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PaperclipPerfector  13hr ago (text post)   613 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 14, 2026

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People travelled for much longer. One thing that is little commented upon is that white collar ‘PMC’ workers whose jobs existed in, say 1870 or 1920 work far longer hours today than they did back then. A banker (and not just, like, JP Morgan himself) and his family might take a 3 month vacation to Europe, and while he might send and receive the occasional telegram he wasn’t working full time through it. Going anywhere took time. In London, until the popularization of the automobile (which I gather became fully mainstream somewhere between 1910 and 1925 maybe) the smog was often so bad that you might find yourself stranded in some corner of the city and need to spend a night there before heading home in the morning.

People did stay on vacation for much longer periods. Spending ‘the summer’ or ‘the winter’ somewhere was common. In the Swiss mountains, a stay of several weeks, maybe months was common. The working classes would go to nearby resorts by rail for a week or two on an annual trip, but even that’s longer than a lot of trips today. Often railroads were highly vertically integrated, so you’d book travel and accommodation through them and perhaps through their partners. Communication was already pretty good in 1920, you could telegraph (or have the railroad booking office do so) a local hotel agent in Miami and check whether there were any spare rooms and where. I don’t think they would telephone, that was still quite expensive long-distance then. I expect the journey itself might take a couple of days, but they had luxury trains with berths and dining cars.

Miami having hotels stands out to me because it’s not exactly close to anything else in the States so everyone there I would assume is on a longer vacation - basically wintering. Europe in 1920 I assume people who summered in Europe would bounce around cities.

This gets to something I would say is related to the paradox of choice. When people have a lot of people around them it can be more difficult to make friends. No one quite knows who to invest their time and energy into. But if it’s a 100 room Miami hotel in 1920 where the rich people are staying for 1-3 months then it feels like it’s worth meeting the other guest in the hotel.

I remember in Band of Brothers Nixon towards the end of the war said the South Beach clubs and hotels were packed again. Obviously he’s rich so perhaps he’s in the class of people who would know people that would go for months, but maybe by 1944 technology had changed enough to allow more people that experience. Though it still feels 20-ish year off to me before the upper middle class has those types of trips.

In every major war there are a class of people who make a lot of money even if overall people are poorer and indeed even if overall inequality declines (usually due to market crashes or broader asset price declines). War involves many government contracts, price fixing, import and export controls, sometimes currency controls, and all these things create huge room for profiteering and arbitrage.

The Miami of today is full of people who got rich in shady business in Latin America or in crypto. The Miami of 1944 already had plenty of the former but a lot of people who had done well off the war, too.

I doubt this story given the overall decline in yearly hours worked. Perhaps there's some (significantly sized) subgroup where the trend is different, but I'd want to see some evidence of it.

I think the shift probably happened in white collar work between around 1920 and 1950, there were a lot of quiet development around intra office memos, telephone calls becoming ubiquitous, a focus on data, corporate consolidation, vastly increased access to information etc. Also, any change would be swamped by falls in salaried or working class hours as paid vacation, weekends etc became more common.

OWID has a longer time series. A few countries show a postwar bump (the US included), but the overall trend since the late 19th century is one of decline.

That only goes to 1950, though. By which point America is almost fully electrified and coming off a generational economic boom. I wouldn’t be surprised if working hours peaked right after WW2.

A casual search found this totally unbiased article, which suggests the U.S. started movements for paid time off, but Sweden and Germany adopted them first.

I know the eight-hour workday became popular over the course of the 1800s. I could see the paid vacation as a Progressive outgrowth of that sentiment.

The story is not impossible, but it also doesn't match what evidence we have. See also more data.

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