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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

This article statement, "His life was shadowed by fear of famine, disease and bursts of warfare. His diet and personal hygiene left much to be desired" explains why I don't want to go back to the life of my peasant ancestors.

The author's background, "Lynn Parramore is a senior editor at AlterNet, co-founder of Recessionwire, and founding editor of New Deal 2.0 and IgoUgo.com. She is the author of "Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture" and has taught cultural theory at NYU" suggests to me why I won't take this opinion piece kindly submitted here as a guide to current economic policy. Actually, today's economy in the United States offers unparalleled opportunities for each worker to make the worker's preferred trade-off among cash income and leisure time, especially if the worker is part of a family household of persons who agree to make different trade-offs from one another.

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Other than adding the fear of famine, I'm not sure how different that is from today.

Fear of disease? Check. Both realistic (as in, the huge fraction with no/minimal health insurance or any dental at all). And unrealistic, like fearmongering politicians (as in, send lots of money to X or we'll all die of some made up thing)

Bouts of warfare, check. Both actual for kids in .mil, and imaginary daydreams of terrorism.

Inferior diet? Check.

The personal hygiene thing, I donno about. I'm not so foul but seems like many people are allergic to soap and water, and others who think smelling like an ashtray is a perfume.

Sorry, but if you think that we have equivalent fear of disease then and now, you don't know what life was like then.

How many people did you personally know who died of disease as a kid? I knew one. (Cancer.) But this was a period where people would have 8 kids in the hope that 2-3 of them would survive to adulthood. And disease was the big killer.

Don't forget about a significant chance of dying or losing limb from any simple cut.

What I find amazing is how recently things like germs[1] were given real attention. I'd heard about Ignaz Semmelweis from a book I read and to think less than 200 years ago you would go to a hospital and they didn't bother to wash their hands between patients? Now maybe it was just the hospital in Vienna, but I imagine many were like that.

Just the things that are taken for granted as common sense now before they were.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease

It is worse than that. Ignaz Semmelweis did not come to broader attention. It was not until Joseph Lister (the Lister in "Listerine") independently discovered this and popularized it that the English speaking world became aware of how they were killing people.

I have encountered mention of memoirs from US surgeons who were most distressed to have learned, shortly after the Civil War, how their failure to take simple sanitation measures was responsible for the death of many of their patients through gangrene.

Within living memory we had a similar shock from antibiotics. I remember an older professor telling me about a doctor he knew who had been unable to save his brother, but would have been able to do so a few years later.

I am sure there are still things out there like this. Heck, I lost my nephew because my sister followed her doctor's instructions to have him sleep on his stomach...less than 6 months before the American Academy of Pediatrics switched the recommendation to putting babies on their backs to reduce the odds of SIDS. If you've taken a parenting course in the last 20 years, sleeping babies on their back probably just seems like common sense to you.

The amount of progress in knowledge and technology in the past 200-250 years or so (pretty much all of the Industrial Revolution) really is staggering. Take someone from 1750, drop him in the world of 1500, and things would have been pretty familiar. Move 250 years in the other direction and he'd be hard-pressed to make heads or tails of anything (assuming you're taking someone from a part of the developed world -- for the developing world, the changes would be less pronounced, but still likely significant).

I had a strange notion recently that if you were to drop the average person (not an Einstein or a Hawking) and dropped them into say the 1500s Europe.

Most people think we'd be regarded as super smart and awesome. This comedian explains most people don't know crap[1], we only know the high-level. I think that even if we could find things we understand to teach it would be largely not viable (how much stuff around us requires machines and precision?) and likely wouldn't reach any audience to become a mainstream idea (even above people thought it ridiculous that germs exist).

I think we'd find people of any time to have clever methods to do their tasks and we'd learn from them and become indistinguishable from the average guy at the time.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVxOb8-d7Ic

I'm not saying that humans are smarter in a generally useful sense now than they were 500 years ago. Especially at the median, where what most people know isn't how things work but what they need to do to make things work within their environment.

