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>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 brut

>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.

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.