Today, America's poor have a better quality of life than medieval kings.
This can’t be true. Just look at the homelessness situation across the US. No shelter, no income, no sanitation. That is certainly worse quality of life than a king.
You must starting your definition of poor quite a ways up the income scale. Maybe you could make make an argument for solidly middle class and above?
Even then, there are even a lot of benefits to being a king which probably outweigh having basic modern amenities like running water and a nice bed. Who needs plumbing when you have a servant to bring you whatever you want?
Beyond that, quality of life is also significantly emotional. There’s a lot of stress to life unless you’re rich, and you also don’t have very much control over things around you. A king has a significant amount of control by definition, and that probably contributes a lot to their quality of life.
> Who needs plumbing when you have a servant to bring you whatever you want?
I like hot showers. I bet you do, too. Besides, what do you think happens to kings when they get a toothache? No anesthetic, nothing to be done except an idiot with a pair of pliers and filthy hands. I doubt many kings had teeth after 35 or so.
> There’s a lot of stress to life unless you’re rich,
I'm afraid that's pretty presumptuous. The rich just have different problems.
> and you also don’t have very much control over things around you. A king has a significant amount of control by definition, and that probably contributes a lot to their quality of life.
When you're the king, everyone wants to kill you. Including your own brothers and sisters and kids. You have no friends. The losers in the game of thrones are always killed.
Where'd you hear that? I've been watching a lot of Soft White Underbelly, interviews with people on Skid Row, and that doesn't really seem to be the case in general although there are a few [1]. Invisible People also does interviews with homeless people more widely and it's even rarer there [2]. Most of the time it just comes down to them not being able to afford to not be homeless and not having anyone to turn to. Without a home, they have no way to keep clean, receive mail or do anything else they need to do in order to keep a job. So it's a catch-22 for most. Without security, they are assaulted, get robbed (of even their basics), arrested and never get to rest, so there's a lot of positive feedback loops that can quickly make things even worse.
And 30% have severe mental health issues (same source).
Treating those issues solves only ~half the problem though (though that's probably 90% of the visible problem). The rest (to your point) is that it's really hard to afford to get a home when you don't have one.
I'd blame zoning as the biggest issue here. Boarding homes and micro-apartments are effectively banned in most cities. Meaning that the hurdle to go from homeless to not homeless is way higher than it should be. Instead of having to scrounge up a couple hundred bucks for a month's worth of housing, you're looking at a thousand or more.
Surveys in the homeless community are extremely unreliable, but I guess that makes sense (better to claim you started drugs after being homeless than admit you did them before, more sympathy that way). Even outside of the homeless context, self reported surveys aren’t considered reliable (see https://www.verywellmind.com/definition-of-self-report-42526...).
In a similar vain, a lot of US residents do not believe the numbers China is pumping out in regards to COVID-19, just another example of how the source can be unreliable.
Being homeless changes your attitude and perspective on life. It's unlikely these people can be truly honest with outsiders, especially strangers because then they don't receive any aid or help.
Personally, I can't take those interviews as a gospel of truth because I don't believe the authors.
I blame private property as the biggest issue here. Empty dwellings outnumber homeless people at least 10-to-1 in the Global North (France, UK, USA..). The fact that media and corporations pretend that's not a problem and the only solution to homelessness is to build more housing tells a lot about what's wrong with "our" approach to problem.
If we lived in a democracy where people can decide for themselves locally, homelessness would be a non-issue. As a former squatter myself, i know for sure if we voted in my neighborhood for/against cracking empty housing to provide housing for all, over 90% of people would support it. If the people in power had the will to do anything about homelessness, by simply ordering police not to evict squats (unless someone squatted a person's residence while they were on vacation, which under french law is a "house theft" crime, not "squatting") in less than 72h we could rehouse all the homeless people and give them proper sanitation.
The problem is the political class and their watchdogs (media, police) are only interested in protecting banks, corporations and wealthy individuals. They couldn't care less about homelessness or people who can't afford to eat.
The problem is treating both kinds of homeless equally: they have completely different problems with completely different solutions. Give the chronic homeless just housing and they’ll more than likely just trash it or figure out how to support their habit with it, the latter will use the housing in the way it was intended as help.
We should throw as much help as possible to those who aren’t in the drug and substance abuse bucket simply because it is very difficult to help them effectively once they move into that bucket.
That's true, but correlation does not equal causation. Many rich people have drugs/mental issues, too. Some drugs are basically a social status symbol in some circles (cocaine, champagne and some other fancy alcohols, for example).
