6 ms·

Gosh, I miss how organized and rich the Old World culture was. Today's culture, is broad and spiritually hollow by comparison.

locopati 3y ago
yes... great if you were rich
- willcipriano 3y ago
  In the modern era everyone is rich to their standards.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Are we though? I sure as heck can't afford to pay a staff of servants.
    - PeterisP 3y ago
      A relevant quote about the change of affordability of certain things from the late Agatha Christie looking back at her early years - "I couldn’t imagine being too poor to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford a car." With respect to material culture - so also with respect to what clothing styles and fashions are possible - anybody who can afford a car is far richer than people who had servants a hundred years ago.
      - marginalia_nu 3y ago
        Cars were an arguably overvalued novelty at the time. The more fundamental question should be something like, do you need to work to put food on your table. If yes, then you are not wealthy.
        ben_w 3y ago
        Here in Berlin, we have a "pfand" (deposit) on various bottles. At a summer barbecue you sometimes get people asking to take your bottles away, so they can collect that deposit themselves. For the larger bottles, just four per day would equal the income of a pre-industrial farmhand.
        marginalia_nu 3y ago
        ..., ignoring inflation.
        ben_w 3y ago
        No, that's inflation adjusted. If I ignored inflation (and hand-waved at least three major currency replacements) it would be eight month's wages.
        rsynnott 3y ago
        This is the thing, no. _Even adjusted for inflation_, the pre-industrial working class (and the early-to-mid-industrial working class, for that matter) was paid barely anything. This was recognised as a problem at the time, even; a lot of the push for the reform of the Corn Laws in Britain, say, came from capitalists, who were, rightly, concerned that the working class _couldn't actually afford to buy any of their products_ (this largely played out; once they were repealed, living costs fell, wages rose, and the consumer market expanded greatly). Adjusting for inflation also gets messier the further you go back. After the repeal of the Corn Laws the average person's day to day obligatory expenses went down dramatically, but it's barely a blip on the inflation charts.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      Most people couldn't afford to pay a staff of servants. ... But you can stay at a Holiday Inn tonight.
      - marginalia_nu 3y ago
        Well, having servants for one night only isn't really comparable to paying for them several decades. Also can't be stressed enough how large the servant staff could be. It often has a management hierarcy of sorts.
        ben_w 3y ago
        Tautologically most people can't afford human servants, because if we were all that rich it would include the servants who we then couldn't afford. Quite a lot of us have robot vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, washing machines, and all of us now have zero marginal cost (to ourselves) voice-controlled AI assistants free with our radio-video-telephone-dictaphone-gramophone-calendar-notepads. Some of the aforementioned are also powerful enough to be able to locally, for an energy cost so small that it's less than the cost of the food calories you burned reading this sentence, create a new artwork in any arbitrary artistic style.
        rsynnott 3y ago
        Most people, of course, didn't have servants at all, and the really big staffs were an _extreme_ outlier; in the period mentioned you're basically talking just high nobility. It did become _somewhat_ more common in the late 19th century (most of the really silly Downton Abbey type setups date from then), before collapsing entirely in the early 20th.
    - pfannkuchen 3y ago
      Generally I’m not sure the modern world is better, but you probably do own a lot of machines that take the place of many things servants would have done in the past. Laundry machine, dishwasher machine, mixing machine, fire tending machine, etc.
      - rsynnott 3y ago
        > Generally I’m not sure the modern world is better ... Eh? I mean, it is clearly better by any reasonable measure. Bear in mind that most people in the 18th century didn't have a staff of servants.
        pfannkuchen 3y ago
        The modern world is way, way more socially atomized than what most people would have experienced in the 1800s. Not everything is about technology or immediate comfort.
- thrwaway1337 3y ago
  False dichotomy much? That is not an argument against the parent's observation per se. One can imagine a culture that is organized, not hollow, and not only for the rich
- barrysteve 3y ago
  or.. pressed ganged as a poor man into the Royal navy - on one of the lucky ships that didn't suffer too much. besides 'if you were rich' is same trade-off as today's world...
- rsynnott 3y ago
  I mean, it really wasn't, either. Read Samuel Pepys' Diary. He's rich for most of the period covered (it starts at about the point that he starts becoming rich, largely through bribery), and it sounds... I mean, like not a lot of fun.
chasil 3y ago
I don't miss the cholera, typhus, and smallpox.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jayd16 3y ago
I think you're comparing your first person view of the modern world with the curated and idealized view of the many facets of the past.
rsynnott 3y ago
... They barely _had_ culture by modern standards. They'd only just invented the novel in the period referred to. This is a particularly severe case of "the grass is always greener", I think.

