I thought this was a terrific post. I haven't really given much thought to evolutionary mismatch until now but I think I will from now on. The constant nagging feeling that something isn't quite right might just be an awareness that the modern world doesn't feel like home.
I teach Conversation English to foreigners and have to think up topics for discussion. One is, 'If you had a time machine, would you rather travel into the past or the future?' While my students are discussing it, I always think that I personally would always travel into the past. I suspect this is because the further back you go, the less the mismatch.
Of course, I'm enough of a modern (weak, pampered etc.) to actually want a certain amount of technology: give me modern anaesthetics any day over a handkerchief and stick thrust between the teeth! Yet it would be nice to reduce these 'cheats' to a minimum.
I really appreciate the comment and think about that prompt all the time. There are certainly many periods of the past I'd skip over, and you're right that I'd be a poor HG, what with my reliance on beds and whatnot, but it'd be awesome to see what very little mismatch would be like, if only just for a few weeks. Thanks for reading!
I think you make some good and interesting arguments, but I wish you would quit wildly exaggerating the statements that leisure and happiness have not increased. Happiness has trended up slightly (not that this is a good measure of anything), and leisure has increased enormously in the past century, with working hours per worker in the US dropping almost in half, vacation growing significantly, retirement getting earlier, and children no longer expected (allowed) to work. And this ignores the even larger reductions in housework that enabled women to enter the labor force rather than hauling laundry down to the creek and scrubbing it all day.
It's on my list to look into that more. Michael Magoon has given me a few links along these lines. Do you have any that would speed my research? From what I've found, working hours did decrease dramatically in the early part of the 20th C. That said, the average hours worked per year for an American in 1938 was 1756; in 2017, it was 1757. (https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever)
Your other points about child labor and housework are fair, too, although I've tried to make clear in the series that I care less about the last 100 years in America than I do the entire technological history of humans. My point is that it's a bit odd that the grand total of our technology has us working (perhaps) more than hunter-gatherers...and that it's possible we're no happier or more satisfied, either.
So anything you have, please send along, and thanks for reading/commenting.
And you send me to an article with a subtitle that international working hours have declined dramatically and that vacations (and as I mentioned retirement) are up?
I understand that we were especially well adapted to be foragers with a population less than one one thousandth of current levels and lifespans of three or four decades.
But once agriculture was invented and populations soared, our lives went to hell, as the Malthusian curse (and stationary bandits) hit us hard. In the past two centuries, for the first time in history, we have seen technology progress fast enough that populations can rise, as life span doubled, leisure increased, freedom and well being improved on most, though not all dimensions.
Happiness is a funky measure due to well known reasons with recalibration, recency bias, cultural stickiness, and innate set points, but even here, as Magoon has pointed out, we have gotten happier over the past century.
Yep, I concede those points in Part II: "There is also evidence that as technology improves worker productivity, working hours decrease; that richer countries (with access to better technology) tend to work less than poorer ones; and that working hours across the world have been steadily declining since the Industrial Revolution. But from the vantage point of thousands of years, this sequence of better technology —> easier time meeting basic needs —> more leisure hasn’t panned out. In fact, according to many anthropologists, hunter-gatherers were “the original affluent society.""
So maybe what you and I can agree on is that agriculture (one of the first technologies) made things much worse for the average human, and only recently has technology began turning things around.
That said, the Industrial Revolution might have rivaled agriculture in how bad it was for the average person, so these declines in working hours, and increases in happiness since then, are perhaps inflated, no? If you have any good data for working hours before the IR, please send them along.
Ha, that's a good candidate! I always find this question tough though because if you didn't have the technologies that came before (e.g., fire), then you probably wouldn't have that one.
As for what universe I was contemplating...you don't think it's reasonable for people to assume that technology would make them happier or reduce their working hours? Going back to fire, I have to imagine that to the extent people were thinking about it, they were thinking "Oh man, my meat is going to be so much tastier and take less time to chew, making me happier and giving me more time."
Grinning because I have to ask this as a complex question. Harvard claims that people 'waste' 2 seconds per minute of work time by using a mouse instead of the computer keyboard shortcuts.
Since I really have no way of checking - I'll agree. Let's suppose the actual productive computer time is 3.5 hours a day or 210 minutes. Then 210 minutes X 2 ( the number of seconds wasted every minute is 420 seconds OR 7 minutes.
Q: What does that person DO in those 7 minutes they saved?
Ok, here's my answer: 7 minutes per day day saved with mouse --> 7 more minutes of work per day over ~2 years --> promotion --> higher pay & more demands on time --> purchase of a better mouse :)
Soooooo good!
I thought this was a terrific post. I haven't really given much thought to evolutionary mismatch until now but I think I will from now on. The constant nagging feeling that something isn't quite right might just be an awareness that the modern world doesn't feel like home.
