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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Various threads lately have had me thinking about how incredibly wealthy we are as a country, and how it definitely was not always so. For example, I made this comment a couple days ago about how everyone was just flat super poor back in 1900, and we're literally at least 10x richer now. I had likewise told the following story in the old place, in context of wealth to afford vast quantities of food (and how that may interplay with societal obesity):

Even coming from Canada, my wife was shocked by how cheap food is here in America. Historically, it just was not this way. We are one generation removed from stories like, "In the fall, dad made his semi-annual trip to the market in the city and brought back some quantity of 50lb bags of flour and 5lb chunks of lard, having a huge smile on his face, saying, 'We're gonna eat reaaaal good this winter!'" (I don't actually remember the exact quantity he said, but it was a low number, and we can easily scale by a small multiplier.) Like, this was a level of abundance in preparation for the winter that they were not used to (obviously, this was not their entire supply of food for the whole winter; they had some other food stored, but it is indicative that it was, cost-wise, an absolute treat). I checked a nearby grocery store's website; 50/5lbs would cost me $26.85. Like, pocket change. (Even if the multiplier was 5x, that's like nothing.) I probably have that much in random cash sitting around in my car. If I lost it or it was stolen, I'd be sad about a violation of my property, but literally wouldn't give a shit about the monetary value. This was a wonderful blessing of food abundance to some people in first-world countries not very long ago.

I didn't completely spell it out, but that was my wife's father's story when he was a child in Canada. (I also hedged on the number; my best memory was that it was precisely one 50lb bag and one 5lb chunk). That was not that long ago.

Yesterday, I read an obituary for a 95 year old who was born in a homestead dugout in New Mexico. Literally born in a hole in the ground.

Perspective on how utterly ridiculously quickly we went from basically universal poverty to nearly universal wealth is often lacking in many conversations where it could be quite beneficial. Sure, some in the capitalism/communism debates (or more generally the sources/causes of wealth and how it interacts with society's choices/governance), but also in obesity conversations (as mentioned) and even fertility conversations. Born in a homestead dugout. And you don't want to have a kid because of a car seat?!

I still don't properly know how exactly to craft an argument that comes to a clean conclusion, but I really feel like this historical perspective is seriously lacking in a country where the median age is under 40 and many folks no longer have communal contexts where they get exposed to at least a slice of history from their elders.

Pierre Berton's The Great Depression mentions someone who had his kids drink coffee because they couldn't afford milk.

Milk was more expensive than coffee?

Always has been as far as I know. Some quick googling claims that at the moment if you buy an average container of ground coffee (that you brew yourself, we're not talking Starbucks here) you can get it for about 26 cents per 12 oz cup (and probably cheaper if you get the cheapest brand available and/or brew it weakly). Milk is about 4 dollars per gallon which makes ten 12 oz cups, which is 40 cents each. Order of magnitude is the same, so I can't imagine getting coffee because you "can't afford milk", you'd probably just get smaller amounts of milk, but in the past the difference was probably larger.

With a high-end home bean-to-cup coffee machine, my marginal cost of decent espresso is about 40p per shot:

  • Coffee beans 25p
  • Machine consumables 5p (descaler, cleaning tablets, water filters)
  • Machine major maintenance 10p (a £250 brewing unit replacement every few thousand cups)
  • Electricity and water <1p

We pay 95p per imperial (20oz) pint to have milk home-delivered, so a half-pint glass of milk costs us slightly more than an espresso shot, but the milk in a late still costs less than the coffee. You could halve the cost of milk by buying in bulk at the supermarket, but then drinking proper espresso coffee is a premium experience as well.

I really feel like this historical perspective is seriously lacking in a country where the median age is under 40 and many folks no longer have communal contexts where they get exposed to at least a slice of history from their elders.

I think this has much to do with the proliferation of suburban environments, which are by nature very blue-pilling and have a socially isolating effect to a great extent. Back when that lame-ass, revolting, manufactured Canadian scandal around supposed unmarked mass graves of indigenous children massacred by the Church was still on the news, I posted the following observation here which is also relevant in this case:

This whole thing reminds me of the news stories about the children's mass grave in Tuam, Ireland, and of supposed mass graves in Tulsa, Oklahoma where racist mass-murdering demons buried the victims of the 1921 "race massacre", or so we're told.

When I try looking at these affairs without bias and prejudice, I try putting myself in the shoes of the average Western middle-class suburban white normie NPC, and frankly I realize that, unless some heretic specifically makes an effort to educate me on this, I'll probably have zero understanding of the following hard facts about the bygone days of the West:

1/ It was normal to bury people in unmarked individual paupers' graves, or even in unmarked mass paupers' graves (in the case of, say, an epidemic, a fire, a mass accident or some similar catastrophe) if nobody claimed the corpse, or if the relatives were too poor to, or unwilling to, afford a proper burial. This, in fact, was not rare.

2/ Back when national economies were yet too undeveloped to produce a surplus to be spent on, frankly, luxuries, there was exactly zero public support for spending tax money* to improve the material conditions of single mothers so that they have the same prospects in life as married wives**.

*Keep in mind, please, that, unlike today, milking the impregnators for child support under the threat of imprisonment wasn't an option either in most cases, because they were either dead, or already in prison/workhouse, or too poor to be milked for money.

**Again, let's be clear about this: back in the days of benighted Papist Ireland, or in any similar patriarchal society, I can assure you there were probably zero housewives willing to tolerate the spectre of the government basically confiscating a given % of her husband's income and giving it to unwed mothers in the form of state handouts. The extent to which Christian societies in such economic conditions were willing to go to look after the downtrodden was basically to shove them onto the Church and leave them to hold the bag, in exchange for them (i.e. the Church) getting a special social status. In the same way, the Church was basically expected to sweep up a portion of single men and women that were unmarriageable for whatever reason and train them to be monks, priests, missionaries and nuns, so that they were no longer a problematic pain in the butt to their own families. This was the implicit social consensus.

3/ Also, a society that poor is also unable to pay for lavishly equipped, professional, extensive police forces. This means extrajudicial punishment, communal vigilantism and mob justice was seen as normal and necessary by most people, at least to a certain extent.

4/ Stray dogs were normally slaughtered and their cadavers/bones were used for producing animal glue and other similar products, because you could be sure absolutely nobody was going to contribute material resources to founding and running comfy dog shelters. (I know this has nothing to do with these manufactured scandals, but I included it because we know that suburban white liberals just love dogs.)

On a different note, after checking the original comment by @Outlaw83, which I don't disagree with in particular, I think something needs to be pointed out: while it's definitely true that "actually, basically everyone was just poor back then", it's also true that a traditional society of strong community bonds and social capital will not tolerate someone just not caring about one's elders. This is not permitted, and earns you social ostracism at least. Frankly I'm even sure there were some laws on the books that made it technically illegal. I'll guess that such social bonds in the USA in the Great Depression era were already frayed by the forces of modernity to such an extent that was became an issue. Also, while it's true that society was willing to tolerate an extreme level of poverty back then, this didn't equally apply to old people, among other groups (say, widows etc.)

Everyone alive owes a massive debt to Faber, Bosch, Borlaug, Fleming, and McLean we will never come close to repaying!

Counterpoint: maybe a world in which a murderous battle royale for enough arable land ensued would've been preferable, because it'd have removed the less capable races from taking up valuable space. It'd have been a tragedy for anthropologists, but probably a net gain for the species as a whole.

I don't particularly care that I'm alive one way or another and I think this is the right attitude. Human greatness as expressed in technological achievement, energy production and intelligence, in aggregate, is what matters, and I do not see how the entirety of Africa or India is helping anyone or anything.

Three of my grandparents were born in houses slightly larger than my pantry. I have more variety of foodstuffs available to me on days when I need to go food shopping than my Irish grandparents did at the weekly trip to the grocery/coop when they were children. It's truly wild how far we've come.

If we look at the 3-5 basic categories (food clothing Shelter plus the lifestyle inflation ones of transportation and medical care) we see that 1950 wasn't absurdly much poorer than 2024, while houses are signficantly better compared to 1950 a lot of houses are pretty old stock so they aren't as much better as you'd expect.

A Cadillac series 62 was 1.8k in 1950 dollars, which appears to be about 2/3rds of an annual salary.. I can't buy a car that crappy new, so I'll look at the car I can buy, a Nissan Versa for 17k. My salary as a freaking Gym desk worker is 40k/year, so a Nissan versa to me is cheaper than a cadilllac series 62 was for the average family in 1950.

Medical care is weird, but I pay $280 a month for insurance, which covers things I don't need, but it also covers 3 "prepaid" doctors visits a year. It also fully covered me for the $100k hospital bill I got when I broke my leg. Medical care has gotten a lot more expensive and is one of the few places where I feel wealth doesn't go as far.

Food is so cheap it may as well be free. Famous health nut bryan johnson has a diet that costs a little less than $20 a day. This is Health nut food mind you but I eat it because I'm too lazy to think about food anymore. 1950 food prices were worse but only like 2x worse it seems?

Clothing may as well be free. I don't even spend $300 a year on clothes.

Shelter though.... yeah this sucks. I currently live with my parents, but otherwise I'd have to shell out 1.4k a month for the smallest apartment I can live in.

Basically if housing costs could go down (Build more housing goddamnit) then the concept of being poor would go from a minor joke to a total joke

A Cadillac series 62 was 1.8k in 1950 dollars, which appears to be about 2/3rds of an annual salary.. I can't buy a car that crappy new, so I'll look at the car I can buy, a Nissan Versa for 17k. My salary as a freaking Gym desk worker is 40k/year, so a Nissan versa to me is cheaper than a cadilllac series 62 was for the average family in 1950.

That's apples and oranges though. Judging by the results of a Google search, the former was a rather fantastic looking, comfy luxury sedan, while the latter is just an average, plain modern sedan.

The main reason I chose that car is because I've ridden in one, it was very unpleasant.

The change in car tech from the 60s to the 2020s is great, so the 2023 Nissan Versa mops the floor with the Cadillac series 62.

Judging by the results of a Google search, the former was a rather fantastic looking, comfy luxury sedan, while the latter is just an average, plain modern sedan.

Indeed, the modern equivalent of the Series 62, being any upmarket SUV, will run you 50-70 kilodollars now, or a year and a quarter the average salary of 60 kilodollars.

Of course, that's also ignoring that those modern luxury SUVs are arguably more than twice the car the 62 was, in that you're not just sitting on a flat bench, you can put stuff in the back, and if you crash it at 100 mph you'll almost certainly survive. That is reflected in the purchase price.

Isn't the modern equivalent a present-day Cadillac luxury sedan instead?

In terms of being a land-yacht I think only the Escalade really compares; their luxury sedans are 12-18" shorter and 6" narrower (or rather, were, as the longer of the two is no longer produced).

I don't really understand why you'd want an automobile that long but market research is quite clear in that people prefer utterly massive cars. I guess they don't like turning corners particularly quickly, I dunno.

Disregarding the trope concerning penis size, I can think of a couple of things:

  1. Health problems. Due to sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy living in general, many middle-aged people have painful back problems, in which case they'll prefer to use cars that are high-riding, and those are normally big.