locopati 3y ago

yes... great if you were rich

willcipriano 3y ago
In the modern era everyone is rich to their standards.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Are we though? I sure as heck can't afford to pay a staff of servants.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    A relevant quote about the change of affordability of certain things from the late Agatha Christie looking back at her early years - "I couldn’t imagine being too poor to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford a car." With respect to material culture - so also with respect to what clothing styles and fashions are possible - anybody who can afford a car is far richer than people who had servants a hundred years ago.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Cars were an arguably overvalued novelty at the time. The more fundamental question should be something like, do you need to work to put food on your table. If yes, then you are not wealthy.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Here in Berlin, we have a "pfand" (deposit) on various bottles. At a summer barbecue you sometimes get people asking to take your bottles away, so they can collect that deposit themselves. For the larger bottles, just four per day would equal the income of a pre-industrial farmhand.
        marginalia_nu 3y ago
        ..., ignoring inflation.
        ben_w 3y ago
        No, that's inflation adjusted. If I ignored inflation (and hand-waved at least three major currency replacements) it would be eight month's wages.
        rsynnott 3y ago
        This is the thing, no. _Even adjusted for inflation_, the pre-industrial working class (and the early-to-mid-industrial working class, for that matter) was paid barely anything. This was recognised as a problem at the time, even; a lot of the push for the reform of the Corn Laws in Britain, say, came from capitalists, who were, rightly, concerned that the working class _couldn't actually afford to buy any of their products_ (this largely played out; once they were repealed, living costs fell, wages rose, and the consumer market expanded greatly). Adjusting for inflation also gets messier the further you go back. After the repeal of the Corn Laws the average person's day to day obligatory expenses went down dramatically, but it's barely a blip on the inflation charts.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    Most people couldn't afford to pay a staff of servants. ... But you can stay at a Holiday Inn tonight.
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Well, having servants for one night only isn't really comparable to paying for them several decades. Also can't be stressed enough how large the servant staff could be. It often has a management hierarcy of sorts.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Tautologically most people can't afford human servants, because if we were all that rich it would include the servants who we then couldn't afford. Quite a lot of us have robot vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, washing machines, and all of us now have zero marginal cost (to ourselves) voice-controlled AI assistants free with our radio-video-telephone-dictaphone-gramophone-calendar-notepads. Some of the aforementioned are also powerful enough to be able to locally, for an energy cost so small that it's less than the cost of the food calories you burned reading this sentence, create a new artwork in any arbitrary artistic style.
      - rsynnott 3y ago
        Most people, of course, didn't have servants at all, and the really big staffs were an _extreme_ outlier; in the period mentioned you're basically talking just high nobility. It did become _somewhat_ more common in the late 19th century (most of the really silly Downton Abbey type setups date from then), before collapsing entirely in the early 20th.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    Generally I’m not sure the modern world is better, but you probably do own a lot of machines that take the place of many things servants would have done in the past. Laundry machine, dishwasher machine, mixing machine, fire tending machine, etc.
    - rsynnott 3y ago
      > Generally I’m not sure the modern world is better ... Eh? I mean, it is clearly better by any reasonable measure. Bear in mind that most people in the 18th century didn't have a staff of servants.
      - pfannkuchen 3y ago
        The modern world is way, way more socially atomized than what most people would have experienced in the 1800s. Not everything is about technology or immediate comfort.
thrwaway1337 3y ago
False dichotomy much? That is not an argument against the parent's observation per se. One can imagine a culture that is organized, not hollow, and not only for the rich
barrysteve 3y ago
or.. pressed ganged as a poor man into the Royal navy - on one of the lucky ships that didn't suffer too much. besides 'if you were rich' is same trade-off as today's world...
rsynnott 3y ago
I mean, it really wasn't, either. Read Samuel Pepys' Diary. He's rich for most of the period covered (it starts at about the point that he starts becoming rich, largely through bribery), and it sounds... I mean, like not a lot of fun.

chasil 3y ago

I don't miss the cholera, typhus, and smallpox.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jayd16 3y ago

I think you're comparing your first person view of the modern world with the curated and idealized view of the many facets of the past.

rsynnott 3y ago

... They barely _had_ culture by modern standards. They'd only just invented the novel in the period referred to. This is a particularly severe case of "the grass is always greener", I think.