Today is Labor Day! So I asked Grok—how many years or generations have most households obtained currency through daily employment, what is called labor by economists?
Most households have obtained most of their currency by selling labor only for a short stretch of history.
For the great majority of the human past—hunter-gatherer bands, then settled farming societies—people produced food and goods directly. Currency existed in some places for millennia, but most families did not live by daily paid employment. They lived by what they grew, herded, crafted, or extracted, supplemented by occasional market sales, tribute, or corvée. Even in late medieval and early-modern Europe, a large share of households still combined small plots, cottage production, and irregular hired work
The change that made wage employment the typical household strategy is recent and geographically uneven. In Britain the share of families classified as “workers” (plus cottagers) was already high by the late 17th century and kept rising through the 19th. In the United States the agricultural share of the labor force was still about three-quarters in 1800 and only fell below half around 1880–1890. By the time Labor Day became a federal holiday in 1894, industrial and service wage work had just become the majority pattern in the United States.
That is roughly 130–150 years, or five to six generations if a generation is taken as 25–30 years. In much of the world the same transition is still incomplete; self-employment and small-scale farming remain large.
So the arrangement Labor Day commemorates—most households depending on regular paid employment for their money—is not an ancient human default. It is a product of the last two centuries of industrialization, enclosure, urbanization, and the decline of family-based production.
People assume labor is money motivated. But is it always? In East of Eden, Steinbeck gives us a variety of reasons people invest their time and capital and labor. Samuel Hamilton works just enough to invest in his own inventions, have them patented and never sees them through to a profitable endeavor. Adam Trask is wealthy and invests in the idea of using new refrigeration techniques to ship vegitables across the counrty. He works just to see if it can work. And then Kathy Trask pursues work with a bent toward the darker side of life. Only Will Hamilton, seems to be a tradional labor for money guy.
Working for a wage gives a job structure and a reason to show up. But aren’t most jobs pursued with a mix of incentives rather than just the money motive?
Home Economics 