> I would guess the costs for most things has dropped dramatically, while the cost for professionals has relatively risen. In a sense this is the gist of it: t

> I would guess the costs for most things has dropped dramatically, while the cost for professionals has relatively risen. In a sense this is the gist of it: the price of goods is much much lower relative to the price of labor, especially when you compare with the modern West. But that doesn’t really do justice to the immensity of the gulf that separates the pre-modern world from our lives on the other side of changes like industrialization, mass production, chemical fertilizer and mechanized agriculture, and the immense drop in the cost of shipping (railways, containerization, etc). It’s not just that prices have changed; the whole economic game is utterly different. The best example is clothing, which was astonishingly costly in relative terms because fibers and cloth had to be hand-produced at every stage of production. A laborer in the Middle Ages could probably afford only a few items of basic clothing and they would be patched and mended for as long as possible. When cotton production industrialized in the 19th century it was one of the great shifts in world history, for all sorts of reasons: see Sven Beckett’s great book Empire of Cotton. It takes a real effort of imagination (and research) to put ourselves back in that pre-industrial world: you must constantly remind yourself of things like e.g. transportation of goods over any distance over land is extremely expensive, unreliable, and slow (think an ox cart on a rutted track). Indeed transportation of people or even meaningful amounts of information could not happen faster than the speed of a horse. That also utterly changes the economic game in all sorts of ways, if you think about it. Nothing gives the flavor of the alienness of the past like a little economic history.