Occupations of humans
What does humanity actually do all day? This stacks total human time — every person-year lived, assigned to its primary activity — from the end of the last ice age to today: learning, getting food, physical and non-physical work, care, research, and retirement.
Informed estimates, not measurements — each person-year of human life is assigned to a primary activity, and the split is approximate (the categories blur badly before formal schooling, retirement and wage labor existed). The research band is drawn to scale: it is genuinely that thin. Time points are spaced evenly, not to scale. Hover for a breakdown.
Reading the chart
The unit here is not people but human time: each person-year lived by anyone, anywhere, is assigned to that person's primary occupation for the year. A child in school is “learning,” a farmer is “agriculture,” a full-time parent is “care & household,” a retired person is “retired.” Four movements dominate the last two centuries:
- The collapse of the food band. For ten millennia, getting food was the plurality occupation of our species — consistently around 40–45% of all human time. Since 1800 it has fallen to roughly a tenth of human time, the single largest reallocation in the history of the species. Everything else on this chart was paid for by that collapse.
- The rise of non-physical work. Trade, administration, services, clerical and knowledge work went from a thin band of scribes and merchants (a few percent) to the largest working category today — roughly 30% of human time and still growing, with AI now beginning to automate parts of it in turn.
- The invention of retirement. Before 1900, surviving past work was rare enough that “retired” barely registers. Pensions plus longevity turned it into one of the fastest-growing occupations of humans — around a tenth of all human time today, likely much more by 2100.
- The stubborn research sliver. Full-time production of new knowledge — the activity that generated the fertilizers, engines, vaccines and computers behind every other shift on this chart — has never exceeded roughly half a percent of human time. There are about ten million full-time-equivalent researchers among eight billion people. The band is drawn to scale; if you cannot see it, that is the finding.
Why this is a politics chart
Every band on this chart is downstream of political choices: compulsory schooling created the modern learning band, pension systems created the retired band, agricultural policy and land reform accelerated the food collapse, and public research funding decides the width of the research sliver. The taxonomy is a choice too — the same data could be cut by sector or by class. Cut by time, one question stands out: as AI begins to absorb the non-physical band the way machinery absorbed the food band, where should the freed human time go? One answer is argued in 10×, then 100×: the case for scaling R&D.