Many people become homeless due to reasons unrelated to drugs. Once you're homeless, basic survival becomes an every day struggle and it's not hard to see how mind-altering substances can be very appealing in this situation.
For some definition of “many” sure, but many become homeless because of drugs, driving their families to give up on them as they are not able to deal with their problems. Still some are independent but lose their apartments as their $2k/month drug habit eats into rent money. Alcoholism is another problem.
The fact that you claim substance abuse is so pervasive among those who aren’t homeless should provide some evidence that ya, people do fall into homelessness because they aren’t lucky enough to remain high functioning or have the support network that would allow them to abuse while remaining housed.
Good, then we agree chronic homelessness is not entirely due to drugs, as i often read on HN :)
> Alcoholism is another problem.
I think it's the same problem. Alcoholism is a drug addiction problem and can be just as bad as any other addiction. That some cultures believe alcohol to be tolerable/encourageable is irrelevant. Alcohol was historically weaponized against indigenous people (not only in the US) and to this day some revolutionary indigenous movements such as the zapatistas in Chiapas consider it this way. Much like crack cocaine was weaponized by CIA against black/brown communities in the US (to finance their counter-revolutionary covert wars in South America).
> people do fall into homelessness because they aren’t lucky enough to remain high functioning
Exactly, but drugs is far from the only reason to become non-functioning according to capitalist standards. Depression/burnout, physical health, workspace/job closure, and *many* other factors can lead to homelessness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw
"60 Minutes" did a segment on that, too, and went interviewing Seattle homeless. Everyone they interviewed turned out to be a drug addict or an alcoholic, even though they initially fooled the 60 Minutes crew.
Lots of them will say they were homeless because they lost their job, which is technically correct, but digging deeper reveals they lost their job because they were drug addicts and alcoholics.
Median household size is around 2.5. Poverty line for household size 2 is $17,420, for 3 is $21,960.
No, it doesn't; in states that have expanded, it covers up to 138% of the FPL, but in some states for adults without dependent children who are neither aged, blind, disabled, nor pregnant, it covers nothing, and for parents of dependent children the limit is still not 138%.
BTW, those miniseries on the lives of medieval royalty that are popular today are romantic fantasies. For example, the only warm place in a castle in winter is right next to the fireplace. They had no concept of central heating, not even an iron stove. Do you want to live through a winter in England with no heating?
How about being around people who never, ever bathed? What do you think happened to all the poop in the castle? Did the cooks ever wash their hands? Most of your kids are going to die before they're adults.
If they survived and if your wife surviived, a large number of women would have likely died giving birth, possibly at an age of 15 or 16 or so.
Measuring the increase in possible outcomes is irrelevant if you don't take into considerable how accessible/affordable those outcomes are. It's just like if you said "but medieval kings didn't have space travel" because you see Jeff Bezos going into space as a sign of social progress for the rest of us.
That many Americans die due to illnesses we know how to treat for cheap for decades is unbelievable. And don't even get me started on long-term conditions, like insulin or HIV-medication prices skyrocketing for zero reason (well, there's one: profit) decades after their first commercialization.
In much of the world, the USA is (rightfully) derided for being so backwards when it comes to health care. I would even go so far as to argue that some traditional medicines (plants, kine/ostheo, acupuncture...) are/were far more advanced than the medical treatments available to poorer US citizens (i.e. none), but i'm not versed in medical sciences so don't take my word for it.
This is more like a convenient truth. How many of those people become homeless, then turn drugs? It's not like the US's social safety net is particularly robust, and even just being on the street for a week can expose you to the violent way the homeless are treated.
Treating a homeless drug addict as a victim of poverty is like giving cough medicine to a person with lung cancer. It does not work.
>Treating a homeless drug addict as a victim of poverty is like giving cough medicine to a person with lung cancer. It does not work.
How do you rehab someone who does not have stable shelter? Are they supposed to battle withdrawal on the street? Housing first policies have demonstrably worked in Finland and Austria.
Put them in a drug rehab facility.
It's still not an economic problem, it's a drug addiction problem.
Sure why not, but what after that? If you think helping them overcome addiction then throwing them back out on the streets is gonna have any positive effects, i can say with 99% confidence you haven't spent more than a day being homeless.
The homeless who aren't addicts or alcoholics tend to do well with programs to help them back on their feet. The former, nope.
So give them housing? Please analyze what you are saying. What is a drug rehab facility if not housing with nurses on staff?
