7 ms·

"The material standard of living of a homeless person in modern-day Manhattan is several dozens of times higher than the wealthiest of kings ten thousand years

"The material standard of living of a homeless person in modern-day Manhattan is several dozens of times higher than the wealthiest of kings ten thousand years ago." Can someone explain to me what their definition of "standard of living" is in this context? I get that they might have access to cleaner water, but surely easy access to food prepared for you and having a roof over your head in a snowstorm would sound really appealing to someone without a home. (Maybe I need to know what they use as the definition of "homeless"...)

blakesterz 11y ago
" Material standard of living can be seen in the increase of real incomes that would increase the purchasing power of consumers, and is characterized by the ability to consume goods and services. Non-material standard of living is more qualitative, and refers to the improvements in quality of life and the environment." So (assuming that's the same definition they used) yeah, I guess the material standard of living is higher. Seems like that's ignoring quite a bit to sound really optimistic though.
- neogodless 11y ago
  Well then, to be fair, they are not defining "homeless" as someone without an income. That's just my poor assumption. With that assumption, I have a hard time seeing how material standards do anything for someone without a home or income :)
- FilterSweep 11y ago
  I understand they are trying to make a distinction between "relative to others" vs. "by absolute measures," and how we are prone to thinking only in terms of the former, but I'd still argue they are indeed ignoring quite a bit. Using our exponential increases in GDP as a measure of comparison seems a bit irrelevant.
- nitrogen 11y ago
  Both of those (material and environmental) fail to encompass fully other important aspects of a monarch's life, like power and sovereignty/independence, things which modern homeless certainly lack.
dominotw 11y ago
They don't have to eat rotten meat, for example.
- abysmal_cynic 11y ago
  The wealthiest kings probably didn't have to either.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
Not Manhattan, but I work in a ritzy part of downtown Chicago and see homeless people literally eating garbage from dumpsters now and again. Yeah, I think the richest kings of Europe were doing a little better than that. I don't think the author understands what homelessness really looks like in dense urban areas and seems to have a Hollywood version of homelessness as his reference.
- erroneousfunk 11y ago
  I don't think you understand what 10,000 years ago looks like. These weren't rich European kings, they were leaders of tribes on the cusp of discovering agriculture. In Europe, they lived in caves and tents and hunted with sharp rocks -- they arguably had it worse even than some of the other prehistoric groups in the Middle East and parts of Asia.
  - drzaiusapelord 11y ago
    Eating freshly cooked meat from a domesticated or game animal is miles better than a rotting piece of garbage in a dumpster sitting in the hot sun. I don't think we're understanding how filthy dumpsters are and how our bodies are not engineered to handle the types of bacteria that grow in those circumstances or just how dangerous and unhealthy urban areas are for the homeless. Even days old dried meat is going to be healthier, tastier, and safer to eat that whatever you find in a dumpster. Opening a dumpster and seeing a freshly cooked steak that has only one bite out of it is pure Hollywood bullshit. Its a major health risk to eat what you find in garbage cans. Hunting and gathering is infinitely better and safer.
    - nickff 11y ago
      You are romanticizing the hunter-gatherer past. Constantly being on the verge of starvation, eating under-ripe fruit, and scavenging rotten meat off week-old corpses was not a good or 'healthy' life.
      - wyldfire 11y ago
erroneousfunk 11y ago
10,000 years ago, we were living in a pre-agricultural society (or, perhaps, only somewhat agricultural) Lots of wandering tribes, moving around following the food, hunting with sharp rocks. Hunger and starvation would be common, everything would be scarce, even for "kings" (which were really just tribal leaders) Modern construction wasn't a thing, dwellings were constructed out of sod, animal skins -- at the best, stacked rocks or mud bricks. As a king, you'd still have to do back-breaking, dangerous work to maintain your position and value in society. There's no possibility of going to a homeless shelter to get out of the cold, or sleeping in a well-constructed subway station to shield yourself from the elements. If you were injured, you couldn't just walk into a nearby emergency room with a team of nurses and doctors required to treat you. No soup kitchens or food pantries or SNAP benefits. Even digging around in a city garbage can or restaurant dumpster would yield an easy and delicious feast compared to spending days tracking prey, killing it with a spear, cleaning and skinning it, and cooking it with primitive tools over a fire. I would much rather be homeless today than in any sort of position 10,000 years ago.
- neogodless 11y ago
  This is an excellent explanation. Thank you! It's amazing how much has changed in 10,000 years. I didn't have a good grasp on the timeline.
- sremani 11y ago
  10,000 years ago we lived like animals, now, we live like pampered pets. edit: note* this comment should be viewed through the "obesity pandemic" prism.
- meric 11y ago
  Houses, kilns, pottery, turquoise carvings, tools made from stone and bone, and bone flutes China [1] I'll take living as a potter in 8000 BC China over being homeless in NYC today, thanks. I don't have to be the King. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8th_millennium_BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8th_millennium_BC
- Pils 11y ago
  I know the work of Jared Diamond has some problems, but as a counterpoint: "While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania...While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s."[1] Obviously this isn't representative of all hunter-gatherer societies, but a >20 hour work week, high-protein 2000 calorie diet seems pretty nice. Of course there are some other nice benefits of modernity but saying being homeless in the US have a categorically higher quality of life is a stretch. [1]http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
gthtjtkt 11y ago
I'm equally confused. I wonder if he meant to say 10,000? My understanding of human history pretty much stops at what we all learned about Egypt in history class, and that time period was ~6,000 years ago IIRC. I have no concept whatsoever of what life was like before then. Were there even "kings" 10,000 years ago?
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  10,000 years ago suggests Mesopotamia. My weak history knowledge suggests that was the only thing closed to a civilization in that era.
  - Govannon 11y ago
    Mesopotamia would have had farming [0], but if you consider the requirements just a group of people, I think there were settlements of sorts back well into the paleolithic. but not kings-with-castles-and-princesses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution
  - erroneousfunk 11y ago
    Yes, Sumeria and Mesopotamia is basically the oldest recorded history we have, but this way predates what we know about that. The author is talking about what we know from archaeological evidence, not recorded history.
ChrisDutrow 11y ago
Yeah, I can't see how that could possibly be true. Kings would have had access to huge amounts of man power. People to build their castles and supply them with food. I suppose you could argue that the homeless person might have better access to healthcare. But I still think the author's statement is very false.
- icebraining 11y ago
  10ka ago there were no castles, only huts in which tiny communities of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers lived.
guyzero 11y ago
So I'm not sure I agree with the original author but a modern homeless person can wander into a hospital emergency ward and get treated for a variety of diseases that would have killed a medieval king. Assuming we mean 1,000 years ago and not 10,000 years ago which may actually pre-date kings.
- cubano 11y ago
  One of my favorite little know facts about how much has really changed with medical treatment... Only 90 years ago, President Calvin Coolidge's 16 year old son died from a foot blister he got while playing lawn tennis on the White House grounds, something that would have probably been easily treated with an OTC anti-bacterial or a quick trip to the doctor nowadays. We hardly have the get "medieval" to see the radical advancements in health and how we all greatly benefit from it.
  - lazyant 11y ago
    Right. Just for contrast, Christopher Reeve (most famous "Superman"actor) died in 2004 of complications of a _bed sore_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Reeve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Reeve
    - houselouse 11y ago
      ...9 years after being thrown off of his horse and living as a quadriplegic, requiring a ventilator
    - guyzero 11y ago
      I think more to the point Christopher Reeve lived for 9 years as a quadriplegic.
CPLX 11y ago
I think a better starting point would be the definition of standard of living.
sanoli 11y ago
10,000 years is too much to make a valid comparison. Do we even know how kings lived that far back?