  2. Safetyism. Heavier cars are more safe if you get into an accident.

  3. The middle-class suburban soccer mom / NASCAR dad lifestyle entails carrying large amounts of baggage (heh) around on a regular basis (shopping at the mall once a week or every two weeks, taking the kids to practice). Thus, bigger and heavier card are handy.

It also fully covered me for the $100k hospital bill I got when I broke my leg.

What kind of broken leg are we talking about here? A simple fracture of one of the long bones (the central case for 'broken leg', imho), or multiple fractures, including smaller bones, perhaps with a hip joint replacement and some knee surgery thrown in? Because that price for just 'do an x-ray (or even ct), make a cast, perhaps do another x-ray' would be insane.

Or is this just the sticker price, and what your insurance ended up paying was more like $3k?

A Compound fracture of the tibia with preparation treatment followed by surgery, physical therapy and 3 days stay at the hospital (pre surgery day, surgery day, post surgery day)

Honestly I think this is part of a lot of the more deranged anti-colonialism takes, the lack of acknowledgement of how bad human existence has been for the most part throughout history. Various versions of 'child mortality was very high on remote Canadian outposts, surely they were arbitrarily slaying indigenous children' when it's just a byproduct of child mortality being genuinely frighteningly high for most of human history. There's this weird unspoken assumption of a lot of people that 21st Century Affluent Democracy is just the default state of the human existence for a lot of historical revisionist statements.

This depended a lot on where you were living, no? Keynes describes pre-ww1 London as an oddly modern place:

“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth ... he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.”

They had most of the things we take for granted like electricity, flush toilets, fancy clothes, subways, cars (for the rich) or fast horse-drawn taxis for the not-so-rich. They also had things that would be considered luxurious even today, like multiple mail deliveries per day, or (briefly) an underground pneumatic tube delivery system . And of course, vastly higher trust and social capital than we have today.

Yes and no.

Telephone orders for goods or investments are kind of like Amazon or stock-market apps, except for the throughput, usability, and expense. The upper classes could get a reasonable approximation of 1980s life. Lower, less so. Electric lighting is not the same as electric heating, appliances, and personal devices.

I say 1980s because the Internet was an absolute paradigm shift. It was astonishingly difficult for the WWI Royal Navy to communicate; everyone else was worse off.

I mean, what exactly are you missing? Be specific. They had coal and gas to keep themselves warm, not that different from today. They could get stuff delivered literally the same day, actually faster than today. They had books, newspapers, comics, movies, and West End musicals to keep themselves entertained, often in much higher quality than what we have today. They had doctors who could come pay you a house call at a moment's notice. They had police who would take on a serious, lengthy investigation to solve a burglary, let alone a murder. They had a trustworthy news service to keep them up-to-date on world events. They had a stock ticker to let them make real-time stock trades for the sort of thing that any normal, non-day trader needs to do. It was a very comfortable middle-class life!

The only thing I'll grant you was that life for the lower classes was much worse then, since so much of their life was built on the backs of the working poor. But it's not like a normal, middle-class professional really needed to think about how the Royal Navy did their signalling.

I think there are a lot of differences in degree, if not kind. Were the goods available in a day really comparable to those in a modern grocery? On Amazon, which offers same-day delivery even in my suburb?

The city was electrified, but that mostly meant lighting. Washing machines were just starting to take off, as were electric stoves. Electric dishwashers didn’t become popular until the 50s. Microwaves possibly later than that. With the exception* of the electric stove, electric appliances are a QoL improvement that was barely available in the first decade of the 1900s.

It’s unlikely that their entertainment was better. Not just for the meme reasons, either, but because we kept almost all the good stuff. You could spend your life reading only early 20th century literature. Hell, you probably could have done that in the 80s, but it got a lot easier after the Internet. I mean, I also disagree that modern options are generally worse, but you do you.

I have to imagine similar situations for most avenues of life. At the dawn of fingerprinting technology, how many of those murder investigations bore fruit? How many house calls were pointless without access to antibiotics? How many would have been prevented with vaccines? It’s easy to say that all the pieces were present for a near-modern experience. But the devil is in the details, and I wouldn’t pick London over my present time and place.

I mean, I don't really know what it was like to live back then. but there were some interesting advantages. eg:

Were the goods available in a day really comparable to those in a modern grocery

They had a million varieties of cheese and baked goods that have been lost to time since the people making them died in WW1. And old-growth french wines that are now changed, for similar reasons. A wide variety of things that would now be considered "artisinal" compared to the highly processed fructose and tasteless GMO vegetables available at a standard american big-box grocery store.

Or, in poem form:

"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by a mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any color I please, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknel, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons."

So they definitely weren't lacking for fun shopping options.

The appliances, sure, I'll grant you that one. Though I'll point out that since we're just talking about the upper-middle class here, they would have all had a servant or housewife to take care of that stuff for you. Watson wasn't washing his own laundry or cooking his own food, he had "help" for that.

It’s unlikely that their entertainment was better. Not just for the meme reasons, either, but because we kept almost all the good stuff.

Well, not exactly. So much of their entertainment back then was live. Live theater (shakespeare!), live opera, live musicals, live discussion in the social clubs. We have to pay out the nose for a trip to Broadway to get that kind of experience. I'll grant you that their movies haven't exactly aged well, but they were thrilling for the people of their time.

Medicine... well yeah, it's certainly improved. But from everything I've read, it hasn't actually improved that much for most people. It's mostly been the decrease in child mortality that really moved the needle. People still lived well into old age, just like they do now. And being able to quickly and affordably get a housecall from a doctor means you can treat simple stuff fast, and avoid getting infected from someone else at the hospital, which really does make a difference.

If we are comparing the life of an upper class Londoner with servants on the eve of WW1 to the life of a middle class Londoner shortly before the Internet, we are of course ignoring the biggest improvement of the 2nd half of the twentieth century (labour saving home appliances). But I think @BahRamYou is right that if money was no object you could enjoy a pretty modern lifestyle in Edwardian London. (And that Edwardian London is close to the first time and place that you could do so). The big things that you absolutely couldn't do (apart from electronic media) were fast travel (no aeroplanes, trains and cars ran at about half the speed they do now), certain types of fresh food (downstream of fast travel), and antibiotics. The doctor who did house calls was arguably more likely to kill you than save you in 1910.

Also there was no way of avoiding the air pollution if you regularly had to be in central London for business.

We have to pay out the nose for a trip to Broadway to get that kind of experience.

West End shows are a lot cheaper. Nosebleed seats start at £25 and top price tickets are generally around £100.

To be clear, I wasn't talking about someone where "money was no object." I was trying to focus specifically on the upper middle class. My understanding is that, at that time, it was pretty normal for anyone in the middle class to have a servant, or at least a part-time housekeeper. It wasn't really an upper-class thing, it was just a not-being-poor thing.

And yeah, no super fast travel, but the travel they did have was more comfortable than today. I don't think doctors in 1910 were all that bad, they did at least know about washing their hands and keeping things clean.

West End shows are a lot cheaper. Nosebleed seats start at £25 and top price tickets are generally around £100.

Ah really? That's awesome. But I was thinking of me, as a regular American, where I would first have to book a flight to New York to see a show. Or wait several years for the off-broadway production to come around, and I get one chance to see it or miss it forever. There's just not a lot of live theater here in most places.

My sense is that if you wanted to pick the single greatest place to be around 1900, it would be London. Even though the British Empire was already starting some of its downswing, they were also able to catch the earliest gains (and gee wiz gizmos) of the industrial revolution while they still had as much wealth as they did (and London would be the peak across the empire). Now mind you, England-wide, that wealth is still on the order of 5k pounds per capita, at least 5x lower than today. Of course, it's worth noting that the US is an outlier in having literally 10x'd its wealth over that time; it was the best performing country over the last hundred or so years, after all.

In the US/Canada (egad, Canada; a quick Ducking only finds a chart since 1960 and my, how you've grown), the story has been insane growth, starting from basically universal poverty. The UK started from a somewhat better place and tailed off relatively speaking, so the story is slightly different there, but it doesn't seem that different. But overall, yes, I agree that locality mattered, yet outside of a very few shining cities on a hill (who were still quite poor compared to a remarkably low percentile today), basically everyone was pretty darn poor.

I think Vienna, Paris, and New York were all pretty good places around 1900, no? Or really any capital city of a western nation. I don't think London had any exclusive technology that the other countries didn't have. Instead there was a big effort to connect the world, via telegram, steamship, and zeppelin.

It's good to be in London circa 1900 if you are wealthy. If you are poor you have to deal with all the effluent of all that progress. Terrible air quality, tenuous access to clean water, cramped, unsanitary living conditions, brutal work, endemic malnutrition. Persistent assaults on every facet of your health is your lot in life as an urban prole at the turn of the 20th century. (Though even 1900 is substantially better in these respects than say, 1860; or at least for London it is).

Is there any way to find out when London had the lowest overall crime rate?

My WAG would be either the late thirties, when the worst of the poverty had been ameliorated, or the early fifties when the standard of living started to seriously rise after the end of rationing.

True, but was there anywhere better to be poor in than London in 1900? I doubt Paris or New York was much better.

Like others I'd say the frontier. Smaller cities were also less oppressive in terms of the environmental pollution. London in particular had infamously bad air quality. The crux of the problem is though you're assuming you have options: the reason so many people ended up in these awful situations is because they were chasing what limited employment and opportunities were available to them. It's not like the rural exodus was just because people decided they didn't like farming.

The American frontier, in all honesty.

Pretty much anywhere there was an abundance of land that was tied into the global trade network. If you could get enough land to be a commercial farmer for relatively cheap any time before mechanization in the 1920s, you'd be set, no matter how you started off.

If you could get enough land to be a commercial farmer for relatively cheap

In that case you wouldn't be considered poor by 1900s standards. The "dream" for a lot of people back then was to own land and be a farmer. The reality for most working poor was being a factory worker, a household servant, or a tenant farmer on someone else's farm. And that's assuming they could get a job at all and weren't just unemployed, like many were, leading to a lot of surplus men looking to sign up for the army.

Right, but if you started poor somewhere it was realistic to save up and get that land, that's the best circumstance to be poor in: you're not going to be stuck impoverished. That's someplace it's significantly better to be poor in than in London at the same time.

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I suppose I would agree with that!

One big thing they didn't have was antibiotics, which is pretty important.

As for higher trust and social capital, I am not sure about that. There are two separate issues there, I think:

  1. Were the middle/upper classes in pre-WWI England more trustworthy than today's middle/upper classes? Maybe, but I see no clear evidence of that. Surely there was plenty of backstabbing going on back then too.
  2. Were the lower classes in pre-WWI England more trustworthy than today's lower classes? I'm not so sure. My understanding is that the homicide rate in 1900 England was either higher than in modern England, or at best about the same as today. Part of that might be because modern policing is more effective than the policing back then - on the other hand, for the very same reason, it is possible that the England homicide rate from 1900 is under-reported. I see no evidence that the society was actually significantly higher-trust than today.

My understanding is that the homicide rate in 1900 England was either higher than in modern England, or at best about the same as today.

You have made this claim multiple times, and I have pointed out to you before that it is blatantly false. Homicide rates in Victorian and Edwardian England hovered consistently around 1 to 1.5 per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, last year in the UK the murder rate was 9.7 per million people The pre-WW1 UK genuinely was a drastically safer place than the modern UK in terms of crime, despite considerably sparser and less effective policing and infinitely worse standards of medical care.

