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PeterHolzwarth ◴[] No.46179223[source]
"A woman's work is never done."

In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And that later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed all waking hours until the day she died.

Men broke their backs in the field, women consumed their lives doing the ceaseless work that never ended, every waking moment. (And occasionally helped out in the field, too).

Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds.

We forget so easily that for the entire history of our species - up until just recently - simply staying alive and somewhat warm and minimally fed was a hundred-hour-a-week job for mom and dad.

There are important downsides, but the Green Revolution - and dare I say it, the industrial revolution - was truly transformative for our species.

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Etheryte ◴[] No.46180355[source]
A small nitpick that doesn't take away from the rest of your comment: staying alive and fed was not necessarily a laborious activity for hunter-gatherers living in good climates [0]. It's our expansion into less hospitable environments that made it so.

> Woodburn offers this “very rough approximation” of subsistence-labor requirements: “Over the year as a whole, probably an average of less than two hours a day is spent obtaining food.”

> Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present--specifically on those in marginal environments--suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production.

[0] https://fifthestate.anarchistlibraries.net/library/370-fall-...

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logicprog ◴[] No.46181040[source]
The "original affluent society" theory is based on several false premises and is fundamentally outdated, but people keep it alive because it fits certain Rousseauean assumptions we have. I recommend reading this:

https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf

There are so many things wrong with those time estimates.

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analog8374 ◴[] No.46181841{3}[source]
Well don't just accuse, insinuate and link. Lay out a few actual assertions.
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1. logicprog ◴[] No.46182735{4}[source]
It's a detailed, complicated anthropological argument made by an expert — and he also does it in a very well-written way. I could attempt to lay out the argument myself, but ultimately everyone would be better served by just... reading the primary source, because I doubt I could do it sufficient justice. I recommend you actually just do the reading. But a general TLDR of the points made are:

- the estimates of how much time hunter-gatherers spent "working" were based on studies that either (a) watched hunter-gatherers in extremely atypical situations (no children, tiny band, few weeks during the most plentiful time of the year, and they were cajoled into traditional living from their usual mission-based lifestyle) or (b) didn't count all the work processing the food so it could even be cooked as time spent providing for subsistence, and when those hours are included, it's 35-60 hours a week of work even including times of enforced idleness pulling down the average

- the time estimates also counted enforced idleness from heat making it dangerous to work, or from lack of availability of food, or from diminishing returns, or from various "egalitarian" cultural cul de sacs, as "leisure" but at the same time...

- ... even the hunter gatherers themselves considered their diet insufficiently nutritious and often complained of being underfed, let alone the objective metrics showing that the were