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Comment by locopati | Hacker News Reader

yes... great if you were rich

I mean, it really wasn't, either. Read Samuel Pepys' Diary. He's rich for most of the period covered (it starts at about the point that he starts becoming rich, largely through bribery), and it sounds... I mean, like not a lot of fun.

In the modern era everyone is rich to their standards.

Are we though?

I sure as heck can't afford to pay a staff of servants.

A relevant quote about the change of affordability of certain things from the late Agatha Christie looking back at her early years - "I couldn’t imagine being too poor to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford a car."

With respect to material culture - so also with respect to what clothing styles and fashions are possible - anybody who can afford a car is far richer than people who had servants a hundred years ago.

Cars were an arguably overvalued novelty at the time.

The more fundamental question should be something like, do you need to work to put food on your table.

If yes, then you are not wealthy.

Here in Berlin, we have a "pfand" (deposit) on various bottles. At a summer barbecue you sometimes get people asking to take your bottles away, so they can collect that deposit themselves.

For the larger bottles, just four per day would equal the income of a pre-industrial farmhand.

..., ignoring inflation.

No, that's inflation adjusted.

If I ignored inflation (and hand-waved at least three major currency replacements) it would be eight month's wages.

This is the thing, no. _Even adjusted for inflation_, the pre-industrial working class (and the early-to-mid-industrial working class, for that matter) was paid barely anything. This was recognised as a problem at the time, even; a lot of the push for the reform of the Corn Laws in Britain, say, came from capitalists, who were, rightly, concerned that the working class _couldn't actually afford to buy any of their products_ (this largely played out; once they were repealed, living costs fell, wages rose, and the consumer market expanded greatly).

Adjusting for inflation also gets messier the further you go back. After the repeal of the Corn Laws the average person's day to day obligatory expenses went down dramatically, but it's barely a blip on the inflation charts.

Generally I’m not sure the modern world is better, but you probably do own a lot of machines that take the place of many things servants would have done in the past. Laundry machine, dishwasher machine, mixing machine, fire tending machine, etc.

> Generally I’m not sure the modern world is better

... Eh? I mean, it is clearly better by any reasonable measure. Bear in mind that most people in the 18th century didn't have a staff of servants.

The modern world is way, way more socially atomized than what most people would have experienced in the 1800s. Not everything is about technology or immediate comfort.

Most people couldn't afford to pay a staff of servants.

... But you can stay at a Holiday Inn tonight.

Well, having servants for one night only isn't really comparable to paying for them several decades.

Also can't be stressed enough how large the servant staff could be. It often has a management hierarcy of sorts.

Tautologically most people can't afford human servants, because if we were all that rich it would include the servants who we then couldn't afford.

Quite a lot of us have robot vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, washing machines, and all of us now have zero marginal cost (to ourselves) voice-controlled AI assistants free with our radio-video-telephone-dictaphone-gramophone-calendar-notepads.

Some of the aforementioned are also powerful enough to be able to locally, for an energy cost so small that it's less than the cost of the food calories you burned reading this sentence, create a new artwork in any arbitrary artistic style.

Most people, of course, didn't have servants at all, and the really big staffs were an _extreme_ outlier; in the period mentioned you're basically talking just high nobility. It did become _somewhat_ more common in the late 19th century (most of the really silly Downton Abbey type setups date from then), before collapsing entirely in the early 20th.

or.. pressed ganged as a poor man into the Royal navy - on one of the lucky ships that didn't suffer too much.

besides 'if you were rich' is same trade-off as today's world...

False dichotomy much? That is not an argument against the parent's observation per se. One can imagine a culture that is organized, not hollow, and not only for the rich

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