But 1 to 1.5 per 100000 is higher than 9.7 per million.

It's still not very good when we're comparing an era before antibiotics with one where gunshot wounds are 90% survivable. There needs to be a lot more violence to get a similar fatality rate under modern conditions.

When you get shot now they literally replace your blood with cryo-coolant to buy time to fix your ruptured organs and veins.
In the 1800s you died of sepsis after they went rummaging in your guts for the bullet without washing their hands.

I think this is easily overlooked, there are many aggravated assaults or attempted murders that occur nowadays in modern and prosperous societies that would have been murders or manslaughter in 1900 because the victim would have died of their injuries.

That and London being one of the most surveilled places on earth. It’s a deterrent for extreme violent action amongst the still rational violent actors but that deterrent has no relationship whatsoever with the underlying anti-social forces that propel murderous violence to bubble up from the depths of our collective depravity.

If 1900 London has a flat murder rate compared to 2024 it’s actually still rather damning.

You know what? I think I’m just gonna go marinate in my own innumeracy for a bit here. I can’t really offer an excuse; just a total brain-fart. I was really confident about it, too, which makes it so much worse.

I was mostly going off of SSCs infamous neoreactionary post, which claims it was about 100x lower back then. Maybe different sources say different things?

"Indictable offences known to the police" rose about 40x from the Edwardian period to the 1990s crime peak after adjusting for population. (The 100x is a mistake due to trying to read a horizontal line near zero on a small graph).

The question of how much this is an increase in real crime, how much of it is the creation of new indicatable offences (particularly ones relating to drugs), and how much is increased reporting is hugely controversial. But it is fair to say that crime in the 1990s was at least 10x Edwardian levels, and probably more.

Violent and property crime is now (as determined by victim surveys with consistent methodology) at around a quarter of 1990's levels. The graph used by the neoreactionaries cuts the data off in 2000 for a reason. [This crime drop is consistent with the lived experience of anyone who grew up in the 1990s - it isn't a case of rigged statistics]

Didn't the Edwardians also have a lot of weird crimes that wouldn't be considered crimes today? Most infamously "sodomy" was illegal. But I'm really not an expert on Edwardian crimes.

I do agree that crime was way worse around 1990 than it is now. That said, there's a lot of minor property crime now that probably never gets reported.

No worries man, I've had brain-farts of a similar level before. It happens.

Yeah, but when discussing an issue I care a lot about (crime) and comment a lot about, it’s very damaging to fuck something up like that. Justifiably tarnishes my credibility.

Well, I would hope that here on The Motte we are trying to be beyond caring about personal reputation as much as possible. Personal reputation is a very useful heuristic, but it has limits when it comes to seeking truth.

I think that some people have a rose-colored glasses view of Victorian England because it would feel nice to imagine that it was a beautiful society full of people who played violins while eloquently debating the finer points of the latest geopolitical news from the continent, while maybe overworked yet fundamentally good and noble commoners dutifully worked the machinery in the factories. I would probably be likely to fall for such a view myself, it's just that I read a lot of Sherlock Holmes when I was younger, and I've read a lot about the Jack the Ripper case, so I was already predisposed to be somewhat familiar with Victorian England's criminal issues.

There's also the fact that late 19th century European industrial civilization is what gave us militant anarchism and communism, which is not proof, but is suggestive evidence, in favor of the theory that conditions for the lower classes really were pretty bad back then, and the society was not any more high-trust than ours is.

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My biological father (who is still alive) grew up in a poor family and as a kid literally had to worry about starving to death because of lack of calories (war played a role in this).

My parents grew up south Europe, born during WW2, and I couldn't believe the level of poverty they endured. I visited the 7,500 person town they grew up in and even today in 2024 it still doesn't have consistent running water and each house has maybe 20 amp electrical service max. You could eat a chicken once a month on special occasions. Dinner involved some starch and beans, every night, usually the same thing. Family members having spent time either in prison for being reported by neighbors with a gripe, or serving as conscripts, or both.

Violence too? Each parent had a sibling killed under circumstances they never quite explain to me. Another sibling (my uncle) becomes mentally retarded from some disease they couldn't even put a name on, because access to health care didn't exist. "He just had a fever when he was young and was never the same when the fever went away". This is almost certainly from a preventable childhood disease that no longer exists in the modern world.

How fucking frightening a world was the relatively recent past. And yet my parents hardly complain about anything. I cannot fucking deal with listening to them stoically describe their upbringing and early life in the US (as illegal immigrants, another fun adventure) and then contrast with the median gen-Zer complaining about their absolute life of amazing luxury today.

I'm sure the horror damaged my parents in ways that aren't legible and that they would not have chosen it if they could do life again, but I'm also not sure this life of absolutely pure luxury we have today (by contrast) actually is the stuff that a good world springs from. Maybe the problem is bad morals, but I struggle to articulate it. It sure would be a shame if you needed the hard times to create the strong men.

I'd class the suffering of the affluent as a different type of suffering. Because when you're starving, facing the possibility of homelessness, facing disease etc., there is a sense of realness and gravitas and urgency to what has befallen you, it is a genuine pain, whereas the suffering of the affluent is a reverse of this; it's not very painful or urgent but it's also completely meaningless, so it manifests as frustration. Put another way, a society that has largely eliminated the extreme negatives of life has flattened the spectrum of human experience, so that for an affluent person to feel any sense of meaning or depth to his life, he must obtain some extremely positive experience. Otherwise life will feel flat and empty. The vast majority of us though lack the means to get some extremely positive experience, so we're stuck living mundane, flat lives. Our pain is not exactly pain -- it's a vague, dull pang of awareness that life can be much more.

Unironically, this reminds me of the "power principle" articulated in the Unabomber's Manifesto. We used to simply focus on survival, and by achieving survival, which took a large amount of effort, we were fairly satisfied. But now survival is almost effortless, and we have so much left over wanting.

In the place of survival, we invent things to pursue to try to find that same satisfaction. But they have to be things that are some kind of balance between hard and achievable. If they're too easy, we find the achievement hollow. If too hard, we despair. Just right, like getting a PhD in marine biology from a prestigious school. There we go.

Except some people never find that moderately difficult but achievable task. Or they achieve one and never figure out another one to replace it. Those people feel really lost. Life loses meaning. Integrate over society and you get, well, gestures at everything

For most of recorded history hard times created stunted dumb peasants that were 5 feet tall and had an IQ of 95 max. You want good times with a challenge, you don't want HARD TIMES™.

You don't need a high IQ to be a peasant though.

I recently enjoyed this article about goiter in Switzerland posted on the SSC board https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/jonah-goodman/a-national-evil

What a great article! Thanks for the read. Amazing that reactionaries always show up to shit on the new and working interventions! Those poor kids kept dumb and disabled till the 50's because of that one doctor! Reminds me of the hand washing guy that said maybe you should wash your hands in between delivering babies and was drummed out of medicine. I think the HARD TIMES™ folks on here have no idea what they are advocating for, and the horror of it.

Worse yet, it was washing your hands between performing autopsies and delivering babies.

Finally, he made a startling realization. A fellow doctor died of what appeared to be a case of childbed fever after cutting himself with a scalpel that had been used during an autopsy of one of the women.

The physicians, Semmelweis realized, had been dissecting infected cadavers with their bare hands. Then, with those same contaminated hands, they were delivering babies.

“They were inoculating their patients with bacteria,” Perlow said. “They were basically immersed in pus for hours.”

Yep. An American, a North Korean and a South Korean.

Enormous enough adversity degrades and permanently weakens people. A child of starvation and parasite infestations doesn't make for large tough adults.

I seem to recall reading that US and South Korean border guards are selected to be particularly tall specifically for, er, diplomatic reasons. But I don't have a citation on-hand.

It's obviously propaganda. I don't know how you look at the guy on the left or right and think "yep, that's what an average typical American/South Korean looks like."

Surely the North Koreans are doing the same.

It was an interesting twist of WWI that for many citizens of the UK getting drafted into the army was a substantial increase in their quality of life. If you were a common prole you were likely medically or physically unfit for the high danger roles, and now you were getting 3 square meals a day and proper medical care for the first time in your life.

Isn't this kind of true of military service in the US? Isn't the army actually not a bad deal if you live in a poor enough area?

The army is a fantastic way to access upwards mobility that wouldn't be otherwise available, yes, but by US standards you'd have to come from a really poor neighborhood to get a quality of life improvement from it in the short term.

If you're poor in the US the military is a fantastic option for upward mobility. But the US also hasn't fought a war like WWI for 80 years, so the potential downside is significantly lower than the prospect of someone signing up for the Great War.

Cf. the hygiene hypothesis. I think there’s a good case to be made that having early exposure to a representative range of evolutionarily relevant stimuli helps individuals to calibrate in multiple domains. If you never have anything concrete and immediate to stress about (eg, periods of food scarcity), then your “stressful event” hedonistat doesn’t have a clear signal, and ends up calibrating in a more stochastic way to regard commonplace stimuli (eg someone being rude to you at the coffeeshop) as threatening.

I suspect one reason this might not show up in the data (or be argued for by academics) as much as it should is the confound from heredity. Yes, if you look at modern American kids who are exposed to trauma, you’ll probably find less well-adjusted adults, but that’s because a huge amount of the potential trauma in your critical windows of development comes from your parents and immediate family, and if they’re fucked up, it raises the chances you will be too. I think this helps explain why eg WW2 concentration camp survivors often go on to live happy lives, in seeming contradiction to the modern narrative that even isolated traumatic experiences fuck you up. Maybe also explains why PTSD is a relatively modern phenomenon in warfare, or at least a hell of a lot more common than it used to be. If you'd had a sibling or two die in childhood and friends die in everyday violent altercations, then maybe a battle is less likely to traumatise you.

Of course, there’s also the chronic/acute distinction. If you’re abused by a primary caregiver throughout childhood, that will also lead to long-term miscalibration of your hedonistat, because most humans have historically been reasonably good at looking after their kids.

More on the PTSD subject here, for example. He observes that 1) combat experience was ubiquitous, and 2) it was viewed positively by the broader society. So returning veterans were told they did a great thing, that whatever they were experiencing was normal and also manly, and then were prescribed the socially accepted purification rituals to code-switch back into farming. Compare Scott’s discussion on neurasthenia: humans can probably adapt to the social context for all sorts of mental states.

I think I’ve also seen variants of @Ioper’s point, where increased range and especially industrial artillery made the difference. It seems likely that a constant drip of adrenaline would have dramatic effects on the psyche; the trenches plausibly maintained that stress much more than pre-modern warfare. But we still see PTSD from maneuver warfare, COIN, and other situations that should be as different from WWI as WWI was from the American Revolution. I’m not sure that physical response can explain the whole picture.

I think one more important aspect is the impersonal nature of modern warfare, which ties into the aspect of helplessness.

When you fight someone with a spear, a bow, a musket or a bayonet, you see your opponents die from your violent actions. You have a simple "problem -> action -> no problem" chain.

When the vast majority of your opponents are killed by artillery, aircraft and drones and the vast majority of your own casualties come from either artillery, aircraft and drones or traps, suicide bombers and IEDs the situation is different: you are stuck between invisible death dealers on the opposing side and invisible death dealers on your side, and instead of defeating the enemy yourself in a pitched battle you are waiting for an attack to happen at any moment and calling your death dealers for help eighty percent of the time.