What I'm asking you to consider is that housing first policies are cheaper to scale and have shown to work. If people's basic needs are met with safety and dignity they are less likely to run away to drugs and alcohol.
Why focus on drugs? Do you believe that some people deserve to have no home if they have a drug problem?
With the security and comfort of having a home, becoming a productive member of society becomes much easier if that's what you care about.
Only in some very limited aspects. "Oh, they can eat wild strawberries in winter" or "have access to modern technology whereas a medieval king didn't" and such.
The don't have the power of medieval kings, the don't have the wealth of medieval kings, they don't have the estates of medieval kings, the servants and free time of medieval kings, they certainly don't command the respect medieval kings had, they don't have many luxuries of medieval kings, and lots of other things besides. They also have to work shitty jobs (even two jobs), they can end up homeless and live in the streets (including out in the cold), a random cop can abuse them, etc.
There's more to "better quality if life than medieval kings" than modern medicine and gadgets...
If you had to choose between being Louis XVI or Henry VIII and a middle class American in Cleveland, Ohio, what would you choose?
With your final sentence I realized you're not talking about poverty at all, but the wealthy, which in a sense clarified things, but also made me confused: what does your comment have to do with this discussion?
A homeless, flat-broke prostitute can turn 4 tricks in a day. Let's call them $50 each, for $200 cash-in-hand. Then they can take that $200 to Wal-Mart, buy an Android phone for $50, a SIM card for $50, and one of those loadable debit cards for $50. That leaves them with $50 cash and a $50 debit card balance. They can use their smartphone and debit card to access many of the modern amenities that the parent post mentioned, such as a delivery meal from Uber Eats, or a Greyhound bus ticket, or music on iTunes. The point is, this stuff is within the realm of the possible for the modern poor. It is NOT for a medieval king. Not at all. No matter how large his army, no matter how much gold in his coffers, Richard the Lionheart can't instantly access music from the other side of the planet while traveling across England in a climate-controlled vehicle at twice the speed of a horse.
There are some tradeoffs where the average person doing a boring middle class job really does have better opportunity and greater security than pretty much anyone in pre 20th century history (and some forms of ancient kingship that really weren't pleasant lifestyles), but let's not take it to reductio ad absurdum levels
That "grand hall" had worse climate control than a Motel-6, and the food was dirty. We can debate the subjective utility of skilled medieval musicians vs a low-end local rock/metal concert with supporting audiovisual systems (a ticket to that can fit within the budget of a few tricks), I would charitably call that a break-even. And a $50 trick buys a LOT more than a burrito and a pack of cigs. You can get a steak dinner at Texas Roadhouse to with your pack of Newport 100s.
The "ick factor" of selling their body was just to demonstrate that even the most down-on-their-luck, homeless, destitute American has a path to access the commodity goods of our age. I don't think it's an absurd reduction to point that out.
So? The Kings had access to much more information than they cared about already.
>They can travel across continents in a number of hours for less than two weeks wages.
A big chunk can't even afford to take a couple of sick days off, lest they be fired, or can't afford to retire and work in their late 60s and 70s in shitty jobs like a Walmart greeter - much less travel across continents to have vacations.
>They can push a button on their phone to have gourmet food delivered to their house in under an hour.
The King could do the same, all day, every day, with personal chefs familiar with their preferences, and without fear for the expenses...
>They can press another button on their phone to fetch a personal driver that will deliver them to any destination.
Oh, how Kings would be jealous of the magic of Uber...
Still, are we talking about the poor - for which Uber is an expense they have to consider very well, and days off a luxury, or people above that? Because I don't see many trailer park types visiting Paris or Barcelona...
>If you had to choose between being Louis XVI or Henry VIII and a middle class American in Cleveland, Ohio, what would you choose?
Depends, if the middle class American is also cherry picked to die (e.g. from some stray bullet or robbery gone wrong), I'd pick one of the Kings. As for Kings who didn't die in guillotine, that would be a no brainer. Who wants to be a middle class schmuck in Ohio, as opposed to a King? (I guess the kind of people who overestimate the magic of Uber and food delivery).
In fact, I'd rather be some random middle-class female from Ohio than any female in the Middle Ages, because of the dangers of childbirth back then.
> The Kings had access to much more information than they cared about already.
Royals used to have portraits painted and transported just so they could get an idea who the person their arranged marriage with actually looked like. Bet they'd like Facebook.
Louis XIV commissioned a more accurate map of france. It took 4 generations to make.
The first semaphore was so valuable it was initially reserved just for government use.
Oops, no wait, these are all post-medieval by a few centuries! Things were even worse before.
