid, depending on whether people will like it. that can't really be encompassed into the concept of a "worker" i guess
and that stuff really matters. the US' economy essentially grew since 1970 because of IT. real economy (production of stuff) stagnated since 1970 (in the US at least). you can see this clearly in diagrams such as this one where oil consumption (which is directly proportional to industrial output) stagnates since 1970. also note that IT companies are the highest-valued companies in the US stock market today, and that's because they have tremendous significance in the US economy.
I don't put software development in that category, just like I don't put bridge architects in that category
Even dancing in the infinite, us software developers are making things. Hopefully useful things
But the salesman? The investor? Point me to what they create
i agree with your point, but i still wonder why all of the IT was invented in america. very little software was written outside of it (at least in the early years)
That's easy, brain drain. When programming was coming into existence, the US was in the cold war - Russia did have a lot of IT stuff too early on, it just wasn't publicly facing
And during this period, the US was spending infinite money investing because we had an ungodly strong economy - Europe, China , and Japan were doing reconstruction from the war and paying back loans, the global South was being economically colonized... The US and Russia were the only players with the funds to advance tech at the time
But if you fast forward a couple decades, every developed nation was doing things in the computing space. But the US had a huge lead on chip manufacturing, manufacturers were signing deals with Microsoft, and everything just kind of converged around the base architecture.
But even then, arm was invented in the UK, Linux came from Sweden (?), things were happening all over
So long story short, the US was in a position to invest while no one else was. That gave us a huge head start, one which, combined with a loosening of anti monopoly enforcement over the same period, created huge barriers of entry around certain parts of the stack