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This depended a lot on where you were living, no? Keynes describes pre-ww1 London as an oddly modern place:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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!
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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:
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.
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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?
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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.
On the contrary, I think personal reputation is extremely important in a space like this, particularly because it helps one make a probabilistic assessment of how likely one’s interlocutor is to be telling the truth, or in this case how likely he or she is to be accidentally making a false or misleading argument without realizing it. You were fortunate that I posted links and raw numbers that could be easily used against me, but if I had made an unsourced or more unspecified claim, you’d have to either figure out a source for yourself or take my word for it. In that sense, having a written record of my own carelessness with numbers will help lower other users’ future assessment of the reliability of my claims. To that extent, personal reputation as it pertains to honesty and sound reasoning is quite useful.
To be quite clear, I actually readily agree with this, and have made the same point before. The early Marxists were clearly not just making it all up when they spoke about the ruthless exploitation of the proletariat. Contrary to the Joo-posters’ claims that Jews were the primary drivers of communism, a great many countries - America very much included - had strong indigenous leftist movements well into the 20th century, with Jewish involvement at best sporadic and incidental. It’s precisely the work of moderate, non-Marxist Progressive reformers that reined in the rapaciousness of the robber barons enough to stave off serious revolutions. (One of these days I’m going to do a deep-dive into the abortive Revolutions of 1848, to really understand exactly what sort of people spearheaded them and exactly what they were fighting for.)
Now, while my claim was less correct than it should have been due to my poor mathematical reasoning, it is also still fair to point out that Victorian England’s homicide rates were comparable to today’s, but with far worse policing and medical care. If you took the same society and added modern forensic technology, surveillance technology, and the medical care needed to turn what would have been a murder in 1850 into a mere assault, you would be looking at a very low-murder-rate society.
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What's interesting is that I've long held the opposite intuition -- but that certainly comes from having read the works of classical opponents of Industrial Britain like Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, who valorized rural, pre-industrial ways of living. No one can read Hard Times and come away with a positive impression of Victorian factory labor.
Not that farming in pre-modern times was very nice either. Wistful conservatives, even Anabaptists, often forget that agricultural labor was considered to be a curse.
The unique gift of contemporary liberalism is the extinction of the material threats that have plagued our existence since
the Fallthe Agricultural Revolution. But this gift comes with a curse: the extinction of the spiritual means that unite people and enable them to endure hardship. Nietzsche once wrote, "he who has a why to live can bear almost any how," and though we have fixed a great deal of the hows we find ourselves increasingly befuddled as to the whys. And a house of cards built upon the how instead of the why is liable to catastrophic collapse.More options
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