> The King could do the same, all day, every day, with personal chefs familiar with their preferences, and without fear for the expenses...
The king would be stuck with local food, in season only. At least he'd probably be able to afford some foreign spices. And they probably couldn't get food in an hour, due to the less efficient kitchens of the time, and not having thousands of restaurants already on standby to serve every kind of meal.
> Oh, how Kings would be jealous of the magic of Uber...
That device that travels twice as fast as a horse for hours without break, and at more comfort? I think so.
> As for Kings who didn't die in guillotine
England has never had a king live past 81. It's even worse if you look at medieval kings. US Life Expectancy is ~79. Even ignoring life expectancy, pretty much all illness was vastly more unpleasant. As a king, you'd likely have gout (called the "disease of kings") or an StD.
> Who wants to be a middle class schmuck
The purpose of the exercise is to determine who is poorer in terms of what is available to them. Kings are no doubt more important and powerful, but can we agree that's besides the point? I for one, would take the quality of life of said schmuck.
An old person my wife once talked to said that "penicillin changed everything". It certainly did, along with vaccines and other very effective treatments (including hand-washing!) for once-deadly diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, cholera, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, mumps, even leprosy.
Death was a major part of life for folks living prior to the late 1800s. Everyone experienced frequent life-threatening sickness and death of close friends, infants & children, family members, and acquaintances.
If I had a choice, and avoiding a very hard life & early death were my only criteria, I'd choose to live now rather than then, regardless of social status.
Yeah, no thanks.
They also generally can't afford medical care, child care, a wide variety of leisure activities (plays, shows, even movies cost!)
They do have access to information and music, but if I had to be a medieval king or a poor person in Cleveland, it is such a no-brainer I can't even understand how the question is being asked.
How do you explain the hundreds of thousands of destitute migrants tramping thousands of miles to get here?
They'll get treated for free in emergency rooms. Medieval doctors were worse than no medical care at all, ever.
> even movies cost!
During the Depression, the movie houses were full of people sleeping, as they were cheaper than a hotel.
Um, no, that is not free in the US. You can go into serious debt that way.
Otherwise, there are repercusions from one that aren't there on the other - up to incoming a debt slave to your default's arrangement, not getting any credit anymore, and even ending up homeless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_I_of_England#Death
The King of England died from a disease caused by getting shit particles in your food. Diarrheal disease deaths are barely on the radar of US fatalities. https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/despite-reductions-i...
So? Many people die from even baser diceases today too. Including homeless and poor people in the US. And they toil their whole lives before that, and are made to feel insignificant, and have no power or servants, unlike the kings.
But just for English kings who died of natural causes, dysentery killed 2 and food poisoning 1, out of 60 total (dead from natural causes, not 60 total monarchs....a 5% fatality rate for the most powerful people in the land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monarchs_of_the_Britis...
"made to feel insignificant" "have no power"....I'd really like to see how you are quantifying these, and why you would weight them so heavily in a quality-of-life assessment to even mention them in the same breadth as dying of preventable food sanitation diseases.
You moved the goalpost from:
> Today, America's poor have a better quality of life than medieval kings.
And they live longer, too.
Homelessness is bottom 0.1%
Kings had zero access.
The same goes for colonial America. Take a look at the clothing in the Fort William museum (from the 1700s). It's so small.
Even whole cities had running water, all the way back to the Roman era. Heck, Rome I said? Ancient Knossos, over 3000 years back:
"Water technologies included running water within the palaces and other settlements, drainage systems, piping systems, rainwater harvesting, and other technologies."
https://iwaponline.com/ws/article/17/4/1106/15032/Hydro-tech...
George Washington was killed by his doctors.
> And Kings didn't need to do 99% of the back-breaking back modern poor have...
What back breaking modern work? Machines do that today. We don't have rope lines of people pulling stones uphill anymore.
That may be true from a purely materialistic point of view but a lot of the unpleasantness of being poor is stress. Not knowing if you can feed your children tomorrow, you may become homeless, if you work minimum wage you often get treated like crap. Medieval kings didn’t have to worry about that.
In short, this is a pretty condescending line mainly uttered by people who aren’t poor and don’t know how it is to be poor.
What?
> your only way to control things is to convince others do what you want
LOL what?
Humans are social animals, and kings are at the absolute top of the social hierarchy. They had immense power. Poor people have very little power in comparison. This has an immense effect on their experience in the world.
Most poor people in the US face a variety of real hardships. Your comment seems quite tone deaf to this reality.