I'm leaning towards the second explanation. WW1 wasn't exactly short of patriotism, so I think we can assume that returning soldiers would be in a relatively similar situation to Romans. The difference is that Romans didn't spend months sitting in damp trenches with constant explosions, with the knowledge that if one hits you, you'll either be ripped apart or buried alive.

Maybe also explains why PTSD is a relatively modern phenomenon in warfare, or at least a hell of a lot more common than it used to be. If you'd had a sibling or two die in childhood and friends die in everyday violent altercations, then maybe a battle is less likely to traumatise you.

As I've understood it, PTSD isn't caused by single traumatic events as much as by prolonged periods of constant high stress, fear of death and feelings of helplessness. Those things really only started to happen during relatively modern warfare.

Pre-modern humans didn't get much "PTSD" because humans are well equipped to handle individual high stress and traumatic events, such as a melee, as long as there it's time limited and there is a feeling of control.

Counterpoint being that the entire life of a subsistence farmer was high stress, fear of death and helplessness. Crop failures, disease, crime, and wars were pretty common. And if the crops are failing in your village, you know you’ll be at minimum very hungry over the winter, and people die around you and probably members of your own family could meet the same fate. Nothing you can do.

A huge difference for modern WEIRDs is that we approach the world from the perspective that life is supposed to be good with the troubles I mentioned (death, disease, starvation, warfare, etc.) seen as outliers and black swan events. And at the same time, the more ancient approach to life was that bad stuff happening is normal, and it’s best to just get on with it. Your fate was your fate. And feelings, while they existed and were acknowledged, weren’t the same focal points that they are today.

I’m personally fairly confident that our modern WEIRD approach to the negative parts of life are creating and driving a lot of mental illnesses, especially in teenagers. We teach, in my view, the exact wrong approach to trauma, and a very inflated view of what can cause trauma. Part of it is just how much we live life on easy mode, which interferes with the development of mental toughness. A terrible experience for a young adult in a modern, western city is likely to be fairly minor compared to the same child in Tudor England. Add in that we tell our young that bad experiences cause trauma and trauma causes permanent mental health problems. And we teach kids to focus on feelings and to set hopes very high.

I agree with much of your post but the initial part isn't very convincing imo. There is a massive difference between being worried about the occasional famine and sitting in a trench that is pounded by artillery. The life of a substinence farmer isn't high stress, it's almost constant low mulling worry.

Is PTSD, especially c-pstd very overdiagnosed today? Absolutely! But it's also a real condition mostly associated with post Napoleonic frontline warfare, that isn't at all comparable to historic environmental or social stressors.

Sort of. If helplessness is going to make an event traumatic, I can easily point to plagues, mothers dying in childbirth, famines, etc as all being particularly traumatic. Imagine being 10-12 and seeing baby’s first be heading in town with dad. Or your mom has a baby and bleeds to death while you watch. Or the Black Death killing a third of your village. And knowing that if you got it, they’d basically shut you in the house and brick you inside entombed in the house. Death in the medieval and renaissance world was common and brutal. Only maybe modern combat comes close, and even then, I suspect that the way normal deaths happen in modern times make combat harder. Death before 65 is a black swan for us.

Helplessness can make an event traumatic and it's a part of what is believed to cause PTSD.

I actually thought of bringing up particularly severe plagues as a possible comparison, with a major difference being things like things like very high levels of noise from explosions, artillery, gunfire, grenades etc, that probably would make severe trauma manifest in different ways.

Surely people were traumatised by the black death and things like plagues resulting from the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, but they might not have gotten PTSD specifically because the circumstances surrounding the trauma and stress was very different, even if death levels were the same or worse than frontline combat roles.

Finally, the first major recorded outbreaks of PTSD did not coincide with people having gone soft in a cosy environment unused to adversity, violence and war. It was pre-penicillin, most people were still agrarian or working in industry under terrible conditions, in societies that were violent and regularly at war. What it did coincide with was the advent of modern industrialised warfare.

I'm very much in agreement with this. Kids need stress, and not just of the exam kind.

One of my less pleasant but ultimately pretty beneficial childhood experience was attending a summer Scouts' camp at age 10. I was a member of the detachment but the summer camps weren't mandatory.

Anyway, it was somewhat unpleasant, mostly because the level of discipline demanded was fairly high, and as a very pre-pubertal kid* I didn't even have any machismo motivation that helped later with unpleasant things like bathing in very cold water.

And of course the labor, cut down dry trees, sawed them for firewood, cooked all the food, carted all the water and we built the camp ourselves. It was nothing dangerous or backbreaking, especially not for the smallest kids, but novel for bookish nerds.

The food wasn't the greatest usually, as you'd expect when the guy who is overseeing it is usually a teenager, and there's no real refrigeration apart from keeping stuff in a cool stream. We only ate meat once during the whole camp. Really helped with fixing my attitude to food too. I stopped being picky.

I remember I cried halfway through when the parents were visiting, but ultimately stayed.

And of course the labor, cut down dry trees, sawed them for firewood, cooked all the food, carted all the water and we built the camp ourselves.

This sounds awesome how much per week do I need to pay for this getaway? $5000...?

Not quite the same as this, but some friends and I spent a week camping in the Smoky Mountains earlier this summer. The costs for food, gas, campsite reservations, firewood, and supplies came to less than $250 per person.

My parents paid cca $80 to have me off their hands for three weeks.

You understand the laboring part was only first five days and then 1/4 of the time ? Each scout patrol would take turns in doing the camp-keeping part.

If you never have anything concrete and immediate to stress about (eg, periods of food scarcity), then your “stressful event” hedonistat doesn’t have a clear signal, and ends up calibrating in a more stochastic way to regard commonplace stimuli (eg someone being rude to you at the coffeeshop) as threatening.

I will observe that a number of successful youth development/leadership programs focus on (mostly-)safe, controlled "stressful events". Thinking of things like NOLS, JROTC, and various sporting and scouting-like organizations. It's usually pitched as building confidence, but dropping kids into the wilderness and showing them how to survive (and even thrive) in unpleasant or even hazardous conditions seems, from this angle, to be deliberately aimed to calibrate this hedonistat. I've been through things like this, and while it's not a controlled experiment, it didn't seem like it was Earth-changing at the time, I've come to appreciate those experiences more as I've gotten older.

If I were looking at data to reduce confounding with heredity, that might be a place to start.

It makes sense, and really I think there’s other “thermostats” in our brains. Like I tend to think of maturity as somewhat calibrating a responsibility and time-preference thermostat to near adult levels. There are some adults that for various reasons end up with theirs somewhat lower than the adult level. You’ll find these people not doing things that need to be done, doing things that put themselves or others in bad situations, or mishandling money or property.

Given that the generation of your parents' parents and grandparents created the world in which the two largest wars in human history happened, I have some doubts about whether they were any more moral than we are. Don't get me wrong, I think the fact that there hasn't been another huge war has much more to do with nuclear weapons than with morality. I don't think that we are necessarily any more moral than those people. But I also think that probably we are not any less moral.

fair take

This is, incidentally, why Covid-era anti-vaccine activism was incomprehensible to a lot of boomers and the natural reaction was that stragglers were crazy and should probably be forcibly vaccinated. When the struggle had been getting enough vaccinations to cover even the poorer areas in various countries, hearing that scientists had cooked up an extra sciencey vaccine with a brand new mechanism was not a cause for concern but for joy and extra trust.

Same attitude applies to other topics - I once listened to an old local leftist lady recount how left-wingers of her generation couldn't quite always understand why the younger generation campaigned for more veggie food days for school meals, since her generation had campaigned for more days when meat was served in school meals, as one way to distribute the rising wealth.

Was your old local leftist lady old enough to remember the days when pellagra was a serious problem in the South? Wikipedia says it was widespread until World War 2 - and of course having meat in one's diet prevents the nutrient deficiency that causes it.

(And to return to the "we've recently become so much wealthier" theme, isn't it astounding that less than a century ago the southern states were so poor many people had to spend part/all of the year living on corn alone?)

Pellagra in the South was ended mostly via fortification.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1446222/

He's Finnish, so I doubt it has much to do with Southern US nutrient deficiencies(where, as with all Southern US problems, one must first control for race- the black population lived in third world level poverty for a long time when we were wealthy enough as a society that it didn't need to be).

It is not possible to understand what happened in 2020-2022 as a proportionate response to disease because it wasn't. COVID is not a disease that primarily affects children or leaves them with disabilities. COVID is not a disease where the number infected can be changed in the long-term by any existing intervention. The motive that best explains the turn to extreme pro-mandate activism (such as supporting assaulting people with needles, or throwing them in concentration camps) is it's status as a shibboleth - that vaccine mandates can be used as an excuse to carry out political purges of people you don't like, who are statistically more likely to be unvaccinated.

Except that doesn't account for the Boomers as above. Who are more likely to be conservative themselves. The motive that best explains the turn is simple fear.

As I'll keep repeating every time this was brought up, the Tory British government did not want to mandate lockdowns and the like, the original response was not to do that. But so many MP's got inundated with letters and emails and phone calls from fearful constituents that they made a very public U-turn. Particularly from older voter's who are more likely to be on the right.

Conservative UK Boomers were not trying to purge their political enemies, they were simply scared. Now you can certainly make the argument that they were wrong to be so badly scared (though of course age did make them more susceptible than younger folk), and you can certainly make the argument that the media et al was part of why they were so scared, but they were not calling for tighter controls and lockdowns and vaccinations as an excuse to purge political enemies. It simply does not pass the smell taste. There was simply no reason for them to want to do so. Indeed, unlike in the US, Conservatives were more likely to be Covid vaccinated than Labour voters.

And given the government didn't want to actually take the steps they ended up being forced to take also suggests that they weren't using it to purge political enemies, again because the government was a Conservative one, and didn't even want to do the things they ended up doing in the first place.

What group of people who are statistically more likely to be unvaccinated do you think the Conservative government driven by Conservative voters were trying to purge?

Except that doesn't account for the Boomers as above. Who are more likely to be conservative themselves. The motive that best explains the turn is simple fear.

Boomers are more likely to be conservative in the UK sense, but this is not conservative in the American sense. Similarly, the Tory government of the time was also not meaningfully conservative in the American sense. But also, the difference between young people and boomers is pretty small: Most young people supported lockdown, just less so than boomers.

Simple fear is not a credible explanation of what happened because it simply shifts the discussion to why there was fear for this and not other similarly (and over their whole lives, more) dangerous illnesses for the old, such as cancer, heart disease, or dementia. Why would people demand such extreme interventions as imprisoning all of society to protect themselves from a spicy cold, while ignoring the 20 QALY bills littering the ground called "stop smoking", "stop being fat", "stop drinking" and such? And for reference, a lifetime of heavy smoking is several orders of magnitude more dangerous than getting COVID. It's more QALY loss than dying from COVID, even.

As I'll keep repeating every time this was brought up, the Tory British government did not want to mandate lockdowns and the like, the original response was not to do that. But so many MP's got inundated with letters and emails and phone calls from fearful constituents that they made a very public U-turn. Particularly from older voter's who are more likely to be on the right.

