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 differenc

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.