blakesterz 11y ago

" Material standard of living can be seen in the increase of real incomes that would increase the purchasing power of consumers, and is characterized by the ability to consume goods and services. Non-material standard of living is more qualitative, and refers to the improvements in quality of life and the environment." So (assuming that's the same definition they used) yeah, I guess the material standard of living is higher. Seems like that's ignoring quite a bit to sound really optimistic though.

neogodless 11y ago
Well then, to be fair, they are not defining "homeless" as someone without an income. That's just my poor assumption. With that assumption, I have a hard time seeing how material standards do anything for someone without a home or income :)
FilterSweep 11y ago
I understand they are trying to make a distinction between "relative to others" vs. "by absolute measures," and how we are prone to thinking only in terms of the former, but I'd still argue they are indeed ignoring quite a bit. Using our exponential increases in GDP as a measure of comparison seems a bit irrelevant.
nitrogen 11y ago
Both of those (material and environmental) fail to encompass fully other important aspects of a monarch's life, like power and sovereignty/independence, things which modern homeless certainly lack.

dominotw 11y ago

They don't have to eat rotten meat, for example.

abysmal_cynic 11y ago
The wealthiest kings probably didn't have to either.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

Not Manhattan, but I work in a ritzy part of downtown Chicago and see homeless people literally eating garbage from dumpsters now and again. Yeah, I think the richest kings of Europe were doing a little better than that. I don't think the author understands what homelessness really looks like in dense urban areas and seems to have a Hollywood version of homelessness as his reference.

