"pretty pleasant" - I'm glad that your educational experience was that way, but for a lot of people education is a form of work. In fact, I would bet most students would prefer work to education - and indeed many vote with their feet and drop out of education.
Heck, even on HN there are many of us who hated "education" - it wasn't pleasant at all.
As for retirement, well that's an unfair comparison, life expectancy at middle age was a lot lower in pre-industrial times, mostly as a result of poor public health knowledge and practice. Furthermore, there was de facto retirement as families and communities took care of elders - but who knows how that related to retirement today. The author of this book probably doesn't know and you certainly don't know.
The Cleveland Fed's Economic Commentary is absolutely positively not pertinent. It is comparing the 1950s to the 1980s, not pre-industrial labor to industrial labor. Did you just google "myth of XYZ" and copy and paste the first result without reading it?
And by the way, even on its own merits that Economic Commentary is pretty suspect. It doesn't look like it takes into consideration commute times, time spent shopping, time spent on administrative overheard like paying bills figuring out insurance payments and the whole host of bureaucratic non-sense that a market economy requires customers to engage - all of that is work, it's not leisure and it needs to be accounted for.
Preindustrial you didn't spend time shopping, you spent time growing your own food and preserving it. You didn't spend time figuring out insurance, because there was no health care, at all. You didn't have bills because you paid up front, or you did without.
The part about the commute though, I'll grant you that. During the last thirty five years, my commute was two and a half hours each day for eighteen years. They rest has been reasonable, but that eighteen was awful.
"pretty pleasant" - I'm glad that your educational experience was that way, but for a lot of people education is a form of work. In fact, I would bet most students would prefer work to education - and indeed many vote with their feet and drop out of education.
Heck, even on HN there are many of us who hated "education" - it wasn't pleasant at all.
As for retirement, well that's an unfair comparison, life expectancy at middle age was a lot lower in pre-industrial times, mostly as a result of poor public health knowledge and practice. Furthermore, there was de facto retirement as families and communities took care of elders - but who knows how that related to retirement today. The author of this book probably doesn't know and you certainly don't know.
The Cleveland Fed's Economic Commentary is absolutely positively not pertinent. It is comparing the 1950s to the 1980s, not pre-industrial labor to industrial labor. Did you just google "myth of XYZ" and copy and paste the first result without reading it?
And by the way, even on its own merits that Economic Commentary is pretty suspect. It doesn't look like it takes into consideration commute times, time spent shopping, time spent on administrative overheard like paying bills figuring out insurance payments and the whole host of bureaucratic non-sense that a market economy requires customers to engage - all of that is work, it's not leisure and it needs to be accounted for.