4 ms·

Perhaps it is, but the overall trend in the 18th and 19th centuries was away from peasant farming towards urbanisation and industrial wage labour, and I don't h

Perhaps it is, but the overall trend in the 18th and 19th centuries was away from peasant farming towards urbanisation and industrial wage labour, and I don't have a better term to refer to that. I was also assuming knowledge of European colonialism. By actual wellbeing, I mean the subjective experience of overall happiness, as distinct from material possessions.

bergenty 4y ago
Well overall happiness is intangible. If we base it on tangibles like easy access to food, convenient and cheap transportation, safety and security, health care, recreation, mortality rate, access to information etc. there’s no comparison.
abeppu 4y ago
Even if the industrial revolution came with a trend towards urbanization and away from peasant farming, if we're talking about people's happiness, the difference between being coerced off the land by enclosure vs being drawn towards economic opportunities in the city seems like an important distinction. I'm curious -- how can you be so confident in making broad statements about "actual wellbeing" today vs the early modern period? I would have thought at a minimum, a smaller proportion of the population being literate, plus actual costs of paper, ink, light, etc would mean there would be just a lot fewer records of subjective experience of lower class people from the early modern period. And you know ... whose happiness counts? I'd have further expected that half the population having drastically greater liberty today than in the early modern period ought to substantially improve some people's subjective wellbeing even without considering material possessions. Same for the move away from child labor, or child corporal punishment. I'm guessing no one has 15th century survey data of peasants being asked "on a scale from 1 meaning 'strongly disagree' to 7 meaning 'strongly agree', how would you rate the sentence 'I am happy most days'". And I'm in no way trying to disregard or minimize the possibility that just a different way of living made people better off at some points in the past. But I also think we risk romanticizing or projecting onto past populations.
- janef0421 4y ago
  My evaluation's based mostly on the high levels of alienation and social control in modern societies.
syntheweave 4y ago
If we go by health outcomes, I recall reading a paper that found two lows in the modern period of Western Europe, going by height, tooth decay, etc: the first around 1800, and the second around 1900. The first is explicable by the looming Malthusian pressures of the time, since industrialization had only just kicked off. The second is rather more interesting. By the mid-19th century railroads had connected Europe enough to ensure access to food. People were eating reasonably nutritious fare around 1860-1870. So what happened? The second industrial revolution also saw the processed foods revolution. Waves of canned, baked, dried, and sugared products descended upon the markets for the first time. They were cheap and tasted good, so people made them staples, not knowing how sick it would make them or their kids. And all the while intensified industry was adding more pollutants, people were smoking more, and the automobile and leaded fuel was just coming on the scene. Thus, the average Edwardian Englishman was quite a bit worse off than his Victorian parents in some measures. And...it's been 150 years and while we definitely know the risks of this status quo better, we're still dealing with the consequences. The promise of consumerism is always that engaging with the market will make a better life, and countless critiques have been written of this idea. As you say, we don't really know if we're happier. But we can point to material well-being and make educated guesses.

bergenty 4y ago

Well overall happiness is intangible. If we base it on tangibles like easy access to food, convenient and cheap transportation, safety and security, health care, recreation, mortality rate, access to information etc. there’s no comparison.

abeppu 4y ago

Even if the industrial revolution came with a trend towards urbanization and away from peasant farming, if we're talking about people's happiness, the difference between being coerced off the land by enclosure vs being drawn towards economic opportunities in the city seems like an important distinction. I'm curious -- how can you be so confident in making broad statements about "actual wellbeing" today vs the early modern period? I would have thought at a minimum, a smaller proportion of the population being literate, plus actual costs of paper, ink, light, etc would mean there would be just a lot fewer records of subjective experience of lower class people from the early modern period. And you know ... whose happiness counts? I'd have further expected that half the population having drastically greater liberty today than in the early modern period ought to substantially improve some people's subjective wellbeing even without considering material possessions. Same for the move away from child labor, or child corporal punishment. I'm guessing no one has 15th century survey data of peasants being asked "on a scale from 1 meaning 'strongly disagree' to 7 meaning 'strongly agree', how would you rate the sentence 'I am happy most days'". And I'm in no way trying to disregard or minimize the possibility that just a different way of living made people better off at some points in the past. But I also think we risk romanticizing or projecting onto past populations.

janef0421 4y ago
My evaluation's based mostly on the high levels of alienation and social control in modern societies.

syntheweave 4y ago

If we go by health outcomes, I recall reading a paper that found two lows in the modern period of Western Europe, going by height, tooth decay, etc: the first around 1800, and the second around 1900. The first is explicable by the looming Malthusian pressures of the time, since industrialization had only just kicked off. The second is rather more interesting. By the mid-19th century railroads had connected Europe enough to ensure access to food. People were eating reasonably nutritious fare around 1860-1870. So what happened? The second industrial revolution also saw the processed foods revolution. Waves of canned, baked, dried, and sugared products descended upon the markets for the first time. They were cheap and tasted good, so people made them staples, not knowing how sick it would make them or their kids. And all the while intensified industry was adding more pollutants, people were smoking more, and the automobile and leaded fuel was just coming on the scene. Thus, the average Edwardian Englishman was quite a bit worse off than his Victorian parents in some measures. And...it's been 150 years and while we definitely know the risks of this status quo better, we're still dealing with the consequences. The promise of consumerism is always that engaging with the market will make a better life, and countless critiques have been written of this idea. As you say, we don't really know if we're happier. But we can point to material well-being and make educated guesses.