https://piped.video/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo
Sources: Juliet B. Schor, “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure”
David Rooney, “About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks” E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” | https://www.jstor.org/stable/649749 James E. Thorold Rogers, “Six Centuries of Work and Wages: The History of English Labour” | https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/rogers/sixcenturies.pdf George Woodcock, “The Tyranny of the Clock,” Published in “War Commentary - For Anarchism” in March, 1944
GDP per capita in England, 1740 to 1840, via Our World in Data | https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-in-the-uk-since-1270 Nominal wages, consumer prices, and real wages in the UK, United Kingdom, 1750 to 1840, via Our World in Data | https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nominal-wages-consumer-prices-and-real-wages-in-the-uk-since-1750
On farming specifically, are you American? American farming is extremely inefficient and unproductive. “Family farming” is not usually an economically sustainable farming model. Throughout history, collective farming with a larger labor pool is much, much more common, and family farms only show up under very specific conditions – when land is very cheap. American land use programs were purposefully designed to displace indigenous people first and farm second. The government made the land cheap (or free) to entice farmers to move into it. As a result, we’ve inherited a family farm system that no longer makes sense, and we’re struggling to figure out what to do.
Sarah Taber writes about this a lot: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/america-loves-the-idea-of-family-farms-thats-unfortunate.html
On your general point, on how much is true, I’ve read a lot of criticism of this video, and I think most of it comes down to interpretation. What is free time? A lot of people criticize the video for not acknowledging that peasants had to work outside of the time they were working for other people, but so do we. Our lives are very different from theirs, and it’s just really hard to compare.
For example, when I say I spend a lot of my free time renovating an old house I’m fixing up, that sentence makes perfect sense, but I’m implying a very specific idea of “free time” that’s actually a little weird, when you think about it. Right now, I’m spending my free time writing this, but to a many a peasant, I assume writing was probably serious work done by serious people with specific training, not something they would consider a leisure activity.