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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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He wrote a whole series about how women traditionally made clothing and he had to admit that primary sources were sparse because even the primary sources of the time thought that this was an incredibly boring topic which no one cared about.

When I read it, I did not think it was especially boring. I actually found it interesting to learn that a lot of productivity went into textiles. For myself, this contrast is larger than for food -- I still spend a couple of hundreds Euros a month on food, but perhaps only a couple of 100 Euro per year on clothes. A 50 Euro jeans can easily last for years.

Or you could say that the baseline requirements of labor for textiles (even after the invention of the spinning wheel) sets the stage for the industrial revolution as spinning machines were one of the early consumers of steam power.

even the primary sources of the time

Come on, that is an incredibly weak argument. Most of our sources were upper class, often aristocratic men interested in what their class viewed as appropriate interests. There is a ton of stuff -- details of industrial processes, demographic information, nutrition of the general population, etc -- which they could have trivially found out and written to us about, but did not bother for the most part.

Some of these a woke niche interests ("Okay, but what was life in the kingdom like for the 99%?") but others might allow us to understand why history happened the way it happened, why this society was stable and that one was not and so on.

I found it interesting, too.

Per gwern:

Clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”, as the Industrial Revolution in textiles never stopped; employment in the US textile industry has cratered while garment per man-hour & per capita GDP in new textile-heavy economies like Bangladesh soars as textile automation continues.

I thought his article was the one with stats about the percentage of income spent on clothing, but I guess that was somewhere else. It was outrageous even through the 50s.

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