Take your average man or woman off the street today and drop them into 1500s Europe, in all likelihood they'd be unable to function.

Now, an engineer (or a Connecticut Yankee) with both a specific understanding of materials science, a knowledge of history sufficient to know the broad outlines of circumstances in the past, and where the gold (or more importantly: coal and oil) are buried, might be able to accomplish some interesting things. If he could convince someone to go along with his proposals.

But that's not my point.

It's that you could pretty much take a European from 1500 and from 1750 and have them swap places. Most of the general nature of day-to-day life would remain largely similar. There were very few significant changes (among the biggest would have been in how business and banking were organized, as financial systems were developing over this period).

Socially and culturally there may have been a few bigger differences. Martin Luther posted his 95 Thesis in 1517, and the changes that this triggered in the Church would likely have dwarfed much else.

And really, you could move another 500 or 1000 years backward and you'd see some incremental change, but nothing at all like the past 250 years.

But again, 1750 -> 1500 is going to be a hugely different change than 1750 -> 2000.

Thanks to the Flynn effect, it is likely that most of us would be significantly better at abstract thought than the average person 500 years ago. Thanks to diet, we'd also mostly be out of shape giants.

We would, however, be sorely lacking on basic survival skills. Also, not knowing Latin would mark us as uneducated and not worth listening to.

I don't disagree with anyone here. It had occurred to me that communication would be difficult (I don't think impossible). Mostly I thought the survival skills is what would be learned and then you'd be just like everyone else trying to survive. Maybe some of the knowledge could make it a bit better (locally) but a lot of what we know is really built on things that would be out of reach.

What someone said about geologists and knowing where resources are hadn't even crossed my mind. I was thinking more of a general high school graduate. Anyone with a specialty (math related especially) might do better (again I assume coping and not freaking out or getting a disease immediately).

Now your whole family is merely bankrupt and homeless if you need medical care, unless you are one of the lucky fraction with insurance or live in a civilized country.

I lived without medical insurance for awhile in my 20s. Its not some picnic.

I remember running across estimates that in Europe in the 1700s, 20-30% of the population was permanently displaced, and a large portion of those were bound to die unpleasant deaths. (Starvation and death through violence both ranking high.) This was not considered exceptional - this was considered an inevitable and unexceptional fact of life that nobody could change.

There would be good years. There were also bad. For bad consider that during the 1300s the population of much of Europe dropped by half due to climate changing the carrying capacity. (The Black Death didn't help either.) Despite a reproduction rate that was much higher than todays.

I submit that your idea of "not some picnic" is MASSIVELY nicer than what was accepted as daily reality.

> Other than adding the fear of famine

Er, that's a pretty huge other.

> Fear of disease? Check. Both realistic (as in, the huge fraction with no/minimal health insurance or any dental at all).

As far as the developed world goes, that's largely restricted to the US. And, of course, most of the diseases that killed people back then can be treated with a few euro worth of penicillin.

> Bouts of warfare, check. Both actual for kids in .mil, and imaginary daydreams of terrorism.

It's highly unlikely that the neighbouring lord will burn your village in the developed world today, however.

> Inferior diet? Check.

Not really on the same level. Even those who got enough food often had severe malnutrition issues. Nowadays, some people have poor diets; in the developed world this is largely a function of personal choice.

Following up on some of the comments here, I thought the submitted article was implausible because I have lived in a country that has gone from a poor, subsistence-peasant economy to a post-industrial wealthy economy in the lifetime of my in-laws who still live there. Nobody wants to go back to a peasant's life. It's just dumb to suggest that that would be a good trade-off.

On the issue of health risk, people have really got to learn from statistics that were shared here on HN earlier. Life expectancy has been increasing at ALL ages all over the developed world,

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...

and correspondingly the risk of being seriously sick at any age has been steadily declining here in the United States and all over Europe and other developed places. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,

http://www.demographic-challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...

originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject. We have no good reason to go back to peasant days, and no reason to take an article that is basically just made up as a basis for evaluating our current trade-offs of modern living.

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