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With modern farming, 10% of the people can now produce enough food for everyone. And if everyone had equal income instead of the top 1% syphoning off half the wealth, we could globally support a middle class lifestyle by everyone working 20 hours a week, the same amount that hunters and gatherers "worked".
Source? Everything we do is more an more complex. A TV show requires hundreds of people. A smartphone, millions if we include supply chains. Same for a car. A modern house requires dozens of highly specialized workers for weeks at a time, plus materials. People live much longer with better health, that's a lot of labor in research, machines, drugs and raw manpower (nurses, surgeons, etc).
Maybe you meant a pre-industrial middle class?
10% of the people, first of all, is around 800 million people. And secondly, that's a lot of really hard work that can't be done just 20 hours a week. I'm in Indiana. I know farmers. It's not even a 40-hour-a-week job. It's a sunup to sundown job.
So sure, everyone gets a break. Except farmers. Who earn the same amount as everyone else but have to work a lot harder.
If the required labor was split up more equitably then farmers wouldn't have to work sunup to sundown.
The entire point of large scale agriculture is that it's more efficient than individual peasants working a single field or whatever.
Nobody is saying that farming isn't hard work, but modern farming should produce more food per man-hour than neolithic farming (or hunter/gathering), right? So why should it be that farm workers now have to work harder than prehistoric people?
Because the tools are more expensive. But that's only half of it.
So why should it be that farm workers now have to work harder than prehistoric people?
Do they? Because what has been said so far is that hunter-gatherers didn't work as hard. Or do you mean pre-agriculture prehistoric people? Because agriculture predates written history by thousands of years.
Once we started farming and herding, the work was harder. But also necessary. That's just how things are.
The question I am posing is not "do modern farm workers labor harder than prehistoric hunter gathers" (they do).
Instead, the question is "should modern farm workers labor harder than prehistoric hunter gathers".
Farming is more efficient than gathering. That's why we farm. So why is it the case that modern farm workers are working harder?
Because feeding eight billion people isn't related to how many hours of work individuals have to do in order to achieve that unless you don't have enough people to do the work.
Have more farmers ...
What if you can't find more than 800 million farmers?
300 years ago 90% of the planet were farmers. Surely you can find enough people.
Not if everyone is paid the same. Why do hard farm work if you don't have to?
That's exactly why the number of farmers keeps reducing under capitalism. In socialism, you can get to democratically decide how much people are paid depending on the actual needs of the economy.
300 years ago, people were forced to farm for a lord.
So are you suggesting a return to feudalism?
No, mate, I'm obviously not suggesting a return to feudalism. I'm suggesting that if humanity needs more people allocated in agriculture, it should allocate more people in agriculture.
Allocate? People should be forced to farm?
You're right, that's not feudalism, that's slavery.
Allocate doesn't have to be through violence, it can be through incentive. If farmers made twice as much as stock traders and worked 30h a week there would be plenty more.
Then there's a problem. However we somehow manage to employ a few billion people currently.
Those few billion people are currently not paid the same as an accountant to do much more demanding work.
We're talking about food production.I misunderstood you. Have more people doing farm work, that way we have enough food and individual farmers don't have to work so hard
But what if you can't find enough people to do farm work? A lot of people work on farms now because they don't have much of a choice. And if you could do easier work but be paid the same as you would on a farm, why not take advantage of that?
I agree with but for one thing. If we doubled the farm workforce then each farmer wouldn't have to work as hard. And we certainly have another 800 million people to throw at it.