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Various threads lately have had me thinking about how incredibly wealthy we are as a country, and how it definitely was not always so. For example, I made this comment a couple days ago about how everyone was just flat super poor back in 1900, and we're literally at least 10x richer now. I had likewise told the following story in the old place, in context of wealth to afford vast quantities of food (and how that may interplay with societal obesity):
I didn't completely spell it out, but that was my wife's father's story when he was a child in Canada. (I also hedged on the number; my best memory was that it was precisely one 50lb bag and one 5lb chunk). That was not that long ago.
Yesterday, I read an obituary for a 95 year old who was born in a homestead dugout in New Mexico. Literally born in a hole in the ground.
Perspective on how utterly ridiculously quickly we went from basically universal poverty to nearly universal wealth is often lacking in many conversations where it could be quite beneficial. Sure, some in the capitalism/communism debates (or more generally the sources/causes of wealth and how it interacts with society's choices/governance), but also in obesity conversations (as mentioned) and even fertility conversations. Born in a homestead dugout. And you don't want to have a kid because of a car seat?!
I still don't properly know how exactly to craft an argument that comes to a clean conclusion, but I really feel like this historical perspective is seriously lacking in a country where the median age is under 40 and many folks no longer have communal contexts where they get exposed to at least a slice of history from their elders.
This depended a lot on where you were living, no? Keynes describes pre-ww1 London as an oddly modern place:
They had most of the things we take for granted like electricity, flush toilets, fancy clothes, subways, cars (for the rich) or fast horse-drawn taxis for the not-so-rich. They also had things that would be considered luxurious even today, like multiple mail deliveries per day, or (briefly) an underground pneumatic tube delivery system . And of course, vastly higher trust and social capital than we have today.
One big thing they didn't have was antibiotics, which is pretty important.
As for higher trust and social capital, I am not sure about that. There are two separate issues there, I think:
You have made this claim multiple times, and I have pointed out to you before that it is blatantly false. Homicide rates in Victorian and Edwardian England hovered consistently around 1 to 1.5 per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, last year in the UK the murder rate was 9.7 per million people The pre-WW1 UK genuinely was a drastically safer place than the modern UK in terms of crime, despite considerably sparser and less effective policing and infinitely worse standards of medical care.
But 1 to 1.5 per 100000 is higher than 9.7 per million.
You know what? I think I’m just gonna go marinate in my own innumeracy for a bit here. I can’t really offer an excuse; just a total brain-fart. I was really confident about it, too, which makes it so much worse.
No worries man, I've had brain-farts of a similar level before. It happens.
Yeah, but when discussing an issue I care a lot about (crime) and comment a lot about, it’s very damaging to fuck something up like that. Justifiably tarnishes my credibility.
Well, I would hope that here on The Motte we are trying to be beyond caring about personal reputation as much as possible. Personal reputation is a very useful heuristic, but it has limits when it comes to seeking truth.
I think that some people have a rose-colored glasses view of Victorian England because it would feel nice to imagine that it was a beautiful society full of people who played violins while eloquently debating the finer points of the latest geopolitical news from the continent, while maybe overworked yet fundamentally good and noble commoners dutifully worked the machinery in the factories. I would probably be likely to fall for such a view myself, it's just that I read a lot of Sherlock Holmes when I was younger, and I've read a lot about the Jack the Ripper case, so I was already predisposed to be somewhat familiar with Victorian England's criminal issues.
There's also the fact that late 19th century European industrial civilization is what gave us militant anarchism and communism, which is not proof, but is suggestive evidence, in favor of the theory that conditions for the lower classes really were pretty bad back then, and the society was not any more high-trust than ours is.
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