The history of economic growth is a tale of cleanliness | Hacker News Reader

The history of economic growth is a tale of cleanliness

economist.com

42 pointslxm47 comments

This sounds familiar:

So too did stubborn citizens grow weary of the lecturing of muckraking do-gooders. By 1854, outbreaks of infectious disease had killed thousands of Londoners of all classes, and yet an editorial in The Times huffed, “We prefer to take our chance of cholera and the rest rather than be bullied into health.”

I mean, yes, you would expect basically any harm to public health to be a significant drag on the economy.

Kinda like this pandemic we're going through right now.

http://archive.is/EEOX4

For a far more nuanced and detailed look at life in London in the 1840s, read 'London Labour and the London Poor' by Henry Mayhew

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Labour_and_the_London_P...

https://archive.org/details/londonlabourand00mayhgoog

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55998

The economist article is OK but a little onesided and cheerleading from their typical angle.

Yet sidewalks in cities around most of the developed world drown in dog/cat poop and pee, something that would have seemed strange a generation ago, and still seems if you travel from a less pet-crazy place.

really? Big fines in Australian cities if you don't pick up your dog poo.

Aliens watching would assume Dogs are the masters - humans follow them around and pick up the poo.

We have these liberally spread about:

https://www.robi-ag.ch

(I am disappointed they changed the logo. The old one was:

https://grundig9000.com/storm/robidog.jpg )

Are they well stocked, too? We've got plenty of those around Paris, especially close to parks and green squares. They often look empty. And in any case, people don't seem to have their own bags either.

I don't have hard numbers, but it's generally a good idea to look where you step on the sidewalks. Although it's true that subjectively it seems somewhat better than a 5-10 years ago.

yes, well stocked (just checked 3 different ones today).

maybe the humans are parasites on the dogs, although seeing the humans throw out the poop later would certainly complicate the graph of life the aliens were developing for our planet.

It looks like problem! I'm going to create «Rumba for dog poo» startup!

Try googling that and you will see it already exists but probably not in the way you imagined.

Really? The campaign in the UK to get owners to clean it up was within my lifetime. It used to be a lot worse. Similar story for Clean Air Acts.

Go back a further generation and you have horses being used for delivery.

Really? I have very rarely seen dog dirt here in Germany. We've got bag dispensers in parks here where dog owners can get bags if they haven't brought any for example.

Naturally it’s not necessarily representative of the country as a whole, but isn’t Berlin famous for having dog poop on every street?

No?

I live in Berlin. I think it's too dirty and we should do more about it. I don't perceive dogs as a major problem. (My gut feeling would be the top problems are cigarette buds, trash from grilling parties and bottles from alcoholic beverages.)

I agree that in Berlin it is not as _major_ problem as in some other large cities, but still, it is telling that it is widely accepted as normal that all building corners that face the sidewalk are constantly pissed by dogs with the coloring of the walls clearly visible everywhere. As for poop, 90% of the times people pick it up, the rest can still ruin your day if you step into it.

If the bottles stay whole:

http://lh3.ggpht.com/-QTcvS4ps9DI/VGIxcC2EVnI/AAAAAAAAN3I/cn...

https://www.rbb24.de/content/dam/rbb/rbb/rbb24/2020/2020_01/...

then current Berlin is already doing better than last-century Boston, where they were commonly reduced to broken bits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RShAxvg5MJE

I can tell that this comment has been downvoted, and I don't think it's fair to downvote people with first hand, daily lived experiences.

Perhaps it sheds additional light on the matter - a denizen of Berlin doesn't think the dogs are a problem. This idea both supports and undermines the parent thread's idea under discussion depending on how you take it, but it certainly adds color to it.

Don't we want their input?

I think their input would be more valuable if they disclosed pet status.

Yes. Inhabitants usually get used to it and deny the problem. But Having been to Berlin in a snowy winter, the number of brown and yellow spots dotting the freshly snowed-in sidewalk within hours is very impressive in a negative way. Other german cities are far less bad in this regard (but I didn't visit all of them).

I highly doubt this is true. I've never lived in a place outside of the developed world, but I also have never lived or visited a place where the sidewalks drowned in dog/cat poop and pee. In fact, I've never actually watched a cat pee on the sidewalk in places where it cannot be covered up, simply because that's not how cats tend to act.

Where are you getting your information from? How much have you traveled? What is your definition of city? Do you have some proof?

I lived in France for 10 years, virtually nobody picked up waste from their pets. Just wasn't a cultural norm. Not necessarily that different in Italy or Spain as well.

Maybe the attitude is changing now, I don't know.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/12/why-cant-fren...

To be fair, the French men also routinely pee on buildings and alleys in public. Your observations of Spain puzzle me though. I always found the Spanish to be exceptionally festidious people with remarkably clean streets.

I remember noticing the same in Marseille about 10 years ago, but Paris for example was already quite different back then. Now I live in Madrid and not picking up after your dog is very much frowned upon, and you see very little pet waste in the streets.

Well, "drown" is a strong word, but I see feces (of questionably animal origin) all the time in my US city, on the sidewalks and otherwise.

In my building we have to put trash bins out in the alley, and people always throw dog shit in those on trash day, too.

In my building we have to put trash bins out in the alley, and people always throw dog shit in those on trash day, too.

I'm not exactly sure where else folks are supposed to put the dog shit except in the trash, honestly. I know people complain about putting shit in their personal trash cans, mind you, but folks are going to put it in a trash can somewhere, even if it is in their own home. And some of those are going to put their trash in the alley.

Do you have a suggestion that doesn't include putting the poop in the trash?

Yes, put it in a dedicated digester: a plastic rubbish bin with holes submerged into the ground. Add paper and water to get it going.

https://thebark.com/content/build-your-own-pet-waste-digeste...

