Growth Recurring

[erudito]

Historically, mass poverty is the normal human condition. This has naturally led to attempt to explain those historically rare instances of sustained economic growth leading to mass prosperity as being somehow special. Not merely in being, before 1900, rare but also involving some very particular human motivations, institutions or discoveries. A

Comments

Re: Longer term

[taavi]

Whether everyday britishers became, on average, poorer or richer during the early IR is something economic historians have argued over for 100 years. It is a controversy, but not an unwarranted assumption. However, from studying processes of urbanisation, nothing is more certain than that a lot of people live in hellish conditions which are worse than those they left. There may not be enough of them to depress the mean average, given that the mean includes the nouveau riche.

On property, I think we are talking about slightly different historical periods. I don't think there was permanent landlessness in the middle ages. The process of Enclosure was a real, relatively short transition that left many people without access to resources and created a "landless" class prone to violent political upheaval: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

You might be interested to know that the witch-persecution craze in England (not the continent) has been partly attributed to the effects of Enclosure by anthropologists. The reasoning is that the poor, the elderly, and women (the majority of "witches") were those who relied most upon access to communal resources to survive and were therefore likely to remonstrate against the removal of the commons by the gentry of their community (eg by "cursing" or abusing the person) and an accusation of witchcraft was a great way to get the meddlesome old baggage out of one's hair.
I see similar processes happening in Thailand today - people, particularly women, who protest the loss of communal resources (eg the drowning of the Pak Mun fisheries by the dam) are regularly accused of heresy, treachery, black magic and so forth by the local Thai power elite.

Re: Longer term

[erudito]

However, from studying processes of urbanisation, nothing is more certain than that a lot of people live in hellish conditions which are worse than those they left. There may not be enough of them to depress the mean average, given that the mean includes the nouveau riche.
The expanding middle class may have been enough to counteract any drop in living standards, but I doubt that urban poverty really is generally worse than rural poverty. It certainly does not seem to be the judgement of those who move to the cities in such huge numbers.

I am aware of the witchcraft as awkward-person removal-technique in the English context (in, e.g., Keith Thomas). (It was also the differences between witchcraft acccusations and trials between England and the continent which drove Macfarlane's study in the first place.) But the withcraft accusations were largely over by the end of the C17th.

There may have been a significant group of folk made worse off in an enduring way by C18th-C19th enclosures. It is, after all, a famous motive for migration (those who survived the trip also being generally better off). But the fact remains that industrialisation occurred first in a relatively high-wage country in its relatively high-wage areas. The evidence that such investment was directly motivated by labour subsitution is very weak, but price effects do not rely on folk looking at things in that way: increased pressure on capital efficiency is enough.

Re: Longer term

[taavi]

What moving to the city gives you is hope. Opportunity. The chance at the winning lottery ticket. These are all powerful incentives for a species with a poor grasp of statistics.
What it also gives you is slums, industrial accidents, lung disease,cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, murder, robbery and rape. But from the village, people don't see that. They see the bright lights.
Less poetically, the higher real wages are visible but the poorer living conditions are not, since they only happen to you if you are unlucky and everyone thinks they will be lucky.

Re: Longer term

[erudito]

It is a notorious fact of social history that pre-modern cities had death rates higher than birth rates and so needed regular replenishing from the countryside. Which does not mean that their overall standard of living was lower, just that the disease risk was higher.

Still, I tend to be very leary of explanations which postulate continuous individual misjudgement on a massive scale. The disease and other crowding costs I grant (see comments about the effects of American migration). But there are lots of unpleasantnesses about rural poverty also.

A factor worth mentioning is the result of the ecological bounty from the New World - potatoes and such. They would have had a counterveiling effect.

Re: Longer term

[jordan179]

The expanding middle class may have been enough to counteract any drop in living standards, but I doubt that urban poverty really is generally worse than rural poverty. It certainly does not seem to be the judgement of those who move to the cities in such huge numbers.

The big difference is that urban poverty is much more visible than rural poverty. Writers either lived in the city (in which case they rub shoulders with the urban poor) or lived in good circumstances in the country (in which case they see merely the picturesque aspects of rustic life).

Dickens, who actually knew better than he is given credit for, frequently depicted the hellishness of both kinds of poverty in his books. Consider the sort of rural culture that could produce a Squeers, or long tolerate his establishment.