Which again, just shifts the question to why did they do this? There are several glaring gaps in this narrative of why lockdowns happened. Why did "boomers" suddenly fear covid so much while not fearing other common boomer ailments? Why did "boomers" suddenly believe this was something that the government should do something about? Why did "boomers" suddenly believe that lockdowns were an option and would work, when this was never done or even meaningfully suggested prior to 2020? And most importantly, why did countries that didn't buy into lockdowns not have their government's similarly browbeaten into doing lockdowns by public demand? Swedes did not have a lockdown, and Swedes mostly agreed with that policy. Swedes opinion of their government's response to COVID is better than most countries, which is the opposite of what you should expect to happen if lockdowns were the result of some inevitable grassroots demand.

The UK's unwritten constitution functions as an elective dictatorship by parliament. In 2020, this shifted somewhat to be an elective dictatorship by the executive of government. But in either case there was no reason why MPs couldn't ignore constituents and refuse to do lockdowns. You could argue that this would make them unpopular and lose their seats, but look at the 2024 election results. They did lockdowns and lost their seats harder than any government in living memory has ever lost their seats, half because of the predictable consequences of lockdowns destroying the economy, public services and the social fabric, and half because they ramped up immigration even higher. At no point have the Tories indicated any aptitude for popularity-maxing, not that lockdowns even are popularity-maxing in the long run.

The conclusion that best matches the data is that every step was driven by government decision because the government wanted to do lockdowns. There was fear because the government wanted fear, and made it so. There was demand for government intervention because the government communicated that they could control the virus. And there was demand for lockdowns because the government communicated that it was possible, would work, and eventually, that anyone who didn't want them was evil in some way. And in Sweden, none of this process happened because the government there didn't want lockdowns, and therefore didn't do any of the groundwork necessary to impose them on a pliant public. I do not believe the government accidentally stumbled into lockdowns for the same reason I don't believe it's possible to accidentally build a shelf - you can't accidentally do something that requires deliberate planning and coordination to carry out. Especially, you can't accidentally stumble into committing crimes against humanity.

There is further evidence that the people responsible for lockdowns wanted lockdowns, mostly contained in leaked conversations, but I think it is unnecessary to present such conversations to make the rather simple claim that governments do things because they want to do them, and don't do things they don't want to do.

And given the government didn't want to actually take the steps they ended up being forced to take

"Forced" to? How? Pressured by the public is one thing, but forced? I'm willing to hear out some explanation of how the government was forced, but if it doesn't involve shadowy figures putting a literal gun to the head of MPs, I'm not sure how they can be "forced" to do something they don't want to do.

What group of people who are statistically more likely to be unvaccinated do you think the Conservative government driven by Conservative voters were trying to purge?

Opponents of lockdowns and the pandemic response in general. Because as a group, we were the only meaningful opposition and threat to the government at the time. It's a matter of public record that the government spied on lockdown critics. when it wasn't more openly sending the police to beat us up. Any other prospective "threat" can be easily dealt with by declaring another variant and locking them down again.

Opponents of lockdowns and the pandemic response in general. Because as a group, we were the only meaningful opposition and threat to the government at the time.

But that can't have been the group the mandates were originally intended to target, because that group only exists post the mandates! Its not even a meaningful thing without them. The government may have targetted those ignoring/against mandates or rules after of course. But that can't have been WHY they imposed lockdowns or the like because that group was created by their lockdown actions in the first place. Like Prohibition wasn't put in place to target bootleggers, it created them, then the government cracked down on them. But it can't have been intended to purge bootleggers.

In any case, they were certainly not a threat to the government at all. Certainly not more so than hundreds and thousands of their own voters demanding action. The Tories didn't lose the recent election because of Covid response, they lost it due to a soggy economy and having been in power for 14 years.

Whether you want to believe it or not, the vast majority of MPs only pressured Boris to change course, because they individually were under pressure from their constituents. They aren't cartoon villains who were secretly wanting to take over.

The government is made of MPs, who are very susceptible to pressure from their voters. The government wasn't the one driving the fear initially. Remember Boris getting a lot of criticism for being seen to just want to let Covid burn through the population? If he was planning lockdowns and mandates why bother taking that bad PR? It was the media and to an extent people themselves, social media plus the 24 hour media cycle amplifies everything nowadays more so than the past. Remember in the early days the government was downplaying fears, and discouraging the idea lockdowns would be helpful. They could have started lockdowns and mandates much earlier had they wished and indeed they took huge criticism for not doing so. They didn't accidentally stumble into lockdowns and mandates, those decided to do them of course. But the timeline of government action is just not consistent with the government being commited to making those decisions in advance to target some specific group.

In addition, you can take this or not, but I used to work in government and for both Labour and Tory parties, and I know quite a few MPs personally, including some very high up in the decision making tree. They were indeed pressured into making those decisions by the public. They were terrified of the amount of vitriol they were getting for not acting.

To be clear, if you dislike the lockdowns and mandates, then the government and MPs are certainly responsible for their actions, pressured by their voters or not. They could have stood on principles and refused. And indeed some few did. But they didn't instigate lockdowns and mandates to purge anyone. They were blindsided by the publics reaction and then did what politicians will almost always do. To do something. Which instinct is to be very clear, responsible for a lot of very bad laws and very probably lockdown and mandates are far from the last we will see.

I considered making this an edit but I think it would better serve as a separate comment.

I disagree that vaccine mandate demands were the result of grassroot popular demand foisted upon politicians. I think the evidence for this is stronger than it is for lockdowns, because the explanation for why someone might wants them depends quite specifically on official statements about the properties of covid, vaccines, and those who refuse to take them. Official statements that frequently turned out to be wrong. All to set up the axioms required for popular support for vaccine mandates: That those who refuse to take the vaccines are not merely wrong, not merely evil, but instead are actively dangerous to you, because unlike the righteous vaccinated, they can still have and spread covid to you and murder you. This is not an organic belief. It cannot be an organic belief because the entire pro-restriction tale of lockdowns is that your organic beliefs about vaccines are all wrong and the only legitimate source of information about vaccines is from the government, which specifically lied about vaccines stopping transmission.

In the absence of government efforts to make people believe the axioms that lead to vaccine mandates, that randomly half-way through 2021 people would have a fever dream and subsequently believe the government should own their neighbours veins is even less coherent than the equivalent for lockdowns.

But that can't have been the group the mandates were originally intended to target, because that group only exists post the mandates! Its not even a meaningful thing without them.

Opponents of lockdowns predate the introduction of vaccine mandates.

But that can't have been WHY they imposed lockdowns or the like because that group was created by their lockdown actions in the first place.

The vaccine mandates target this group, not the lockdowns.

The Tories didn't lose the recent election because of Covid response, they lost it due to a soggy economy and having been in power for 14 years.

The disastrous state of the economy is due to the Covid response, so yes, that's why they lost the election as badly as they did.

Whether you want to believe it or not, the vast majority of MPs only pressured Boris to change course, because they individually were under pressure from their constituents. They aren't cartoon villains who were secretly wanting to take over.

Which only shifts the question to why constituents wanted lockdowns in the supposedly government-not-wanting-lockdown UK, while those in Sweden didn't want lockdowns. If the answer is the media, then why did the media not push Sweden into lockdowns? At some point, there needs to be some explanation for why the UK did this policy while some of our peers did not, and the most credible explanation is that the government wanted to do it. Maybe not all MPs, maybe not all in government, but a large enough proportion were able to use their powers to ramp up fear and then offer to resolve that fear with lockdowns.

The alternative explanation is that everyone just woke up one day in mid-March after dreaming up an entirely new suite of policies that they wanted, for no reason, and therefore the government had to do these policies, because there's no proposed mechanism here for why the public would organically desire this policy after never even suggesting it for Hong Kong Flu, Asian Flu, HIV, Swine Flu, and countless other smaller epidemics.

And if they don't want to be seen as cartoon villains, all they had to do was not do lockdowns.

The government wasn't the one driving the fear initially.

Internal discussions on deliberately increasing fear predate the lockdowns. "The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging" This is just what was openly published, too.

But the timeline of government action is just not consistent with the government being commited to making those decisions in advance to target some specific group.

Again, you're confusing me saying vaccine mandates were targeted at dissidents with me saying lockdowns were targeted at dissidents. They're two different policies, and I never claimed the latter.

In addition, you can take this or not, but I used to work in government and for both Labour and Tory parties, and I know quite a few MPs personally, including some very high up in the decision making tree. They were indeed pressured into making those decisions by the public. They were terrified of the amount of vitriol they were getting for not acting.

Committing monstrous crimes against humanity because you're scared that a public that despises you anyway will despise you is not a coherent explanation for their behaviour. If they are scared of being voted out, see my prior comments on how the government clearly isn't maximizing for popularity. Their position on immigration is enough to explain that. If they are scared of something more dramatic like being murdered, then their concern should be the growing number of Islamists in the country due to their immigration policy, not that Doreen, 72, retired civil servant is suddenly going to turn into a killer because she's scared of the spicy flu. And in terms of how they acted, the only group that ever seemed to scare them was anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protesters, judging by how violently they reacted towards them compared to e.g. BLM protesters.

Ok, so you would roughly agree lockdowns were driven by fear then?

But then why would you think the government needs vaccine mandates to target and purge anti-lockdown activists? It simply can. As you point out Parliament is sovereign. It can just pass a law to lock em up or use anti-terror mandates it doesn't need a convoluted vaccine mandate which only really applied to healthcare workers to then purge anti-lockdown activists. It doesn't make sense. Plus they didn't actually purge them!

As for dates, prior to March the Government was already getting huge criticism. Including letters from hundreds of scientists being published in the media.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.voanews.com/amp/science-health_coronavirus-outbreak_boris-johnson-steps-plans-tackle-coronavirus-criticism-mounts/6185847.html

Once they have decided to change tack, then messaging to increase compliance will be used. That's SOP. But it doesn't mean that is WHY they changed tack. Pressure was mounting through Feb and into March and Boris had already gone stricter and stricter as you can see above.

The pressure was coming from voters and the media.

The reason I think its important to understand that is not to absolve government of blame. Because whatever the pressures, they could have chosen otherwise. Their reasons for doing so, don't impact on the morality. But rather because when the next crisis happens in 15 or 20 years with a new crop of politicians perhaps of different parties, then you might think it won't happen again. But as long as the same public and media pressures are brought to bear, and incentives for politicians remain the same I am telling you it will. Whether it is Labour or Tories or Lib Dems, or the Reform Party in charge.

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They did lockdowns and lost their seats harder than any government in living memory has ever lost their seats, half because of the predictable consequences of lockdowns destroying the economy, public services and the social fabric, and half because they ramped up immigration even higher.

They lost seats to a party that wanted even longer lockdowns enforced even more harshly. The simple fact remains that Boris opposed lockdowns. Many senior Tories did; there was more hostility toward lockdowns in the UK government than in any comparable Anglo country, and almost all of Europe, outside of some of the most conservative state governments in the US.

The Tories u-turned after all neighboring countries had implemented harsh lockdowns and after the press (which was normally quite pliant) began an extreme campaign of fear-mongering. Cummings (supposedly intelligent, although I think he’s clearly shown himself otherwise) then panicked and told Boris that he had better implement lockdowns or risk some kind of popular revolt if the UK’s death rate was much higher than other countries.

