The life of American workers in 1915
bls.gov
bls.gov
The life of your service workforce today with fluctuating, uncertain hours. I don't completely agree with the economics behind fight for $15, but I salute them that they found balls to organize and demand better working conditions and wages.
But you can find some: Here is Pulitzer's the "The Evening World" http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030193/issues/191...
And a bit from Hearst's "New York Evening Journal" https://archive.org/stream/newyorkeveningjo1219hear#page/n0/...
source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_history_of_the_United...
I looked into this fellow. One really interesting bit is that he seems to have been executed for a crime he didn't commit, because he refused to give an alibi.
> His most famous songs include "The Preacher and the Slave" (in which he coined the phrase "pie in the sky"[4]), "The Tramp", "There is Power in a Union", "The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab", which express the harsh and combative life of itinerant workers, and call for workers to organize their efforts to improve working conditions.[5]
> In 1914, John G. Morrison, a Salt Lake City area grocer and former policeman, and his son were shot and killed by two men.[6] The same evening, Hill arrived at a doctor's office with a gunshot wound, and briefly mentioned a fight over a woman. Yet Hill refused to explain further, even after he was accused of the grocery store murders on the basis of his injury. Hill was convicted of the murders in a controversial trial. Following an unsuccessful appeal, political debates, and international calls for clemency from high-profile figures and workers' organizations, Hill was executed in November 1915. After his death, he was memorialized by several folk songs. His life and death have inspired books and poetry.
> The identity of the woman and the rival who supposedly caused Hill's injury, though frequently speculated upon, remained mostly conjecture for nearly a century. William M. Adler's 2011 biography of Hill reveals new information about his alibi, which was never introduced at his trial.[7] According to Adler, Hill and his friend and countryman, Otto Appelquist, were rivals for the attention of 20-year-old Hilda Erickson, a member of the family with whom the two men were lodging. In a recently discovered letter, Erickson confirmed her relationship with the two men and the rivalry between them. The letter indicates that when she first discovered Hill was injured, he explained to her that Appelquist had shot him, apparently out of jealousy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...
There was also the Women's Trade Union League, founded in 1903, and the American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886.
Eg, it says "labor leader Joe Hill was arrested", but doesn't say why that's notable.
It says there was labor unrest, and thousands of strikes by workers who wanted higher wages and an 8-hour work day, but doesn't mention that the labor movement had been pushing for an 8 hour day/48 hour week for decades.
(See http://bportlibrary.org/hc/bridgeport-at-war/strikes-for-the... for a description of the Bridgeport strike, which does mention the unions, and strikes by non-unionized workers.)
It never mentions the name of a union. But it does mention the fraternal organizations "Freemasons, the Knights of Columbus, Rotary, and the Elks, ... and the Kiwanis Club".
What you'll see is a shift from farm and ag, and transport categories to first manufacturing and especially railroad categories, then management and various professional classifications.
By 1920 most major modern technologies existed, the major exceptions being television (and all its associated work), computers, nuclear energy, and some specific classifications of chemical work.
Many of today's jobs might best be considered "complexity management": managing people or things, inspecting or certifying them, training and teaching, sales and marketing (especially), government.
See: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3832wx/occupat...
The pace of advancement was, from our perspective, staggering. A few decades before and after would radically transform daily life, not just bring a few new toys.
100 years ago, a 50 year old would have been born as the first transatlantic cable was laid, and seen the general introduction of the telephone, phonograph, movie projection, airplanes, filing systems (including punched card machines for data), radio, electric lights (which made nightlife possible), the first plastics, ironclad warships, the opening of the Suez and Panama Canals, the first affordable car in the Model T, the explosion of newspapers made possible by Linotype, etc.
Much of today's change is cosmetic, or a matter of added convenience. Flight, electronics, vaccines, antibiotics... those kind of changes affect how you really live.
People in the early 20th century imagined we'd have rocket ships, ray guns, 600 year lifespans, and robot servants by now because they were projecting forward based on the speed of change in their own time. Near as I can figure the pace of technological development really slowed down in the 1970s and has continued slowing.
Whether this is because something fundamental has created stagnation or, as Tyler Cowen proposed, we've eaten all the low hanging fruit, I couldn't say.
But the impacts of those changes ... not so much. The whole concept of impact measurement is its own ball of waxworms, but there are some areas we can look at. Medicine, for example, improved life expectancy twice as much from 1900-1950 as from 1950 to today. The low-hanging fruit really mattered. Air travel today is slower than in 1970s, when ground and airport delays are considered. A multi-millionfold increase in compute power has extended long-range weather prediction from five days to ... seven. (Though the minute-by-minute near-term forecasts can be uncannily accurate.)
In researching material (something I do a lot of these days), there are the benefits of online access, but I'm ultimately blocked by the rate at which I myself can read and understand new information.
(And not get distracted replying to comments on HN.)
Ah, America.
The article is about the "General Motors streetcar conspiracy"; the link jumps to the section where other factors in the decline of streetcars are discussed.
Sure, there were a few rail lines running across the country, but building the nations highway system, plus the luxury of the general population to own cars really allowed people to travel the country for business and pleasure. Without the automobile the country wouldn't have been as well connected and arguably wouldn't have became what it did.
Nobody wants to build street lights or a subway station in the middle of an Iowa corn field, but reasonable infrastructure where people actually live is important.
PS: America seems to have forgotten that infrastructure drives economic development. From dirt roads to high speed internet society's live and die based on past investments not what happens to rich or powerful people.
Should people who live in that corn field pay for a rail system in DC?
>PS: America seems to have forgotten that infrastructure drives economic development. From dirt roads to high speed internet society's live and die based on past investments not what happens to rich or powerful people.
Infrastructure that make sense enables economic development. But not all infrastructure makes economic sense. Sure, you can stimulate economic growth in a place by pouring a bunch of money into it. But how much growth did you suppress in other places by taking money out?
Or how about: Between 1995 and 2011, the federal government paid $172.3 billion in commodity subsidies, $46.6 billion in crop insurance subsidies, $37 billion in conservation subsidies and $21.4 billion in disaster subsidies.
Compare with the much hated bank/auto bailout which cost a net $21bn.
Really, rural areas should love for city's to become more efficient so they can leach even more money from them.
By the same token, regional and city-wide projects should built by the people who are going to benefit. There's no reason I should have had to pay for Boston's Big Dig, for example.
Yes. The same way people living in DC pay for all the interstates they don't use next to corn fields.