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Thank you. I was going to make the same post. I'm a huge fan of all of the mod-cons, but for most of human history people lived with pre-industrial-revolution l

Thank you. I was going to make the same post. I'm a huge fan of all of the mod-cons, but for most of human history people lived with pre-industrial-revolution levels of tech. And we still had rich and poor. Poverty is when you don't have a good place in society, lack of respect by your fellows, and no security for your physical safety or property.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I think this misses the point of the article. Yes, the world has had, and will always have, rich and poor. But to raise the poor up, what you fundamentally need is more energy. I think this article also does a good job in emphasizing country-level poverty is what's really important to think about. That is, in the US, since we already have the infrastructure of a rich country, even poor people can afford safe food and refrigeration (but even then it's not evenly distributed, e.g. much has been written about "food deserts" in the US). But, in say, Nigeria, they are so undersupplied with refrigeration trucks that making it possible for the poor to get reliable access to safe food would take a massive investment, which would mean a lot more energy.
- theptip 4y ago
  Right. Don’t confuse “poor”, ie relative poverty, with absolute levels of wealth ($ per household) and downstream claims about absolute levels of, say, child mortality. In 1800, almost everyone was destitute by current standards, even prosperous merchants. Child mortality rates were appalling. And at the same time, there was a spectrum between relatively rich and poor, and merchants appeared “rich”. The article is solely about absolute wealth levels, and is making empirical claims about energy requirements to get there. Concerns about wealth inequality are orthogonal to this set of claims. You could have incredibly equal or unequal societies, but none of them can (with current technology) produce low child mortality rates with very-low per capita energy usage.
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    In 1800, almost everyone was destitute by current standards, even prosperous merchants. If you measure wealth by dollars or iPhone access, this tautologically true but it's not a good measure of how life was. A wealthy person had enough food, access to leisure, a large house with luxurious possessions and probably servants. Sure, health care might have been bad and they might have died of various epidemics. Their lives would have been far more appealing than the life of, say, someone working 60 hours per week in a factory (who has some health care but risks on the job injury and is worn down by the stress and routine - even if their cheap Android would have worth a trillion dollar in 1800).
    - bborud 4y ago
      Then why did people migrate to where the industrial jobs were?
      - joe_the_user 4y ago
        You know my comment said some people, wealthy people lived better in some ways than present day impoverished factory workers? Farm hands, Eastern European serfs and so-forth did not live better by any means. As other have noted, the industrial revolution also got much of it's impetus from peasant being driven off the land they cultivated.
      - coldtea 4y ago
        Because rich people fucked with their livehood, and even passed laws to indirectly force them to become industrial workers. And there was furious battles against that current...
      - npteljes 4y ago
        Maybe the alternative, whatever it was, seemed to be more horrible. Agriculture for example is really vulnerable to weather and other environmental factors. But the factory is always there, summer or winter, wet or dry season.
- moistly 4y ago
  > But to raise the poor up, what you fundamentally need is more energy. Or to direct the energy differently, e.g. shift some of it from rich users to poor ones. > in the US … even poor people can afford safe food and refrigeration Poor people are living homeless in tents and cars. They can not afford safe refrigeration and many do not have good access to safe food.
scratcheee 4y ago
The rich/poor divide does indeed exist and has always existed, but that floats separately to the poverty divide. changing one does not change the other. Imagine an ancient communist utopia where all the bread is split evenly - and the 20% who aren't making bread spread their more interesting items across the population equally. Maybe you'll get some nice pottery. By any modern measure of poverty, you have created a utopia of poverty, everyone would be below the modern poverty line. The rich of ancient times had to scrape their wealth from the labour of _so many_ people. Meanwhile, if we tried applying the ancient poverty line to a modern rich society, we'd have trouble defining it clearly, even homeless people might sit above it, it barely makes sense.
bborud 4y ago
> And we still had rich and poor. If you only care about there being a delta between the rich and the poor, sure, there have always been rich and poor people. But that neither usefully describes the world, nor does it account for what poverty actually means and how poverty levels have changed in the last century. Hans Rosling used to make a joke that the top few percents of students in the Swedish educational system knew less about the world than a chimp (based on the reasoning that if you pick answers to questions randomly, you'll be right more often than the students). I can recommend watching some of Hans Rosling's talks about poverty and reading his books. It is important to understand what poverty means.
randomdata 4y ago
Isn't social order ultimately just a proxy for access to energy? In pre-industrial times, and even modern times, those who were able to compel (or force) people to work for them – i.e. provide them energy – were those considered to have a higher social standing. Those who provided the energy were of lower social standing.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I think this misses the point of the article. Yes, the world has had, and will always have, rich and poor. But to raise the poor up, what you fundamentally need is more energy. I think this article also does a good job in emphasizing country-level poverty is what's really important to think about. That is, in the US, since we already have the infrastructure of a rich country, even poor people can afford safe food and refrigeration (but even then it's not evenly distributed, e.g. much has been written about "food deserts" in the US). But, in say, Nigeria, they are so undersupplied with refrigeration trucks that making it possible for the poor to get reliable access to safe food would take a massive investment, which would mean a lot more energy.