The UK worships arr en haech ess, and arr enn haech ess was (according to the press and itself) about to be overwhelmed with corpses and dying grandmothers who had survived the Blitz only to die because Boris didn’t lock down the country. In this context, they made a poor decision. It is worth remembering, though, that even on this right wing forum there were many people advocating harsh lockdowns.

They lost seats to a party that wanted even longer lockdowns enforced even more harshly.

And if Labour was in charge to do the even longer lockdowns enforced even more harshly, Labour would have been kicked out by voters after the economy was even worse. Voters might not understand that lockdowns are the reason the economy is fucked, but they'll punish the incumbents for it all the same.

The Tories u-turned after all neighboring countries had implemented harsh lockdowns and after the press

All neighboring countries had not implemented harsh lockdowns.

Cummings (supposedly intelligent, although I think he’s clearly shown himself otherwise) then panicked and told Boris that he had better implement lockdowns or risk some kind of popular revolt if the UK’s death rate was much higher than other countries.

Cummings was pro-lockdown very early. This seemed to be more out of some infatuation with perceived Asian efficiency/superiority leading to a desire to randomly copy China, rather than any coherent explanation of why lockdowns might work. Only after he broke lockdown restrictions was this memory-holed and the story changed to one where he wasn't supporting them from early on.

As for the idea of a popular revolt over the government not imprisoning you hard enough, how is it coherent to revolt with demand to be imprisoned? If you organically fear covid, why would you pour out into the streets to overthrow a government to replace it with one that will imprison you? Slavish obedience to government and revolt do not go hand in hand.

The UK worships arr en haech ess, and arr enn haech ess was (according to the press and itself) about to be overwhelmed with corpses and dying grandmothers who had survived the Blitz only to die because Boris didn’t lock down the country.

Which fails to explain why the press would claim that the NHS was about to be overwhelmed and that lockdowns would cause it to not be overwhelmed, leaving the origin of the policy unexplained.

Why would people demand such extreme interventions as imprisoning all of society to protect themselves from a spicy cold, while ignoring the 20 QALY bills littering the ground called "stop smoking", "stop being fat", "stop drinking" and such?

Well, one difference would be that Covid interventions were supposed to be temporary, which they indeed were.

If the government was so gung-ho for lockdowns, why did it then eventually stop wanting them? There's a pretty obvious narrative for why the public fear abated - Omicron meant that pretty much everyone got Covid and it was quite mild, so the fear abated - but I've never seen a proper explanation from Covid skeptics why this happened (after and during many of them were mired in doomerism about how the lockdowns would just go on forever and ever or would be reinstated "right the next winter when the cases start rising again" when that didn't happen), apart from saying that some protests in a few countries led to a worldwide ending of restrictions, which would probably make them far and away the most effective protests in the history of mankind.

The UK government did continue being gung-ho for lockdowns "next winter", as in the winter of 21/22. Their failure to implement renewed restrictions that would have lead to lockdowns is likely a confluence of multiple factors limiting their ability to encourage support for them. Some of these factors include:

  1. Less MPs were pro-lockdown now, with more of them slowly being convinced that it was bad policy. Not enough to defeat the government but enough to mean there was organised political opposition to match the disorganised discontent from the public.

  2. Many MPs and the Public perceived that the reintroduction of restrictions was not motivated by covid, but instead to punish people for noticing partygate.

  3. A single journalist asked a question to a covid modeller on Twitter that finally caused the fraudulent modelling justification for restrictions to fall apart, after one of the modellers effectively confessed they were making up worst case scenarios for policy-based evidence-making.

I do not know what motivated the government to do lockdowns in the first place. Nor do I claim to know. And therefore I don't know what motivated them to stop pushing for them as their sole political objective. But I am quite certain that "the public wanted them" cannot explain it, mainly because it cannot explain why the public wanted them without first requiring the government also wanting them.

If the government was so gung-ho for lockdowns, why did it then eventually stop wanting them?

Because people were turning on them in real-time?

But the thesis was that the governments were doing all of this regardless of the public opinion.

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And given the government didn't want to actually take the steps they ended up being forced to take

Pretending to be forced is a pretty common way authorities do what they want while avoiding taking responsibility for it.

It is, But given my ex-position and contacts I can confirm that Boris et al, really did not want to. Not that Boris is principled, just that he thought it was going to make him look bad, due to the financial hit. We even have access to many of his messages as part of the various probes into parties at Number Ten at the like, if you don't (understandably!) want to take some internet strangers word for it.

I am not saying that Boris and the Conservatives had a particularly ideological commitment against lockdowns, and mandates, particularly, just that most of the reports commissioned showed very little gain for considerable cost.

It's worth noting that those reports were accurate, but also that in the US(where age is not the principle political divisor as it is in the UK), opposition to lockdowns on the right was specifically driven by younger conservatives. Older conservatives often held views more similar to their liberal counterparts, although many of them now regret it.

why Covid-era anti-vaccine activism was incomprehensible to a lot of boomers

Yes, but you're also explaining the "cuckservatism" phenomenon more generally. If trusting authority got them out of abject poverty, blindly trusting it to not run off a cliff (and destroy that wealth) is what they are more likely to do, and it's all the more important to them to lose gracefully rather than put up a real fight, and they teach their children to do the same. It's also why they think education (especially college degrees) solve everything. They can't think of the experts being evil or corrupt because in their time they weren't, and have no memetic antibodies against experts that become evil, especially if they perpetrate that evil in Boomers' favor.

People (specifically Americans) born after that time were starting to become more skeptical of that machinery into the '80s and '90s (as evidenced by popular media; government conspiracies and cover-ups were all the rage in the movies and books of the time). That skepticism has grown but slower than it otherwise would have; life expectancy is much longer than it was in the past (another thing they can thank authority and experts for).

The Boomers went through two epidemics about as bad as COVID and barely noticed at the time. Boomer enthusiasm for vaccines is a result of increasing concern with personal health and a shift towards trusting authority with age, not anything that happened in their youth.

Which two? The Hong Kong flu of the late 1960s killed only about a tenth as many people as COVID did in the US. Granted, the population of the US was only about 60% as large back then as it is now, and it is possible that reporting of deaths in one or both pandemics is faulty. But still, I figure that at most, the Hong Kong flu was "only" about a fifth as deadly as COVID.

the population of the US was only about 60% as large back then as it is now

It was also, on average, 10 years younger.

If the age distribution of Hong Kong flu behaved like COVID, then this alone would drop mortality rate by ~60%. Algeria is about 10 years younger than the US, for example. Combined, the effect would be that COVID is about 2.5 times as deadly as Hong Kong flu. The response from authorities was at least several orders of magnitude more severe.

Well, 2.5 times worse is still not exactly "about as bad as COVID".

In any case, no matter what you think about COVID, in my opinion the right-wing reaction to it was bad politics. I can't blame right-wing politicians much for it because in this case it was really more of a grassroots thing from the right-wing base.

Old people vote more than any other age cohort. Old people are also the ones most in danger from COVID. And as someone else pointed out, old people tend to associate vaccines with good things.

Well, 2.5 times worse is still not exactly "about as bad as COVID".

No, but if your response to something as bad as X is nothing, then your response to something as bad as 2.5X should be somewhere between nothing and slightly more than nothing, not to go metaphorically nuclear.

Good point.

And far less obese and diabetic.

The population also smoked a ton, which helped to reduce the obesity rate but which probably didn’t help the flu fatality rate.

The effect of both smoking and obesity on COVID mortality are inconclusive and therefore, at worst, small compared to the effect of age. This is true for pretty much every "comorbidity". It's just hard to do anything to make it more likely you will die of covid that won't get drowned out by being a few years old.

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But have there been any previous epidemics where there existed a loud and visible group of dedicated "anti-vaxxers" whom the boomers didn't deride as hopeless imbeciles? The ones I know grew up looking at parents and other older relatives crippled by polio, watched measles and such get basically stamped out, and universally considered covid anti-vaxxers to be on par with lizardman conspiracists.

The ones I know grew up looking at parents and other older relatives crippled by polio

You don't even have to be a boomer for that. I'm a gen X'er and a childhood friend of mine got infected by polio as a young kid (luckily with no serious long term effects). In a western country.

But have there been any previous epidemics where there existed a loud and visible group of dedicated "anti-vaxxers" whom the boomers didn't deride as hopeless imbeciles?

HIV, and the loud and visible group of "people who are sexually active". Abstinence and it's advocates was treated as hopelessly imbecilic.

And the Swine Flu pandemic, probably because the vaccine distribution was limited, existed to treat something that was probably less bad than regularly circulating flu, and gave some people narcolepsy.

In other words no.

I’m not sure Boomers were all that much more opposed to anti-vaxxers than any other demographic. According to Pew, 22% of Republicans aged 65+ never got the vaccine, and presumably many who got it didn’t care if younger people didn’t (anecdotally, I know this to be true among some of my family and friends, but I unfortunately can’t find good statistics on the subject nationwide). As of February of this year, only 24% of Republicans aged 65+ were up to date on their booster shots, which is a smaller percentage than Democrats in every age category. Both the earlier numbers and the current numbers are quite a bit above the lizardman constant.

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"He just had a fever when he was young and was never the same when the fever went away". This is almost certainly from a preventable childhood disease that no longer exists in the modern world

Or it was something like encephalitis which only certain causes of which have vaccines. People regularly get TBE in the first world despite the existence of a vaccine.

TBE seems pretty rare in Europe.

Overall, for Europe, the estimated risk is roughly 1 case per 10,000 human-months of woodland activity.

And some countries have been able to drive the rate down over the decades.

In Austria, an extensive vaccination program since the 1970s reduced the incidence in 2013 by roughly 85%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis

Wealth is a Good only insofar as it is instrumental toward happiness. When we consider America’s increased wealth we must also consider the difference in lifestyle between today and the past. How are the social stressors? How is nature exposure different? How is family life different? How different is work? How different are inculcated values? Forestry, agriculture, and logging industry workers report superior happiness, superior meaning, and lower stress than finance and insurance workers, which is a blow to the “wealth and happiness are linear across epochs” hypothesis. This difference is probably just due to exposure to the natural environment, as being near forests and mountains and bodies of water are associated with greater life satisfaction. But consider all the effects this has… one hundred and thirty years ago, the median American walked on dirt roads more often, under a canopy of trees, had more contact with horses and livestock, more likely worked in a natural environment. Even just examining one dimension here — the environment — and ignoring the multitude of social and nutritional differences, we should be suspicious of pronouncing a preference for one time period.

Born in a homestead dugout. And you don't want to have a kid because of a car seat?!

Well, the homestead dugout woman was an expert at being a mother through social acculturation. Her daily tasks did not involve cognitive stress or constant multitasking. She probably did not spend 10 hours of her adolescence sitting in a chair in an academic rat race. She did not have to learn how to navigate a stressful high-speed husk of metal to pick up groceries. Everyone she met on the daily was likely the same religion and ancestry, which reduced stress. She probably gardened. I can see how she would have an easier time being a mother just like the Afghani women in wartime Afghanistan had no problem being mothers.

So, what prevented her family from staying in the homestead dugout? Is it just a matter of people making choices that in isolation make sense but collectively destroy the commons? Intentional State policies to shatter and commoditize what once was for the sake of capital?

