What can ya do?

April 23, 2012 11:17 AM

I'm seeking information about relative skill levels in pre-industrial and industrial societies.

I'm working on an article about the misapprehensions that underlie the concept of "the simple life". As part of my research, I'm looking for books and articles that talk about the skills that were used by the average person in other times and places.

For example, hunter-gatherers' need to be able to identify many plants, the habits of animals, etc.

Another example, nineteenth century homesteaders' ability to tan hides, grow food, fix wagons, make horseshoes, or whatever.

My premise is that life in an industrial society is actually "simpler", because you can basically survive if you have just one skill that can make you money, and know how to push buttons.

I don't want to just write about my preconceptions, though, as they might be wrong. I'm sure there is a lot out there on this subject. Also, probably more uncommon: writings about the lack of eclectic skills amongst industrialized people in the 21st century.

Thanks!

posted by crazylegs to technology (8 answers total)

An excellent book that will help you with all things medieval:
The Time-traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

It's beautifully written too!
posted by jujulalia at 11:29 AM on April 23, 2012 [1 favorite]

Even "crude" stone age tools showed evidence of deliberate and precise craftsmanship.
posted by Burhanistan at 11:30 AM on April 23, 2012

You don't even need to go back in time. Many rural parts of the developing world seem to be in this hazy zone between the new and the old. Most people living on their farm know a far wider variety of skills simply through necessity.

Perhaps frame it as a highly industrialized and developed society with adequate infrastructure and working systems.
posted by infini at 11:57 AM on April 23, 2012

I posted this comment about six months ago, and I'll repeat it here:

I was chatting with a guy who is a medieval historian, specifically of disability, as well as a pediatric rehabilitation specialist (so: academic and clinician). He mentioned how the view of disability has changed as we move into a more technologically based society.

Back in the day, when villages needed people to go find firewood, etc., it was a lot easier for someone with a family member who had, for example, Down Syndrome to say, "Okay, you might take a little longer to do some things, but we still have a valuable place for you. Those things need to be done by SOMEONE, and you can do them." The person with Down Syndrome didn't lag that far behind "regular" folks. Ergo: no real disability, at least in the sense of measuring someone's capabilities against those of others in the society in which they live.

Now, even tasks most of us consider simple require critical thinking or computer skills -- or at least understanding that, in order to do your task, other people have to engage in more complicated tasks. We measure each other by increasingly abstract measures that build on other skills, so it's not as easy to just jump in and help with a new activity. So it's kind of like a digital divide: the difference between "regular" people and people with a disability that affects the way they do or understand something just keeps growing.
posted by Madamina at 12:18 PM on April 23, 2012 [5 favorites]

It's just an anecdote, but I love this story: "From 33 years of fieldwork with New Guinea lowland hunter-gatherers, Jared Diamond concluded (Guns, Germs, and Steel, pp. 20-21) : 'From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they struck me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in the things and people around them than the average European or American is. ...[Diamond tries to warn his companions on a foraging expedition against eating unknown mushrooms]: At this point my companions got angry and told me to shut up and listen while they explained some things to me… How could I insult them by assuming they didn’t have names for different mushrooms? Only Americans could be so stupid as to confuse poisonous mushrooms with safe ones. They went on to lecture me about 29 species of edible mushrooms, each species’ name in the Foré language, and where in the forest one should look for it.' "

(See link for longer excerpt.)

Also, Madamina is talking about a phenomenon that economists have studied widely and refer to as Skill-Biased Technical Change. See the link for details, but the jist is that 500 years ago, a skilled guy with with a shovel and cow wouldn't be able to produce much more than a less skilled (whether because he's less educated, or just less intelligent) guy with a shovel and a cow. But in today's economy, a genius with a PhD will do a whole lot better than a HS dropout.

Yes, I know those two paragraphs point in opposite directions. (Despite being an American, I'm not that stupid.)
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 12:57 PM on April 23, 2012 [2 favorites]

I swear there's an Econtalk episode that talks about, say, Mt. Everest sherpas in the same way that Diamond talks about the New Guineans. Each sherpa is enormously competent in many things that "civilized" people would find baffling. But the sherpa is poor, because he is required to be a generalist and can't specialize: it's specialization that leads to productivity, which leads to wealth.

The reason the sherpa can't specialize but the Westerner can is actually a bit of a mystery: we don't really know what causes long run economic growth. We have a bunch of ideas, and we have a feel on what ideas are more important than others, but there's no overarching, general theory of long run economic growth. But we can probably say, as Adam Smith did, that the degree of specialization is proportionate to the extent of the market. The bigger and deeper the market, the more specialization there will be, and, with specialization, the greater the wealth. The sherpa's market is very small, and he winds up doing a lot of stuff himself: he has to mend his own clothes, make his own shoes, cook his own food, etc. Western markets are very big, and we can go off and make a living being web site interaction managers who can order take-out.

I wouldn't necessarily say that a sherpa is more skilled in some sense than a Western web site interaction manager. They've both acquired skills and knowledge appropriate for his own market. It would be hard to train one to do the other's job.
posted by chengjih at 6:39 PM on April 23, 2012

In a commercial setting, you might want to read about Taylorism, which paved the way for replacing skilled individual craftsmen with streamlined production methods.

My premise is that life in an industrial society is actually "simpler", because you can basically survive if you have just one skill that can make you money, and know how to push buttons.

One way I have heard it put is in a modern society, the infrasturcture and society is smarter and the individuals are dumber. What was previously required of skilled craftsmen has now been captured in process.
posted by kithrater at 7:12 PM on April 23, 2012

Skill specialization and division of labour is certainly not a new idea - it's been around since the Neolithic. For example, spinning has almost always been a female occupation, across all cultures and over the span of human history. There are lots of reasons for this, but probably the most obvious one is that you can spin with a hand spindle and do other things at the same time: care for children, monitor the cooking of food, travel, teach, whatever - any task that doesn't require exclusive use of your hands. Every woman spun, all the time; that constant labour was required to make the thread to make the cloth to make anything else at all - clothing, carpets, sails, tents, socks & underwear. So we see our first division of labour and the beginning of skill specialization roughly 20,000 years ago, with only women doing the spinning.

'Round about the time that people started living in cities and trading over distances, the division of labour became more pronounced. Cuneiform tablets found in modern Syria from 5000 BCE describe the sophisticated and complex accounting measures used to keep track of cloth production - the House of Wool spun the yarns, the House of Dyeing dyed it, the House of Weaving wove it. All of these factories were separate endeavours, and the women in them were specialized labourers with a single job.

Egyptian linen production was also characterized by a pronounced division of labour - one group of women processed the flax plants, another group spliced the individual fibres together, a different group plied the strands of flax into thread with a spindle, and then it moved on to the weavers - every step of the industrial process of producing cloth was done by a separate & highly skilled labour force working from separate and sometimes widely distributed locations.

So anyway - to finally get to the point I'm making here - the idea that humans have always been generalists is simply wrong. Societies have practised the industrial-style division of labour since before the Iron Age, and there have always been specialists that made their living using only one narrow range of skills. There have always been generalists around too, but as soon as people start living in groups larger than family-size, division of labour and skill specialization naturally occurs. Generalists have always been a tiny minority.
posted by Mary Ellen Carter at 8:15 AM on April 24, 2012