> There have always been people That "argument" is on the level of "my grandfather smoked and died cancer-free at 96" (so don't tell me smoking causes cancer)

> There have always been people That "argument" is on the level of "my grandfather smoked and died cancer-free at 96" (so don't tell me smoking causes cancer). In other words, we were not talking about extremely rare individual cases - the rarer the farther back in time you go. The science for and during the industrial revolution wasn't driven by poor farmers and workers. That statement remains true even if you should manage to find some poor fellow who did manage it. Even today we still have the problem of way too low upward mobility from the working class, even though they could do it without nearly as much trouble as in the past!