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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28916 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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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):

Even coming from Canada, my wife was shocked by how cheap food is here in America. Historically, it just was not this way. We are one generation removed from stories like, "In the fall, dad made his semi-annual trip to the market in the city and brought back some quantity of 50lb bags of flour and 5lb chunks of lard, having a huge smile on his face, saying, 'We're gonna eat reaaaal good this winter!'" (I don't actually remember the exact quantity he said, but it was a low number, and we can easily scale by a small multiplier.) Like, this was a level of abundance in preparation for the winter that they were not used to (obviously, this was not their entire supply of food for the whole winter; they had some other food stored, but it is indicative that it was, cost-wise, an absolute treat). I checked a nearby grocery store's website; 50/5lbs would cost me $26.85. Like, pocket change. (Even if the multiplier was 5x, that's like nothing.) I probably have that much in random cash sitting around in my car. If I lost it or it was stolen, I'd be sad about a violation of my property, but literally wouldn't give a shit about the monetary value. This was a wonderful blessing of food abundance to some people in first-world countries not very long ago.

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:

“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth ... he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.”

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:

  1. Were the middle/upper classes in pre-WWI England more trustworthy than today's middle/upper classes? Maybe, but I see no clear evidence of that. Surely there was plenty of backstabbing going on back then too.
  2. Were the lower classes in pre-WWI England more trustworthy than today's lower classes? I'm not so sure. My understanding is that the homicide rate in 1900 England was either higher than in modern England, or at best about the same as today. Part of that might be because modern policing is more effective than the policing back then - on the other hand, for the very same reason, it is possible that the England homicide rate from 1900 is under-reported. I see no evidence that the society was actually significantly higher-trust than today.

My understanding is that the homicide rate in 1900 England was either higher than in modern England, or at best about the same as today.

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.

I was mostly going off of SSCs infamous neoreactionary post, which claims it was about 100x lower back then. Maybe different sources say different things?

"Indictable offences known to the police" rose about 40x from the Edwardian period to the 1990s crime peak after adjusting for population. (The 100x is a mistake due to trying to read a horizontal line near zero on a small graph).

The question of how much this is an increase in real crime, how much of it is the creation of new indicatable offences (particularly ones relating to drugs), and how much is increased reporting is hugely controversial. But it is fair to say that crime in the 1990s was at least 10x Edwardian levels, and probably more.

Violent and property crime is now (as determined by victim surveys with consistent methodology) at around a quarter of 1990's levels. The graph used by the neoreactionaries cuts the data off in 2000 for a reason. [This crime drop is consistent with the lived experience of anyone who grew up in the 1990s - it isn't a case of rigged statistics]

Didn't the Edwardians also have a lot of weird crimes that wouldn't be considered crimes today? Most infamously "sodomy" was illegal. But I'm really not an expert on Edwardian crimes.

I do agree that crime was way worse around 1990 than it is now. That said, there's a lot of minor property crime now that probably never gets reported.

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