4 ms·

My friends and I talk about this a lot. We aren't living in the 1880s anymore. For one, we value life, health, and safety much more than they did back then, wi

My friends and I talk about this a lot. We aren't living in the 1880s anymore. For one, we value life, health, and safety much more than they did back then, with things like OSHA, much more stringent labor laws (overtime, child labor), more types of insurance required for employers including unemployment and various disability coverage, environmental laws like CEQA/Clean Air Act, and tons of other stuff. But I think the biggest change is ultimately cultural. We just don't value growth today like we did back then. We want safe workplaces, and a clean environment. I also think there's a much greater tolerance for government bureaucracy today then there was in the 1880s, including all kinds of permits that take weeks to issue, multiple agencies overseeing everything at the state, local, and federal level, and just in general a huge expansion in the size of government. If you told someone from the 1880s that US government spending would rise to some 40% of GDP over 120 years, they'd think you were totally insane. I go back and forth on whether it's good or bad. It's a complicated question. It takes forever to get anything done, and yet, young Chinese nationals are coming to the US because their parents have utterly ruined their environment, they don't trust the safety of their food supply, and factories with hundreds of people in them burn down, killing everyone inside. I used to think the US and Europe were radically different places, but I'm coming to see they're more alike vs. different. It's really the US and China that are worlds apart.

maxharris 10y ago
I think (but am not completely certain) that we needed a high-growth environment to be rich enough to invent the technologies that give us safe workplaces and a clean environment. If that's true, I also wonder what safety and and living standard improvements we might be giving up because we don't have high growth today.
- wavefunction 10y ago
  >we might be giving up because we don't have high growth today If by this you mean our descendents. It would be fair to note that life for most was quite brutish and short in the "high-growth" period you're lauding. Would you have been a collier or among the more fortunate, I wonder?
  - maxharris 10y ago
    It was brutish and short for most people because there wasn't much wealth of any kind. How far would the combined fortunes of the industrialists gone in raising the standard of living had they been confiscated and distributed to everyone else? Not far at all, it turns out. 50 million people lived in the US in 1880, and Vanderbilt's $232 million fortune would have netted each of the the other 50,189,208 Americans around $4.62 each (around $114 in 2015 dollars). What they got in exchange from these captains of industry (steel, rail, oil, and a future where their children went on to live better than they did) was worth a heck of a lot more to their lives and livelihoods than a few fistfuls of coins. Even if you were Andrew Carnegie, you'd have no Xbox, no CT scanner, no supercomputer in your pocket, no access to the Internet, no way to jump between cities by air... Back then, all people were so poor, not just in material goods or safety technologies, but in knowledge. In the 19th century, they didn't know a damn thing about what actually caused cancer, so people routinely did incredibly stupid things (stupid to us, that is, with the knowledge we have today) when making dyes and many other chemical processes. Incredibly, the alternatives to all that were even worse. If you just sat at home and did nothing, what would you have to do? Play cards and starve to death? Books were still expensive, and remember what I said about all the things that even Carnegie wouldn't have access to in his time? Given all that, I'd rather start as a poor person today than be a rich person in 1830.
vacri 10y ago
As an example of changing values (though not 19th C), the Hoover Dam claimed 100-ish lives during its construction. That would be a scandalous number today.
- maxharris 10y ago
  Here's just one example of my point: we have TBMs (tunnel boring machines) today, which were made possible by 19th and 20th-century industrial development. During the construction of the Hoover Dam, the original bypass tunnels were created by drilling and blasting, which resulted in a number of those deaths. If they had TBMs back then, many people would been spared exposure to dangerous rock dust, explosives, falling rocks, etc.

maxharris 10y ago

I think (but am not completely certain) that we needed a high-growth environment to be rich enough to invent the technologies that give us safe workplaces and a clean environment. If that's true, I also wonder what safety and and living standard improvements we might be giving up because we don't have high growth today.

wavefunction 10y ago
>we might be giving up because we don't have high growth today If by this you mean our descendents. It would be fair to note that life for most was quite brutish and short in the "high-growth" period you're lauding. Would you have been a collier or among the more fortunate, I wonder?
- maxharris 10y ago
  It was brutish and short for most people because there wasn't much wealth of any kind. How far would the combined fortunes of the industrialists gone in raising the standard of living had they been confiscated and distributed to everyone else? Not far at all, it turns out. 50 million people lived in the US in 1880, and Vanderbilt's $232 million fortune would have netted each of the the other 50,189,208 Americans around $4.62 each (around $114 in 2015 dollars). What they got in exchange from these captains of industry (steel, rail, oil, and a future where their children went on to live better than they did) was worth a heck of a lot more to their lives and livelihoods than a few fistfuls of coins. Even if you were Andrew Carnegie, you'd have no Xbox, no CT scanner, no supercomputer in your pocket, no access to the Internet, no way to jump between cities by air... Back then, all people were so poor, not just in material goods or safety technologies, but in knowledge. In the 19th century, they didn't know a damn thing about what actually caused cancer, so people routinely did incredibly stupid things (stupid to us, that is, with the knowledge we have today) when making dyes and many other chemical processes. Incredibly, the alternatives to all that were even worse. If you just sat at home and did nothing, what would you have to do? Play cards and starve to death? Books were still expensive, and remember what I said about all the things that even Carnegie wouldn't have access to in his time? Given all that, I'd rather start as a poor person today than be a rich person in 1830.

vacri 10y ago

As an example of changing values (though not 19th C), the Hoover Dam claimed 100-ish lives during its construction. That would be a scandalous number today.

maxharris 10y ago
Here's just one example of my point: we have TBMs (tunnel boring machines) today, which were made possible by 19th and 20th-century industrial development. During the construction of the Hoover Dam, the original bypass tunnels were created by drilling and blasting, which resulted in a number of those deaths. If they had TBMs back then, many people would been spared exposure to dangerous rock dust, explosives, falling rocks, etc.