And today's rich are doing even better than that, so there's no harm in taxing their wealth, right?
The state isn't an amazing tool, but it is the best one we have. It can bring about universal healthcare and education, mass housebuilding programmes, regulation and optimisation of dysfunctional markets.. and even put human beings on the moon.
Meanwhile, "investors" pile money into.. um, dogecoin?
The "government is bad" narrative is too simplistic to be helpful. I'd suggest broadening your outlook.
And why are they doing this? The trail leads right back to... government.
"Side effects include investors to dumping money into sketchy stuff because nothing else returns worth a crap" is one of the big gripes people have with 2008+ fed policy.
This is hardly true, and is only "common" wisdom due to an incredibly effective PR campaign by Ronald Reagan. In the 60s, when we were sending people to the moon, people didn't generally hold such contempt for government. Any large government is no more dysfunctional than a large private corporation - the inside of Google isn't all sunshine and roses.
>that it can print as much as it wants
Just because you don't see it come out of your paycheck doesn't mean it's not a tax. It's an undemocratic, flat tax that is paid with inflation.
Reagan was bad, to me, because he massively cut social programs. So yes, Reagan was bad because he made "less government". If Reagan did "more government", then I would be happy. Do you not see the obvious contradiction in your comment?
If you need me to spell it out for you:
1. I am for more social spending, even if it has a "bad" ROI, because the ROI for social spending is hard to measure.
2. Regan was incredibly effective as painting government programs as woefully inefficient.
3. If Regan did more social spending, I would want more of that, but that is not who Regan was, so I do not like that.
And work two jobs and go bankrupt and die of some treatable disease? I'd rather be poor in any european country or Korea or Japan.
Besides, that's a pretty cheeky comparison.
Bulgaria welcomes you
I could imagine lot of people who would think they are better off there than in the US.
E: There's of course a lot of things that aren't great about Bulgaria - it is probably the least developed and most corrupt EU country - but since US is very unequal, it depends whether your baseline is millionaire FAANG software engineer or minority person working in Walmart.
I love Bulgaria (beautiful country, great people) but it's just your imagination: there are still more Bulgarians emigrating to the USA than Americans to Bulgaria. Lots more. Like almost one-way street, really.
Poor minority Walmart employees having no idea how good they would have it in Bulgaria instead...
Sure, but that proves nothing.
Belarus?
That's definitely not true. That's a bias with some social researcher focusing on certain metrics such as income and education level. But in many societies (especially prior to that period), quality of life was rather unrelated to anything measurable: mutualizing resources on a local scale provides quality of life improvements which cannot be measured by looking at commercial activity (money).
That's a pretty big assertion without evidence especially with America's awful healthcare system and it's smaller safety net than some other countries.
Germany had made a few baby steps towards socialized healthcare at the very end of the 19th century, but other than that socialized healthcare systems didn't start until the 20th century and universal coverage not until after World War II.
How can you not see the obvious problem with that logic?!
(Aside from the anecdata issue.)
Maybe you should do them a service and inform them that America is a hell-hole?
Thank you. I will add that to my list of fantastically bad quotes.
Which can give you any number of incurable dick-rotting diseases (because no antibiotics) or give birth to an unwanted heir (because no birth control).
> beheading people I don't like
Thus making enemies that will hunt you in your sleep (because no rule-of-law).
> fixing laws I don't agree with
Then having to keep fixing them to repair unwanted side effects (because no law-making experts).
> having people willing to do anything to please me
And having no way to know if those people are really on your side or are just biding their time until their turn to do you in and take your place (because no quiet suburban lifestyle).
If you thinks these are perks, you are watching too much Fantasy.
I'm thankful that I've gotten to live in Northwest DC, South Chicago, West Baltimore, Oakland. Our country's extremes are often as bad as a war-torn country.
They didn't live in ruinously expensive, heavily fortified castles for nothing.
They endured constant plots against them, from everyone, and to misjudge those threats meant death.
Natural causes: 60
In battle: 15
Murdered, assassinated, executed: 17
Euthanised: 1
Other: 2
Accidental: 3
Unknown: 10
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monarchs_of_the_Britis...
There's also the wannabes (like princes) who were killed to prevent their ascension to the throne.
I infer you've never spent time in a war-torn country.
My father told me that in Germany after the war, if you were smoking a cigarette, people would follow you until you threw the butt away. They'd fight over the butt, and the winner would combine the bits of tobacco left with other bits and sell the result.
Accurate figures are not known, but likely millions starved to death in Germany after the war.
We're in the 21st century.