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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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