theptip 4y ago
Right. Don’t confuse “poor”, ie relative poverty, with absolute levels of wealth ($ per household) and downstream claims about absolute levels of, say, child mortality. In 1800, almost everyone was destitute by current standards, even prosperous merchants. Child mortality rates were appalling. And at the same time, there was a spectrum between relatively rich and poor, and merchants appeared “rich”. The article is solely about absolute wealth levels, and is making empirical claims about energy requirements to get there. Concerns about wealth inequality are orthogonal to this set of claims. You could have incredibly equal or unequal societies, but none of them can (with current technology) produce low child mortality rates with very-low per capita energy usage.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  In 1800, almost everyone was destitute by current standards, even prosperous merchants. If you measure wealth by dollars or iPhone access, this tautologically true but it's not a good measure of how life was. A wealthy person had enough food, access to leisure, a large house with luxurious possessions and probably servants. Sure, health care might have been bad and they might have died of various epidemics. Their lives would have been far more appealing than the life of, say, someone working 60 hours per week in a factory (who has some health care but risks on the job injury and is worn down by the stress and routine - even if their cheap Android would have worth a trillion dollar in 1800).
  - bborud 4y ago
    Then why did people migrate to where the industrial jobs were?
    - joe_the_user 4y ago
      You know my comment said some people, wealthy people lived better in some ways than present day impoverished factory workers? Farm hands, Eastern European serfs and so-forth did not live better by any means. As other have noted, the industrial revolution also got much of it's impetus from peasant being driven off the land they cultivated.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      Because rich people fucked with their livehood, and even passed laws to indirectly force them to become industrial workers. And there was furious battles against that current...
    - npteljes 4y ago
      Maybe the alternative, whatever it was, seemed to be more horrible. Agriculture for example is really vulnerable to weather and other environmental factors. But the factory is always there, summer or winter, wet or dry season.
moistly 4y ago
> But to raise the poor up, what you fundamentally need is more energy. Or to direct the energy differently, e.g. shift some of it from rich users to poor ones. > in the US … even poor people can afford safe food and refrigeration Poor people are living homeless in tents and cars. They can not afford safe refrigeration and many do not have good access to safe food.

scratcheee 4y ago

The rich/poor divide does indeed exist and has always existed, but that floats separately to the poverty divide. changing one does not change the other. Imagine an ancient communist utopia where all the bread is split evenly - and the 20% who aren't making bread spread their more interesting items across the population equally. Maybe you'll get some nice pottery. By any modern measure of poverty, you have created a utopia of poverty, everyone would be below the modern poverty line. The rich of ancient times had to scrape their wealth from the labour of _so many_ people. Meanwhile, if we tried applying the ancient poverty line to a modern rich society, we'd have trouble defining it clearly, even homeless people might sit above it, it barely makes sense.

bborud 4y ago

> And we still had rich and poor. If you only care about there being a delta between the rich and the poor, sure, there have always been rich and poor people. But that neither usefully describes the world, nor does it account for what poverty actually means and how poverty levels have changed in the last century. Hans Rosling used to make a joke that the top few percents of students in the Swedish educational system knew less about the world than a chimp (based on the reasoning that if you pick answers to questions randomly, you'll be right more often than the students). I can recommend watching some of Hans Rosling's talks about poverty and reading his books. It is important to understand what poverty means.

randomdata 4y ago

Isn't social order ultimately just a proxy for access to energy? In pre-industrial times, and even modern times, those who were able to compel (or force) people to work for them – i.e. provide them energy – were those considered to have a higher social standing. Those who provided the energy were of lower social standing.