I teach Conversation English to foreigners and have to think up topics for discussion. One is, 'If you had a time machine, would you rather travel into the past or the future?' While my students are discussing it, I always think that I personally would always travel into the past. I suspect this is because the further back you go, the less the mismatch.
Of course, I'm enough of a modern (weak, pampered etc.) to actually want a certain amount of technology: give me modern anaesthetics any day over a handkerchief and stick thrust between the teeth! Yet it would be nice to reduce these 'cheats' to a minimum.
I really appreciate the comment and think about that prompt all the time. There are certainly many periods of the past I'd skip over, and you're right that I'd be a poor HG, what with my reliance on beds and whatnot, but it'd be awesome to see what very little mismatch would be like, if only just for a few weeks. Thanks for reading!
I think you make some good and interesting arguments, but I wish you would quit wildly exaggerating the statements that leisure and happiness have not increased. Happiness has trended up slightly (not that this is a good measure of anything), and leisure has increased enormously in the past century, with working hours per worker in the US dropping almost in half, vacation growing significantly, retirement getting earlier, and children no longer expected (allowed) to work. And this ignores the even larger reductions in housework that enabled women to enter the labor force rather than hauling laundry down to the creek and scrubbing it all day.
It's on my list to look into that more. Michael Magoon has given me a few links along these lines. Do you have any that would speed my research? From what I've found, working hours did decrease dramatically in the early part of the 20th C. That said, the average hours worked per year for an American in 1938 was 1756; in 2017, it was 1757. (https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever)
Your other points about child labor and housework are fair, too, although I've tried to make clear in the series that I care less about the last 100 years in America than I do the entire technological history of humans. My point is that it's a bit odd that the grand total of our technology has us working (perhaps) more than hunter-gatherers...and that it's possible we're no happier or more satisfied, either.
So anything you have, please send along, and thanks for reading/commenting.
And you send me to an article with a subtitle that international working hours have declined dramatically and that vacations (and as I mentioned retirement) are up?
I understand that we were especially well adapted to be foragers with a population less than one one thousandth of current levels and lifespans of three or four decades.
But once agriculture was invented and populations soared, our lives went to hell, as the Malthusian curse (and stationary bandits) hit us hard. In the past two centuries, for the first time in history, we have seen technology progress fast enough that populations can rise, as life span doubled, leisure increased, freedom and well being improved on most, though not all dimensions.
Happiness is a funky measure due to well known reasons with recalibration, recency bias, cultural stickiness, and innate set points, but even here, as Magoon has pointed out, we have gotten happier over the past century.
Yep, I concede those points in Part II: "There is also evidence that as technology improves worker productivity, working hours decrease; that richer countries (with access to better technology) tend to work less than poorer ones; and that working hours across the world have been steadily declining since the Industrial Revolution. But from the vantage point of thousands of years, this sequence of better technology —> easier time meeting basic needs —> more leisure hasn’t panned out. In fact, according to many anthropologists, hunter-gatherers were “the original affluent society.""
So maybe what you and I can agree on is that agriculture (one of the first technologies) made things much worse for the average human, and only recently has technology began turning things around.
That said, the Industrial Revolution might have rivaled agriculture in how bad it was for the average person, so these declines in working hours, and increases in happiness since then, are perhaps inflated, no? If you have any good data for working hours before the IR, please send them along.
Where to begin?
you wrote:
"...the technological progress over the last century in the U.S. has neither increased life satisfaction nor granted more leisure."
In what universe did you expect those to be benefits of technology?
I would argue that the single most important event in the history of the universe was the invention of moveable type.
Love to hear your thoughts on that one!
Ha, that's a good candidate! I always find this question tough though because if you didn't have the technologies that came before (e.g., fire), then you probably wouldn't have that one.
As for what universe I was contemplating...you don't think it's reasonable for people to assume that technology would make them happier or reduce their working hours? Going back to fire, I have to imagine that to the extent people were thinking about it, they were thinking "Oh man, my meat is going to be so much tastier and take less time to chew, making me happier and giving me more time."
Grinning because I have to ask this as a complex question. Harvard claims that people 'waste' 2 seconds per minute of work time by using a mouse instead of the computer keyboard shortcuts.
Since I really have no way of checking - I'll agree. Let's suppose the actual productive computer time is 3.5 hours a day or 210 minutes. Then 210 minutes X 2 ( the number of seconds wasted every minute is 420 seconds OR 7 minutes.
Q: What does that person DO in those 7 minutes they saved?
Ok, here's my answer: 7 minutes per day day saved with mouse --> 7 more minutes of work per day over ~2 years --> promotion --> higher pay & more demands on time --> purchase of a better mouse :)
If only!