LET'S ALL EAT LIKE IT'S 1222.

It seems like no matter how many times I note the blessings of liberty, summarized, for instance, as "Yes, we are all underemployed compared to our ancestors, and people put a lot of money into steam traction engines for the sociability of it, not because they are the most effective way to help God give us our daily bread," there's always somebody who gets nostalgic for the thirteenth century.

Incredible as it may sound, the average modern American puts in longer hours at his or her work than the average medieval peasant.

While many people feel pressure to work long hours, even the hardest-hit victims of the “gigs economy” might assume that at least they don’t work as hard as a medieval peasant.

But that assumption would be wrong.

Juliet Schor, a Professor of Sociology at Boston College, explained in her book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, that the average American in 1987 was working about 1,949 hours annually, while an adult male peasant in 13th-century England racked up approximately 1,620 hours yearly.

If you're going to measure inputs, maybe you ought also look at outputs, and your tenure-tracker, or partner-tracker, or startup enthusiasts sees a lot more by way of secular reward than that thirteenth century serf did.  There are lots of ways the contemporary labor supply curve might bend backwards, and the way information technologies blur the boundaries between work and leisure (on the one hand, keeping current with the late night electronic mail, on the other hand, checking the brackets during what is notionally the work day) it's likely still true that we're underemployed compared with our distant ancestors.  Even if there was ample time, once the harvest was in, and winter came, to devote to devotions and to fasting.  "Plowing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, no doubt, but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off."  Yes, and pray the rats didn't get to the last of the root crops in the cellar before the new planting season.

I'll let Twitchy's Sam Janney bring the high heat.

If Leftists think Medieval peasants had it better way back then, by all means, they should start living that way.

They can give up their phones, any sort of conditioned air, heat, doctors, electricity, modern-day food, clean water, etc. and live their lives just like Medieval peasants did. Hey, if capitalism is such a horrible thing then they really should stop benefitting from it.

There’s a reason ‘old age’ for a Medieval peasant was around 30.

But hey, stupid narratives are the in thing on Twitter.

That post has a few illustrations, which reinforce one of my favorites.