Comment by psykotic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by psykotic | Hacker News Reader

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> There used to be a time when Left-leaning people knew some history.

Everyone tends to view history from an angle that supports their preconceptions. You don't seem to be any exception.

> Terrible as the worker conditions might have been at the dawn of the Industrial Age, they were a vast improvement compared to the past.

How are you defining worker conditions?

A family with a small plot in the countryside could not occupy their full time with cultivating the land. If you travel throughout the deep countryside of countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, China and the poorer parts of Thailand like Isaan, you still see much evidence of this today.

People moved to the cities because they could make more money. It's that simple. In no way were working conditions an improvement if you care about hours, health and safety. The ready availability of jobs for unskilled labor also created perverse incentives for parents to send their children to work at the factories. That was true in late 18th and early 19th century Europe, and it is still true today in the poorer emerging economies.

Sure, what you said is all true. And guess what? The only cure for it is to move further along the line of industrialization.

Guess how you get there.

It's always hilarious to see rich white people talking about how the poor asian people need to be living their lives.

And you suppose making more money, or wanting to, is somehow evil?

I suppose, said or insinuated no such thing. What a childish comeback.

Of course it isn't evil. If you're starving then making money is not only not evil but a necessity. Beyond meeting your immediate needs, working endless hours at a repetitive, unhealthy job to support your family or further your children's future is commendable.

That does not mean worker conditions improved with industrialization as compared to working on your own farm or as a day laborer.

A standard of living is not made by just the raw hours of leisure. Industrialization also brought security from famine and allowed for hygiene, sewage and medicine. It also allows people to chose to work very little, just to support their bare necessities (although very few chose to).

In many cases it wasn't really a voluntary choice to change lifestyle in order to make more money; a lot of the mass-urbanization periods happened when previous ways of making money collapsed. In the U.S., two big periods of rural flight were the late 19th century, when industrialization of farming lowered prices enough that family farmers were no longer competitive; and the 1930s, when the dust-bowl put another large cohort of family farmers out of business.

You could argue they ended up better off anyway, but it wasn't as if millions of people sat down and voluntarily decided, "well, I could stay and farm, but I'd rather go to the city and work in a factory". The collapse of family farming as a viable occupation sort of made the choice for them.

The industrialists were not responsible for the conditions of late medieval agriculture. Again, would the rural folk have been better off without the factories altogether?

An alternative way to look at things was that industrialism saved Europe (and later the rest of the world) from waves of famine. It allowed, for the first time since centuries, the possibility for ordinary people to travel to work and to move up in society. Conditions were not agreeable to a modern eye, but compared to the past were a great improvement.

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