In my experience, it's a lot of rising standards of living and population growth. The house my grandmother is born in is still currently occupied by her brother. They've doubled it in size since 1930, added a nice shed. It still has a turf stove as it's only heating, but it's got electricity and got access to non-wireless internet service in 2018. But my grandmother was one of 11 kids, and her brother and his wife are the only people living in that house today. The land it sits on will simply only support 6-8 people even at full cultivation, and many of the improvements they made to the property were only possible because of money sent home by relatives that left. The local council strictly controls further development of the area. You can't just settle anywhere you'd like anymore, so the village that supported 200 in 1920 still only supports around 300 today. So, most of them move abroad. And they settle in cities instead of building a new homestead in a strange climate, because most of them did not leave home with more than a few hundred dollars.

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

This sort of presentism is common in a lot of threads. I have frequently commented about how divisive and violent American politics were in previous centuries (even before the Civil War). And how in previous civilizations, contrary to some of our DreadJim-posters, women did not live like chattel under the absolute rule of their Patriarch. It often comes up in discussions about race (I wonder how many of these young black Millenials and Zoomers saying that racism is "as bad today as it was under Jim Crow" have actually asked their grandparents if they agree?)

As you say, previous generations were much poorer than us, relatively speaking, though that goes to the common argument about medieval kings having fewer luxuries than a modern American teenager. "Would you rather be a Roman emperor, or a poor person in 21st century America?" I think a lot of people would prefer to be a Roman emperor, even if they would miss smartphones and flush toilets.

It's very hard to avoid seeing yourself relative to the rest of the world you live in.

What’s the life expectancy of a Roman emperor?

I think a lot of people would prefer to be a Roman emperor, even if they would miss smartphones and flush toilets.

Only the first year. By my second year of my reign we would be firmly into the 1860 technology wise. And probably catch up with ww ii tech by the end of the first decade.

I assume this is a joke, but Rome didn't have the steel-making and cylinder boring technology to have steam power, and training the skilled personnel to actuate those technologies takes more than two years. But, of course, it's irrelevant, because Roman agriculture wasn't good enough to support sufficient numbers of specialists to have an industrial base that makes those technologies do any good, partly because of techniques(high medievals were wealthier than the Romans largely because of better agricultural technique) but also in large part because of a worse crop package. And Roman society didn't have the institutional basis which spread superior agricultural techniques in our universe, because that institution was the medieval church- and building a replacement for that one is a task which is not the work of a single human lifetime.

If Claude is to be believed, you need special high melting point silica bricks (and many other things besides) just to use the Bessemer process. Even going back to the Elizabethan period makes things hard to catch up quickly. The economies of scale weren't there, you didn't have the right precision tools and pumping technology.

Besides, what would you even need steam power for if you aren't trying to mine coal on a large scale anyway? And when you can always use slaves for what mining you do?

(The first use of steam power was in coal mining)

also in large part because of a worse crop package.

This makes me wonder how feasible it would be to reach the Americas with Roman-era ships. Of course, you'd have to make sure your Romans copy the nixtamal technique after bringing back maize, so your poorer citizens don't wind up with widespread pellagra like happened in real life.

If the Romans would have brought potatoes over they wouldn't have had to worry about nixtamalization (potatoes have only slightly less b3 than maize).

A genuine and reasonable question. I know psuedohistorians keep claiming classical/late antiquity transatlantic voyages, and real historians usually don't claim that Roman and Punic ships couldn't have made the voyage. I also know the vikings did it. I assume that means the ships could probably cross the Atlantic in good weather, although navigation technology might not have been up to snuff(I know the vikings had a few navigational techniques the Romans didn't). Hell, the Polynesians made lengthy voyages across the Pacific in the stone age, and there are a few recorded cases of Eskimos showing up in medieval Europe in kayaks.

My off the cuff opinion is that Romans who knew about trade winds and where the Americas were could have gotten here, assuming they had infrastructure built up to launch those expeditions at the right time of year. But they didn't have that kind of knowledge and they didn't try. It raises an interesting question about how the Algonquian Indians in Canada were more able to resist viking settlement than the natives of Ireland, Russia, etc.

Did Romans have proper ocean-going ships, though? Herodotus writes that Phoenicians did some cabotage sailing around Africa (and came back with bullshit stories about the Sun being in the north at noon), but were they limited by navigation or by the ship construction?

Carracks look to me like nothing the Romans had built, but caravels are small enough to be comparable with various merchant vessels of the ancient Med.

By "ocean-going" I assume you mean ships you might actually want to leave sight of land with; then the answer is no. Roman ships traded up and down the Atlantic Coast of Hispania/Gaul/Britain and across the Indian Ocean to India, but with the same kind of coast-hugging galleys they plied the Med with.

Of course this makes you wonder: well how did the Vikings get to North America then? Well they hugged the coast too. @hydroacetylene if you use the trade winds you inevitably arrive in the Americas in the tropics, not from the north like the Viking expeditions did.

The development of the caravel was a marriage of deliberate conceptual design of an oceangoing vessel that was smaller, more flexible, and more capable of weathering storms; as well as technological advances/borrowings in terms of construction and sail design. Kind of a counterfactual thing but it's not easy to imagine the Romans building them. They didn't have the need or the ability.

with the same kind of coast-hugging galleys they plied the Med with

Well, they didn't exclusively coast-hug. They routinely attempted real crossings of the Med - going to Alexandria, Carthage/Tunis and Tripoli by coast hugging just would take much to long. Sure, those crossings aren't huge, and the Med in summer is one of the most benign waters to cross (and they pretty much stopped shipping completely in fall, the Med gets angry in winter). But still, it's sailing without sight of land for at least a day or three.

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It raises an interesting question about how the Algonquian Indians in Canada were more able to resist viking settlement than the natives of Ireland, Russia, etc.

My first guess would be that Ireland is much closer, the Vikings raiding Ireland already had bases in Scotland and you can see parts of Scotland with the naked eye on a sunny day on the Antrim coast.

The distance would make any big setback or defeat fatal, it’s not like the Vikings in Canada could go seek refuge from Saxon kings or with the Norse in the Hebrides if they lost a battle.

Viking greenland was pretty close, and Iceland wasn't that far either.

If we're counting the distance from Newfoundland Iceland was still closer to Ireland by about 1100km. There were single battles in Ireland where more Vikings died than the total population of Greenland (6,000), it does seem like it was just easier to send more people to settle Ireland than Canada.

Yeah, knowing that there's something valuable over the Americas and roughly how far you've got to go/what the weather dynamics are would likely make the process simpler.

It's very hard to avoid seeing yourself relative to the rest of the world you live in.

I think it's because we care about the status that materials goods can afford far more than the goods themselves. The Roman emporer is poor in terms of what stuff he can access, but he is famous and powerful and has many slaves and hangers-on.

That's what people mean when they say they 'can't afford children', they worry that having children would eat into their positional status goods like holidays, clothes, cars and dining out. Food and clothing are dirt cheap, but plane tickets don't discount in bulk. Children can share bedrooms, but that might make you look poor. Because we don't afford status to parents in any meaningful way, having kids is a drop in status for most people.

The Roman emporer is poor in terms of what stuff he can access, but he is famous and powerful and has many slaves and hangers-on.

No, he isn't. He is the master of 25 legions with a palace that stretches for 300 acres and personally owns massive amounts of capital- even in today's dollars. Was John D Rockefeller poor because he didn't have a smart phone?

I'd say he was poorer. Not because of a smart phone, alone, but the average American has far better access to services and goods than Rockefeller did. They can access cheaper, fresher food of greater variety; they can ride in safer, more comfortable cars and hail drivers (or non-drivers!) to take them wherever they want; they can take a weekend jaunt to Paris; they have access to better medical technology; they can access all the world's information with a 50ms latency; they can schedule a session with a tutor on whatever topic they want within a few days on the other side of the world.

Rockefeller does win out on a couple areas compared to an average person today, in areas where certain labor costs still predominate. His housing is probably better quality (though probably not safer). Clothing and small material effects are better crafted. He can afford people to do chores for him (though give it 20 years, and AI personal servants will be widespread). But

They (counting unified/Western only) also averaged 6-7 years on the job. I can’t think of one who was replaced and lived afterwards.

It is amazing to me that the Empire lasted for several hundred years, yet that society never managed to figure out a regular form of succession that people could more or less agree on.

yet that society never managed to figure out a regular form of succession that people could more or less agree on

Sure they did. Rome revealed (but never acknowledged) itself to be ruled by the executive.

In other words, it was a bureaucracy.

Thanks! Completely forgot about him.

That is a remarkable historical fact. Going through this list:

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

As you say, damn near every single one had a reign ending in their death, with a definite majority of those being violent death.

It’s not that remarkable, unless you mean it’s remarkable that any emperor resigned. How many popes have retired in the past 2,000 years? How many monarchs? How many members of the nobility? In a system where the tradition is to remain in power until your death (and especially when that power comes with significant advantages), the only surprising thing is that some people choose to resign.

Japanese emperors usually ended their reigns by abdication, because they had no real power, and their lives were circumscribed and boring, with endless religious ceremonies they had to perform.

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Are African dictators poor? Their countries are, but most of them seem to be billionaires despite their hazardous jobs.

This creates an odd scenario where you could reasonably argue that a few modern despots are the wealthiest people ever. Near-infinite monetary wealth, combined with modern amenities and technology, combined with ancient style control over other people.

Stalin wins out I think on total amount of control of resources, but he does miss out on some modern goods. Perhaps Putin as wealthiest person ever? I could see arguments for other despots as well.

Perhaps Putin as wealthiest person ever?

Even Putin doesn't quite have the ancient-style control, though.

I would argue that the wealthiest person on Earth to date was the former (de facto) king of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.

Surely the king of Saudi Arabia beats him on that metric.

In any case I’d point to Xi Jinping as a very reasonable candidate for de facto wealthiest man in world history.

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The Roman emporer is poor in terms of what stuff he can access, but he is famous and powerful and has many slaves and hangers-on.

It sometimes crosses my mind that these are very different measures of wealth that people probably use interchangeably. The wealth of "other people's time" is actually zero-sum: the guy at the bottom of the totem pole will never get anyone's time. You might think robotics and computers could fix this, but my dishwasher saves countless person-hours and hasn't given me any (well, at least much) social status.

To some extent, it might make sense to consciously get people to adopt non-zero-sum measures for status. Not sure how practical that is, though.

it might make sense to consciously get people to adopt non-zero-sum measures for status.

Is this even theoretically possible, though? Status is a relative position, and a rising tide does not lift all boats. It'd be akin to raising everyone's SAT scores—you're still going to have a 99th percentile and a 5th percentile, along with the correlated benefits (or lack thereof).

One idea I've seen is having a multiplicity of status hierarchies. One person's status derives from being best in the world at chess; another at speed running Super Mario; another at laparoscopic surgery.

In practice, we could have that now, but we don't. My hypothesis is that by having a global status domain, the status hierarchies that can exist just aren't numerous enough to give everyone or even a substantial minority one they can sit on top of. Perhaps if instead we just compared against people in our neighborhood or city, things would be better.

One idea I've seen is having a multiplicity of status hierarchies . . . In practice, we could have that now, but we don't.

