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The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place. Lots of people go

The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place. Lots of people got very wealthy though, that's for sure. This view of history as immutable, with the ends always meeting the means is the sort of thinking that I believe is holding us back as a society. Researchers are still studying the impact that the industrial revolution had on not just the environment, but also the mental health of the descendants of the working class in Europe: https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-the-industrial-revolution-left-psychological-scars-that-can-still-be-seen-today https://hbr.org/2018/03/research-the-industrial-revolution-l.... We can and should do better.

baryphonic 7y ago
Compared to what? Sure, it was awful compared to working at Google with unlimited snacks and all of that. Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad.
- nullorundefined 7y ago
  it was literally misery on scales that hadn't been seen before. children were expected to work in horrible and abusive conditions. everyone was working very long and gruelling days for next to nothing and had no way to protect themselves from exploitation.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    How is that different from subsistence farming?
    - buckminster 7y ago
      It was just as bad only with industrial accidents and diseases on top.
      - baryphonic 7y ago
        Entire families working in the fields all day didn't have accidents or diseases in subsistence farming?
        buckminster 7y ago
        In the UK industrial accidents were commonplace until the passing of The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. The very many maimings and deaths it has (belatedly) prevented are less common in subsidence farming. Of course farmers get sick, but they don't get the diseases created by industry. There are a great many respiratory conditions and cancers that don't occur naturally.
  - archi42 7y ago
    Not sure if you're talking about industrial revolution or present day labor conditions...? Okay, we have child labor outsourced to poorer countries, but still confusing.
- nullorundefined 7y ago
  also, "it wasn't so bad?" were you there? suffering is suffering.
  - baryphonic 7y ago
    > were you there? Not being Nicolas Cage, I was not. However, there are many, many countries today who are similar to 19th century UK/US. Would you like to go to rural China and compare the peasant subsistence farming still happening there with urban China and its sweatshops? > suffering is suffering. Sure. People suffered. They suffered horribly as peasant farmers living on less than $2/day, or they suffered as laborers making possibly a bit more. Work was universally hard. It's possible (likely) that future people will see what we went through - disease, hunger, unemployment, bad management, personal suffering/alienation and a host of other problems - and say literally the same thing about us. But although I think all of us can think of a few tweaks at the margins, we'd all utterly fail fully to replace the status quo most people accept, many try to change, a few succeed at changing and a precious few improve. We should give the past the same courtesy we expect from future generations. And we should be willing to make some of the sacrifices today to ensure that future generations will endure. (And this includes things like ensuring the effects of climate change or nuclear weapons don't wipe us out.) The past is and forever shall be a foreign country.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad. the life expectancy in Liverpool and some other parts of England during the peak of industrialisation fell to 25 years, the average height fell by almost 10cm, so actually it was pretty bad and it took decades for the situation to improve. I would have very much preferred to be a self-sufficient farmer during that time. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens goes through a pretty big amount of data that shows that traditional communities and even hunter-gatherers lived much better and longer lifes than people that had to endure the human meatgrinder that was industrialisation. https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-living-standards-improve-during-the-industrial-revolution https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin...
baddox 7y ago
> The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place. Yes, and that's why the labor movement is important (I'd like it to be much stronger than it is still today). Is your view that neither the Industrial Revolution nor the labor movement should have happened?
nitwit005 7y ago
Those seemingly horrible jobs were better than what they had before. You can tell because people voted with their feet. They left their farms to take those jobs, and didn't go back. Something similar plays out with "sweatshop labor" these days. People talk about the abuses, but there's often the same flow of people from the countryside lining up for the openings. That's not to say that stopping stupid abuses and unsafe conditions isn't important, it's just important to keep in mind how bad things often were. Simply having a job with a salary that guaranteed you wouldn't starve was a huge improvement for some people.

baryphonic 7y ago

Compared to what? Sure, it was awful compared to working at Google with unlimited snacks and all of that. Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad.

nullorundefined 7y ago
it was literally misery on scales that hadn't been seen before. children were expected to work in horrible and abusive conditions. everyone was working very long and gruelling days for next to nothing and had no way to protect themselves from exploitation.
- bluGill 7y ago
  How is that different from subsistence farming?
  - buckminster 7y ago
    It was just as bad only with industrial accidents and diseases on top.
    - baryphonic 7y ago
      Entire families working in the fields all day didn't have accidents or diseases in subsistence farming?
      - buckminster 7y ago
        In the UK industrial accidents were commonplace until the passing of The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. The very many maimings and deaths it has (belatedly) prevented are less common in subsidence farming. Of course farmers get sick, but they don't get the diseases created by industry. There are a great many respiratory conditions and cancers that don't occur naturally.
- archi42 7y ago
  Not sure if you're talking about industrial revolution or present day labor conditions...? Okay, we have child labor outsourced to poorer countries, but still confusing.
nullorundefined 7y ago
also, "it wasn't so bad?" were you there? suffering is suffering.
- baryphonic 7y ago
  > were you there? Not being Nicolas Cage, I was not. However, there are many, many countries today who are similar to 19th century UK/US. Would you like to go to rural China and compare the peasant subsistence farming still happening there with urban China and its sweatshops? > suffering is suffering. Sure. People suffered. They suffered horribly as peasant farmers living on less than $2/day, or they suffered as laborers making possibly a bit more. Work was universally hard. It's possible (likely) that future people will see what we went through - disease, hunger, unemployment, bad management, personal suffering/alienation and a host of other problems - and say literally the same thing about us. But although I think all of us can think of a few tweaks at the margins, we'd all utterly fail fully to replace the status quo most people accept, many try to change, a few succeed at changing and a precious few improve. We should give the past the same courtesy we expect from future generations. And we should be willing to make some of the sacrifices today to ensure that future generations will endure. (And this includes things like ensuring the effects of climate change or nuclear weapons don't wipe us out.) The past is and forever shall be a foreign country.
Barrin92 7y ago
>Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad. the life expectancy in Liverpool and some other parts of England during the peak of industrialisation fell to 25 years, the average height fell by almost 10cm, so actually it was pretty bad and it took decades for the situation to improve. I would have very much preferred to be a self-sufficient farmer during that time. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens goes through a pretty big amount of data that shows that traditional communities and even hunter-gatherers lived much better and longer lifes than people that had to endure the human meatgrinder that was industrialisation. https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-living-standards-improve-during-the-industrial-revolution https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin...

baddox 7y ago

> The Industrial Revolution was a terrible period for workers up until the labor movement began fighting for putting basic protections in place. Yes, and that's why the labor movement is important (I'd like it to be much stronger than it is still today). Is your view that neither the Industrial Revolution nor the labor movement should have happened?

nitwit005 7y ago

Those seemingly horrible jobs were better than what they had before. You can tell because people voted with their feet. They left their farms to take those jobs, and didn't go back. Something similar plays out with "sweatshop labor" these days. People talk about the abuses, but there's often the same flow of people from the countryside lining up for the openings. That's not to say that stopping stupid abuses and unsafe conditions isn't important, it's just important to keep in mind how bad things often were. Simply having a job with a salary that guaranteed you wouldn't starve was a huge improvement for some people.