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Right. Don’t confuse “poor”, ie relative poverty, with absolute levels of wealth ($ per household) and downstream claims about absolute levels of, say, child mo
by 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 agoIn 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 agoThen why did people migrate to where the industrial jobs were?
- joe_the_user 4y agoYou 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 agoBecause 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 agoMaybe 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.