My instinct is that we absolutely have a multiplicity of status hierarchies operating today in a largely independent fashion. For example, there are plenty of American sub-groups in which status and money don't seem closely aligned. If you're a full professor of history at a large state university, then your status among colleagues will derive primarily from your research output and its reception. If you're a Hasidic Jew in Brooklyn, then your status in the synagogue will derive from your knowledge of Torah. If you're a Texas adolescent boy, then your status at school will derive from how many touchdowns you throw. These qualities are not closely related to earnings (if they're even related at all).

Arguably we already have that though. Magnus Carlson might not be a household name to everyone but he’s hot shit to anyone who’s remotely familiar with competitive chess. Bobby Fischer and Gary Kasparov and Boris Spassky were household names, to the point that they became important symbols and agents for national cultural struggles. The way they were talked about was closer to war heroes than people who play a game that involves moving small figurines around a checkered board. And I’m sure the top laparoscopic surgeons of the world probably feel they have a great deal more status than the average white collar wage laborer. I’ve also seen stories about internet content creators who are nobodies to the world at large, but if they walked into a comic con they would be treated like royalty.

I thought I had remembered a quote from de Tocqueville explaining that every American was content with his station in life because every American would at some point serve as president, chairman, or other elected official of an association, board, committee, government body, etc. So while he may be just another face in the crowd in one context, he would be a respected leader in another. I can’t find the quote I’m thinking of, but taken together, these two seem to speak to the same phenomenon, albeit more obliquely:

Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types- religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Americans combine to give fêtes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take shape in that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth of propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.

And

The federal government does confer power and renown on those who direct it, but only a few can exercise influence there. The high office of President is hardly to be reached until a man is well on in years; as for other high federal offices, there is a large element of chance about attaining to them, and they go only to those who have reached eminence in some other walk of life. No ambitious man would make them the fixed aim of his endeavors. It is in the township, the center of the ordinary business of life, that the desire for esteem, the pursuit of substantial interests, and the taste for power and self-advertisement are concentrated; these passions, so often troublesome elements in society, take on a different character when exercised so close to home and, in a sense, within the family circle.

With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs. Apart from the voters, who from time to time are called on to act as the government, there are many and various officials who all, within their sphere, represent the powerful body in whose name they act. Thus a vast number of people make a good thing for themselves out of the power of the community and are interested in administration for selfish reasons.

I think it's an interesting, if somewhat abstract question. As a counterpoint, Maslow's hierarchy doesn't include "being superior to others", and plenty of religions try to challenge a relative notion of status: "the last shall be first", or the notion of kharma.

I think a lot of people would prefer to be a Roman emperor, even if they would miss smartphones and flush toilets.

Depends on the emperor tbh

Some monkey's paw situation, in which you get to be emperor, but the year is 69AD.

See the Twilight Zone "I'M HITLER?!" meme

And you don't want to have a kid because of a car seat?!

Correction: people with two kids don't want a third, because car seat laws force you to buy a bigger car, which is still a substantial expense for most people.

See, car seats are usually so wide that you can't fit three in the back of a typical sedan or SUV, plus several states require kids to be in car seats or booster seats to a surprisingly high age - my home state of Pennsylvania doesn't allow kids to go without one until the age of 8!

And, y'know, we also have cheap and reliable contraceptives now, alongside all that cheap food.

Do you have to use an actual car seat? Older kids can sit on booster seats that are much smaller and lower cost than a car seat. Example

A quick googling says Pennsylvania law requires a booster seat between ages 4 and 8.

We do indeed own a couple of booster seats since our kids are in that age range, but you might want to take a second look at the specs on the one you just linked - it's 17.5 inches wide, which means if you want to fit three across then your car's back seat needs to be at least 52.5 inches wide, but actually more because you have to be able to reach in between the booster seats to buckle/unbuckle the kids. I haven't taken a tape measure to my own car seats, but we bought average sized ones and our cars aren't tiny and there still really isn't room for a third seat there.

I have a carseat and a booster in the back of a midsized sedan. It looks to me like I could fit 3 boosters back there. But I understand reaching your hands between the click the belts would not be easy.

The Nissan Altima is a mid-size sedan with 54.5 inches of rear hip room

With the Accord, you get 55 inches of rear hip room

The Camry has 54.6 inches of rear hip room

I have 3 kids, 1 was in a booster while 2 were still in their car seat. I made it work for a short time with 3 in the backseat of my crossover, but I had to buy a seatbelt extender just to be able to buckle in the booster seat.

See, car seats are usually so wide that you can't fit three in the back of a typical sedan or SUV

Usually. Slim-size carseats are more expensive but I can testify that they do fit three across a backseat.

This is one of those things that absolutely infuriates me as a numerate parent.

There’s strong evidence that child seats are much safer for very young children, but my understanding is there’s virtually no statistically significant increase in safety after children reach a certain size, like around 3 years old.

Quite literally at least a generation of third children were never born because of this spurious legislation and regulatory nonsense.

While my wife and I only have two children, we would have likely wanted a third even if we met and married just a year before we did. And getting a larger car would have been prohibitively expensive, even a used one.

I think the link between status and fertility as often is discussed here is a valid one, and the concept of ‘cultural inflation’ has vast explanatory power to mend the massive gap between our greatly increased wealth and our cratering fertility; you’re simply expected to buy a lot more shit and do a lot more expensive things to not be considered “low status”, and I think avoiding low status is much more paramount and painful than achieving high status for the vast majority of people.

The sort of benign neglect that many high functioning millennials / gen x / boomers got from their parents is simply no longer acceptable to society.

A married couple with noble hearts and the love and affection of their kin and community with still be considered a piece of garbage if they roll up in a beater station wagon with four kids with hand me down clothes and bologna sandwiches in brown bags.

I feel like there used to be a place for people who were humble but respected and respectable, I don’t think it’s false nostalgia to perceive that we no longer really have that option, ironically it’s been swept away partially by the huge growth in wealth.

My wife and I are extremely disagreeable & nonconformist types but even we are affected by this kind of intense material snobbery that our unbelievably wealthy society has produced. Collectively we have gone all in on K-Strategy and basically gutted the vast middle ground of family lifestyle that the majority of the world has occupied up until literally maybe a generation ago.

A married couple with noble hearts and the love and affection of their kin and community with still be considered a piece of garbage if they roll up in a beater station wagon with four kids with hand me down clothes and bologna sandwiches in brown bags.

If they have the love and affection of kin and community, who are these people considering them garbage for not having the latest material things, and why do they care?

My wife and I are extremely disagreeable & nonconformist types but even we are affected by this kind of intense material snobbery that our unbelievably wealthy society has produced.

Did you consider that you could just ignore the law?

I routinely ignore stupid laws as a matter of principle, however it must be said the penalty and fine for breaking that particular law can be pretty steep.

As to your other point, in our atomized age social status and the benefits they infer aren’t necessarily given by your immediate neighbors, family and friends. You’ll be happy to have their love and respect on your deathbed but increasingly in order to actually achieve any sort of real success you have to be plugged into a larger scene which is chock full of the fake and gay bullshit that I routinely complain about. That stuff has a monetary cost, not merely a psychological one.

Me personally, I’ve been somewhat lucky to find a niche which allows me to not worry too much about nebulous social status. It helps that I’m not personally very ambitious, but merely concerned with living an excellent life as an example for my children and hopefully their children.

Did you consider that you could just ignore the law?

I have literally never heard of somebody keeping their kid in a car seat up until legally required.

And yet you were willing to get slim carseats to fulfill those requirements. In general people have become far more conformist. Part of this is the vast increase in state capacity (and increase in punishments). Part is a somewhat-overblown fear of same (parents worry CPS will take away their children if they get a car-seat ticket).

Due to the belief that standard seat belts will not fit on a child under four feet tall, yes.

Like I said, more conformist. And safetyist. When I was an elementary-school-aged kid, there were only lap belts in the back seats anyway. Too many kids for the car? Stick some in the cargo area, it'll be fine.

Or as we used to call it in the station wagon, the way way back.

Well yes, concern for the safety of the children themselves when it just looks like seatbelts don't fit right trumps not letting the government tell you what to do. In some ways increased safety consciousness is bad, but my mother was breastfed in the front seat of the car; I don't think we should go back to that.

More comments

The new cars don’t come with the option of lap belt only, and the one time I picked the four year old up having forgotten the car seat, she complained about how uncomfortable it was the whole way home.

Stick some in the cargo area, it'll be fine.

Classic Balkanic coming of age experience

my home state of Pennsylvania doesn't allow kids to go without one until the age of 8!

Meanwhile, in the land of 'you got a loicence for that?' kids are required to have a car seat until they're 12! (Although I just learned that there is an exception for families with three children which seems sensible)

Plus we have the lowest nursery teacher to child ratio in Europe so childcare is crazy expensive. It's like they don't want us to have children! (I say that flippantly, the real culprit is safetyism).

Meanwhile, in the land of 'you got a loicence for that?' kids are required to have a car seat until they're 12!

Is this true? That's insanity. By the time I was 12 I was quickly gaining on my own mother in height.

Looks like it's age 12 or 135cm (4' 5"), whichever comes first. The internet tells me that on average this is at age ten for boys and age nine for girls. Still crazy, of course.

The law is actually 12 years or 4’5, whichever comes first.

In addition there appear to be some major caveats:

Unexpected journeys If the correct child car seat isn’t available, a child aged 3 or older can use an adult seat belt if the journey is all of the following:

  • unexpected
  • necessary
  • over a short distance

You can’t take children under 3 on an unexpected journey in a vehicle without the correct child car seat, unless both of the following apply:

  • it’s a licensed taxi or minicab
  • the child travels on a rear seat without a seat belt

No room for a third child car seat: Children under 3 must be in a child car seat. If there’s no room for a third child car seat in the back of the vehicle, the child must travel in the front seat with the correct child car seat.

Children aged 3 or older can sit in the back using an adult belt.

So large families (provided at least one child is older than 3) seem to be pretty much fully exempted.

Sadly, the idea that anyone might consider trade-offs is so ridiculous that it’s played for laughs by comedians.

It doesn't matter how many iPhones or how much fried chicken you can afford if housing is unaffordable and most of "wealth" is actually just zero-sum status games anyways.

This obvious sign this is true is people complain about "income inequality" not "poverty"

See also the invention of the new phrase "food-insecure"

In the future, egalitarian causes will use newer phrases that describe the future ways that the relative-low-status are relatively low status. That means ignoring the number of spacecrafts that the average poor can fabricate.

It is all envy, all the way down

Yeah. Whenever this subject comes up, some people will bring up smartphones and touchscreens, how they didn't even exist, how much memory they process etc. It's just a nonsensical misdirection. In 1980, I'm pretty sure you could work as some well-off bigshot lawyer with one phone nr. and two rotary phones in your fancy office. Today if you're the lowliest subcontractor / gig worker / part-time employee wagecuck, you're still expected to have a smartphone and have one or two DM apps installed because you're expected to be available anytime, any place.

I liked the book Accelerando. At one point in it they are post scarcity. The Hello Kitty artificial intelligence introduction speech to newly created people says things like monster trucks are free. Only original art, human made fashion and weapons are not distributed by Hello Kitty. Snobbish and exclusive positional goods like new fashions are the only really hard to get things.

Great book, horrible ending. Which is about in-line with anything Charlie Stross writes.

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