erroneousfunk 11y ago
I don't think you understand what 10,000 years ago looks like. These weren't rich European kings, they were leaders of tribes on the cusp of discovering agriculture. In Europe, they lived in caves and tents and hunted with sharp rocks -- they arguably had it worse even than some of the other prehistoric groups in the Middle East and parts of Asia.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  Eating freshly cooked meat from a domesticated or game animal is miles better than a rotting piece of garbage in a dumpster sitting in the hot sun. I don't think we're understanding how filthy dumpsters are and how our bodies are not engineered to handle the types of bacteria that grow in those circumstances or just how dangerous and unhealthy urban areas are for the homeless. Even days old dried meat is going to be healthier, tastier, and safer to eat that whatever you find in a dumpster. Opening a dumpster and seeing a freshly cooked steak that has only one bite out of it is pure Hollywood bullshit. Its a major health risk to eat what you find in garbage cans. Hunting and gathering is infinitely better and safer.
  - nickff 11y ago
    You are romanticizing the hunter-gatherer past. Constantly being on the verge of starvation, eating under-ripe fruit, and scavenging rotten meat off week-old corpses was not a good or 'healthy' life.
    - wyldfire 11y ago

erroneousfunk 11y ago

10,000 years ago, we were living in a pre-agricultural society (or, perhaps, only somewhat agricultural) Lots of wandering tribes, moving around following the food, hunting with sharp rocks. Hunger and starvation would be common, everything would be scarce, even for "kings" (which were really just tribal leaders) Modern construction wasn't a thing, dwellings were constructed out of sod, animal skins -- at the best, stacked rocks or mud bricks. As a king, you'd still have to do back-breaking, dangerous work to maintain your position and value in society. There's no possibility of going to a homeless shelter to get out of the cold, or sleeping in a well-constructed subway station to shield yourself from the elements. If you were injured, you couldn't just walk into a nearby emergency room with a team of nurses and doctors required to treat you. No soup kitchens or food pantries or SNAP benefits. Even digging around in a city garbage can or restaurant dumpster would yield an easy and delicious feast compared to spending days tracking prey, killing it with a spear, cleaning and skinning it, and cooking it with primitive tools over a fire. I would much rather be homeless today than in any sort of position 10,000 years ago.

neogodless 11y ago
This is an excellent explanation. Thank you! It's amazing how much has changed in 10,000 years. I didn't have a good grasp on the timeline.
sremani 11y ago
10,000 years ago we lived like animals, now, we live like pampered pets. edit: note* this comment should be viewed through the "obesity pandemic" prism.
meric 11y ago
Houses, kilns, pottery, turquoise carvings, tools made from stone and bone, and bone flutes China [1] I'll take living as a potter in 8000 BC China over being homeless in NYC today, thanks. I don't have to be the King. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8th_millennium_BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8th_millennium_BC
Pils 11y ago
I know the work of Jared Diamond has some problems, but as a counterpoint: "While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania...While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s."[1] Obviously this isn't representative of all hunter-gatherer societies, but a >20 hour work week, high-protein 2000 calorie diet seems pretty nice. Of course there are some other nice benefits of modernity but saying being homeless in the US have a categorically higher quality of life is a stretch. [1]http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

gthtjtkt 11y ago

I'm equally confused. I wonder if he meant to say 10,000? My understanding of human history pretty much stops at what we all learned about Egypt in history class, and that time period was ~6,000 years ago IIRC. I have no concept whatsoever of what life was like before then. Were there even "kings" 10,000 years ago?

sliverstorm 11y ago
10,000 years ago suggests Mesopotamia. My weak history knowledge suggests that was the only thing closed to a civilization in that era.
- Govannon 11y ago
  Mesopotamia would have had farming [0], but if you consider the requirements just a group of people, I think there were settlements of sorts back well into the paleolithic. but not kings-with-castles-and-princesses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution
- erroneousfunk 11y ago
  Yes, Sumeria and Mesopotamia is basically the oldest recorded history we have, but this way predates what we know about that. The author is talking about what we know from archaeological evidence, not recorded history.

ChrisDutrow 11y ago

Yeah, I can't see how that could possibly be true. Kings would have had access to huge amounts of man power. People to build their castles and supply them with food. I suppose you could argue that the homeless person might have better access to healthcare. But I still think the author's statement is very false.

icebraining 11y ago
10ka ago there were no castles, only huts in which tiny communities of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers lived.

guyzero 11y ago

So I'm not sure I agree with the original author but a modern homeless person can wander into a hospital emergency ward and get treated for a variety of diseases that would have killed a medieval king. Assuming we mean 1,000 years ago and not 10,000 years ago which may actually pre-date kings.

cubano 11y ago
One of my favorite little know facts about how much has really changed with medical treatment... Only 90 years ago, President Calvin Coolidge's 16 year old son died from a foot blister he got while playing lawn tennis on the White House grounds, something that would have probably been easily treated with an OTC anti-bacterial or a quick trip to the doctor nowadays. We hardly have the get "medieval" to see the radical advancements in health and how we all greatly benefit from it.
- lazyant 11y ago
  Right. Just for contrast, Christopher Reeve (most famous "Superman"actor) died in 2004 of complications of a _bed sore_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Reeve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Reeve
  - houselouse 11y ago
    ...9 years after being thrown off of his horse and living as a quadriplegic, requiring a ventilator
  - guyzero 11y ago
    I think more to the point Christopher Reeve lived for 9 years as a quadriplegic.

CPLX 11y ago

I think a better starting point would be the definition of standard of living.

sanoli 11y ago

10,000 years is too much to make a valid comparison. Do we even know how kings lived that far back?