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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28917 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.

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.

I think Vienna, Paris, and New York were all pretty good places around 1900, no? Or really any capital city of a western nation. I don't think London had any exclusive technology that the other countries didn't have. Instead there was a big effort to connect the world, via telegram, steamship, and zeppelin.

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