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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.
My sense is that if you wanted to pick the single greatest place to be around 1900, it would be London. Even though the British Empire was already starting some of its downswing, they were also able to catch the earliest gains (and gee wiz gizmos) of the industrial revolution while they still had as much wealth as they did (and London would be the peak across the empire). Now mind you, England-wide, that wealth is still on the order of 5k pounds per capita, at least 5x lower than today. Of course, it's worth noting that the US is an outlier in having literally 10x'd its wealth over that time; it was the best performing country over the last hundred or so years, after all.
In the US/Canada (egad, Canada; a quick Ducking only finds a chart since 1960 and my, how you've grown), the story has been insane growth, starting from basically universal poverty. The UK started from a somewhat better place and tailed off relatively speaking, so the story is slightly different there, but it doesn't seem that different. But overall, yes, I agree that locality mattered, yet outside of a very few shining cities on a hill (who were still quite poor compared to a remarkably low percentile today), basically everyone was pretty darn poor.
It's good to be in London circa 1900 if you are wealthy. If you are poor you have to deal with all the effluent of all that progress. Terrible air quality, tenuous access to clean water, cramped, unsanitary living conditions, brutal work, endemic malnutrition. Persistent assaults on every facet of your health is your lot in life as an urban prole at the turn of the 20th century. (Though even 1900 is substantially better in these respects than say, 1860; or at least for London it is).
Is there any way to find out when London had the lowest overall crime rate?
My WAG would be either the late thirties, when the worst of the poverty had been ameliorated, or the early fifties when the standard of living started to seriously rise after the end of rationing.
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True, but was there anywhere better to be poor in than London in 1900? I doubt Paris or New York was much better.
Like others I'd say the frontier. Smaller cities were also less oppressive in terms of the environmental pollution. London in particular had infamously bad air quality. The crux of the problem is though you're assuming you have options: the reason so many people ended up in these awful situations is because they were chasing what limited employment and opportunities were available to them. It's not like the rural exodus was just because people decided they didn't like farming.
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The American frontier, in all honesty.
Pretty much anywhere there was an abundance of land that was tied into the global trade network. If you could get enough land to be a commercial farmer for relatively cheap any time before mechanization in the 1920s, you'd be set, no matter how you started off.
In that case you wouldn't be considered poor by 1900s standards. The "dream" for a lot of people back then was to own land and be a farmer. The reality for most working poor was being a factory worker, a household servant, or a tenant farmer on someone else's farm. And that's assuming they could get a job at all and weren't just unemployed, like many were, leading to a lot of surplus men looking to sign up for the army.
Right, but if you started poor somewhere it was realistic to save up and get that land, that's the best circumstance to be poor in: you're not going to be stuck impoverished. That's someplace it's significantly better to be poor in than in London at the same time.
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I suppose I would agree with that!
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