The city has public trash cans on the corner, with bags in them. So you throw your little baggie of dog shit in it, the city collects the bag, and the dog shit is gone.

My trash bin (large, wheeled, plastic variety that lives in an enclosure on the bottom floor of my building) is full of my domestic trash, in several bags, and is not itself lined with a bag. City comes, empties out my bin, it's now an in-theory empty plastic bin. Someone throws a baggie of dog shit in, it just goes to the bottom. It rains, and now there's a slurry of dog shit water in the bottom of my trash bin and it's there forever because my building doesn't have a hose for me to hose it out, nor is there a designated drain for collecting shit water, nor do the city trash collectors upend the bin into the garbage truck - they just grab the bags out and leave the shit-slurry where it lies.

So my suggestion is ... walk to the fucking city trash can literally a half-block away and throw your dog shit in there instead into a domestic trash bin with no bags in it.

Luckily I'm moving the fuck out of this building / neighborhood in December. Wonder what the other tenants will do when they realize no one is putting the building's bins out now...

spent a few months in Athens. Dog shit was everywhere. Greeks don't seem to be the type to pick up after their pets and it was incredibly gross.

I'm in kyiv now and despite seeing more dogs, I have yet to see any such droppings. I guess people are more fastidious about cleaning up after their animals in public places.

So many Belgian cities. Dear God, after the rain, trying to pick your path through. Ugh.

And SF. And London.

Well to be fair, in SF that's probably human poop

That's what everyone thinks but I looked it up and it's mostly dog poop.

In Portland, OR, it rarely snows much, but the weeks when we do get a good storm, oh god, there's dog piss everywhere. & then you realize that people are probably walking their dog less now that it's all slippery & cold + that there's probably usually even more dog piss everywhere then what you can now see thanks to the snow.

What's up with the misspelling of cleanliness in the title? How could that slip by an editor? Maybe it is some kind of experiment to see if they get more clicks with a deliberate error.

A few years ago, I would notice more misspellings in headers and captions than in the main body of text. This was especially true back when the textarea widget got spell-checking, but input fields did not. Could something like that be at fault here, as well? Do input fields have spell-checking across browsers these days?

Browsers do check, but Firexfox for ex. still has a bug. He does not check the word, if you leave the word with moving the cursor away (not a space, dot or something like that on the end).

By default, single-line input fields in Firefox (including textareas) don't have spellcheck enabled. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Layout.spellcheckDefault So spellcheck might be enabled for the body text but not for the field where the headline goes.

Making stupid 'errors' in headlines/summaries was a blatant thing in slashdot a while back (may still do, I don't know). It provoked plenty of rageposts, which I'm sure is exactly why /. did it, by people who never seemed to guess they were having their chain jerked. Again and again. It's why I stopped reading it. It probably works in some sense but it's a counterproductive tactic if you ask me.

Did you not understand the meaning of the title?

And if you did understand it, what does it matter if the word is misspelled?

Language is a tool to convey meaning, not to give nitpickers a field day.

It is adopted from the print edition title which it says was "Cleanliness is next to growth". However the print edition apparently does not contain the same misspelling.

Originally I thought there was some special meaning to the misspelling, i.e., it was done deliberately and the reason would be revealed in the article.

Anyone know how to get around the paywall? Private tab doesn't work.

Get your credit card out?

http://archive.is/EEOX4

This another case that seems intuitive to me (I can't read the rest of article) since:

* Cities basically serve as a multiplier for economic output, enabling economies of scale (because of lots of people live near one another).

* That increase in population also leads to increased risk from pathogens which can spread with unsanitary conditions or over-crowding and work to reduce urban population (Corona, Queens - one of the harder hit areas of NYC during the pandemic has lower share of 1-2 person households and a higher share of 3-7 person households than the city overall).

* It's only been since the 20th century when most of the world's population has lived in cities, so their growth has likely been encouraged by practices and technologies like better sanitation and wastewater treatment, hand-washing, vaccines, and modern epidemiology.

What I'm curious about is this: could computing and the internet recreate the broad multiplicative benefit on economic output that cities create? Or will the internet in the 21st century continue to serve only the winners in a winner-take-all market?

I'm optimistic that computing and the internet could recreate the economic benefits of cities. At this point though collaboration tools still have a ways to go.

The other part that really needs to improve is the random discovery that comes from being packed in with so many other people. Places like HN provide a large part of that but there needs to be more of them.

What a great article. It points out that the horrifying diseases of that time were rationalized as being bad luck or divine retribution. People didn’t have any particular desire to get to the bottom of it. Germ theory earned its advocates public lampooning. The things is that it’s exactly the same today. I was reading about how Botox injections have been observed to reduce depression. Doctors claimed that it was because of a feedback loop between frowning muscles and mood. Modern, certified doctors grasped onto this theory with white knuckles, that “frowny face bad.” It’s unbelievable. Obviously follow up studies showed the the location of the injection makes no difference in the anti-depressive effect. It just blows my mind. They always create a theory that does one thing: terminates the line of inquiry. Yes, it’s frowning so there’s nothing more to be seen or done with this. I think subconsciously, it is too emotionally upsetting for them to have to basically go back to the drawing board, rewrite a bunch of basic biology and medicine. There is some kind of mental block there. And just think that thousands and thousands of things like this are around — clues being ignored that could literally save people’s lives and prevent unimaginable suffering. I had psychosis and keto cured it. My doctors literally ignored me when I told them. I asked, should this be looked into? Shouldn’t you be raising the alarm about this weird thing? Shouldn’t we see if it works in other people? No no no... always talking in circles without ever addressing what I’ve said. Science will vindicate me eventually... but in the meantime a whole lot of people will suffer needlessly.

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