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Kings are a poor comparison. It’s a shit job and sucks in all kinds of surprising and non-surprising ways.

Are our poor better off than financially independent aristocrats of yesteryear? The kind that can be “an artist” or something their whole life. I guess in some ways it’s better now, more tech. But I’m not sure freedom and respect can be bought/replaced with tech alone.

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If you’re having kids, you would want them to be born in a poor family in modern day Germany than to aristocrats 300 years ago.

The infant mortality back then was brutal, even for the aristocrats.

But if you asked aristocrats to swap infant mortality with modern poor life, they might have a spectrum of opinions not necessarily leaning towards being poor. The point is that modern worries are also, well, modern.

The infant mortality was high for everyone, poor or not. So it’s a bad measure

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