A straightforward question - how did the overall standard of living and factors like mortality rate change for different European, Asian and African civilisations? Has the SoL been rising more or less steadily for all of them with relatively minor fluctuations, or are some peoples actually worse off than 2000/1000/500/200 years ago?
I am sure you could easily fill an entire book with a fully researched answered to that question; several books perhaps.
It would depend on exactly how you define SoL and what you would consider minor fluctuations, I guess. It regularly goes down or slows increasing during wars, revulutions etc. Some radical regimes can really fuck up the situation locally, but if you take a long view over centuries and milenia that might not count for much more than a blip.
For Europe we can certainly say that ever since people have started taking an intrest in science a few centuries ago things have been looking up. Before that it was pretty static for a long time and it might even be said that the fall of the Roman/Greek civilization was a step back for many people.
For Africa it is not quite as clear. The widespread lack of written records makes it hard to say anything about what life was like centuries or millenia ago in most of Africa. The arrival of modern medical concepts definetly had a positive influence on things and european colonialism despite all the bad it has done could be arguably said to have raised the standards of living throughout the world. Unfortunately Africa is in large parts not very politically stable and overall very poor so that the improvements are not as clear as they would be elsewhere. Aids epidemics and warlords tend to overshadow the benfits of modern medical knowledge especially if many people still do not have running water.
I guess you could pick any country or region in the world where people are currently very bad off and then try to look back to a time when the regions inhabitants were not actively starving or the victims of an ongoing genocide to show that their standard of living has gone down. But one might argue that suck picking and choosing are just blips in a long view perspective.
I can’t give a citation, but I remember reading that the average height of people in England at the beginning of the Christian era went down steadily through the middle ages and then began to rise again, but not getting back to that of year 0 until the middle of the last century. Presumably that is mainly a measure of the adequacy of nutrition in childhood.
Another thing I have read is that while agriculture sustained much larger populations than hunting and gathering, the average health declined because the diet became very starchy rather than based on fruit and animal protein (including insects, which are very important in most primate diets. (Whatever the ethical considerations, I do not accept any claim that a vegan diet is especially healthy.)
What about on a shorter timeframe?
Has it gone down since the 50’s here in the U.S.?
Used to be one person in the family worked full time and all ends were met… now… not so easy.
That question is almost impossible to answer. It depends too much on how you define SOL.
It used to be that one person in the family worked full time and all ends were met, but that statement contains an important and unwritten assumption. The assumption is that “all ends” entails a single B&W TV, a single car, a refrigerator and basically no other electrical appliances. It also assumes that people 50 years ago were happy that a diagnosis of cancer was a death sentence, that a severe injury meant amputation, that gunshot wounds were fatal, that congenital deafness was a lifelong disability and so on and so forth.
By this stage you should hopefully be seeing why your question can’t be answered. Me, personally I think that my SOL is much higher than it could ever have been on the 50s simply because of the medical advances possible now. Organ transplants, retroviral drugs, microsurgery and so forth are very expensive treatments and I have never needed to use them, nonetheless I am very grateful that they exist should I ever need them. If my wife or I had to work full time solely to provide our partner and children with those things then it would still a small price to pay for that safety net. The fact that we can afford to own three TVs, have air conditioning, two cars, a computer, internet, a mobile phone etc. is just icing, but it does make life so much nicer and easier than could ever possibly have been 50 years ago.
There’s really no easy way to compare purchasing power and SOL with the world 50 years ago because so many things people want and need simply weren’t available at any price in the 50s. That doesn’t mean that people were effectively wealthier because they worked less. It could just mean that people didn’t waste their money on frivolities like chemotherapy and heart bypasses.
What Blake said on the 1950’s lifestyle. People often complain that things are so much harder to afford than they were in the 1950’s. The problem is that “things” then compare poorly to things now.
Most families could afford a 1950’s lifestyle on one income now very easily. That would include an average house size of a little over 1000 feet probably put up quickly after WWII. One car would be easy to afford because the materials and engineering were pretty simple. I would opt for a model where you can get optional seatbelts though because crappy tires and handling combined with poor crash engineering could put a hurt on you. There are places that will sell you a serviceable 50’s model even today.
One very plain refrigerator and a simple gas stove and oven won’t set you back much. As you probably know a, black and white TV and maybe a record player can be had for next to nothing but here you can’t help but improve on the reliability of the older ones.
Medical insurance is very expensive now but luckily, you can just drop it and pay out of pocket. Going to a clinic to get some limited antibiotics, bones breaks set, and a handful of other things the doctors could actually do effective back then won’t really cost much in the long-run so just pay for it.
Clothing roughly in the same style and quality of everyday 1950’s clothing should be very cheap in real terms. Advances in materials science and outsourced production make clothes as cheap as ever.
Food - “Ever heard of putting food on the table.” It is a cute phrase but people never took that seriously in recent times in the U.S. right? WRONG. Food takes up a tiny percentage of today’s household budget compared to then. In 1950, milk alone could eat up 10% of the annual household budget. Maybe that is why companies were happy to delivery. Lots of big-ticket items get delivered. People get lazy these days with buying quality food but you can stick to the same standards they had and get better quality, range of goods, and quantity.
Retirement - don’t focus on that too much because you probably won’t live much past working age and a good chance not even that long.
The point is that most people wouldn’t have trouble affording a tony New York apartment like in the Honeymooners or a nice suburban ranch house like on Leave it to Beaver.
Sanitation and toilet facilities have made big strides in the last 100 years or so. In 1800 London even if you were rich you crapped in a bucket (ok maybe an ornate ceramic pot) and the waste was thrown out the window onto city streets. Certain ancient cultures had a sort of plumbing, but nothing like we have today.
I think that a less error-prone and perhaps more interesting question may be to assess civilization’s happiness/unhappiness ration throughout time. This would certainly have some correlation with SOL, but it would not be wholly dependant upon it. I’m certain that some form of a happiness/unhappiness ratio will be readily quantifiable with soon-to-be developed advanced brain scanning techniques. So, although the question may be purely subjective now (though interesting to debate), it should be testable by scientific method in the future.
As has already been discussed, it is difficult to accurately compare average SOL today with that from the past and I’m tempted to believe that as technology advances, so does the SOL. But, I’m really not comfortable with that assessment. I’m more comfortable speculating on the happiness/unhappiness ratio today vs. the past.
Example: H/U 1950’s vs. Today: My guess is that, at least for the average American, the ratio was higher in the 50’s than now. I base this on many factors, including, but not limited to:
-More complexity/anxiety in today’s world.
-More perceived danger today. Indeed, worrying about A-bombs falling from the sky and other dangers occupied many ’50’s minds, but today there are a greater number of perceived dangers and they are less concrete (i.e. we could all rally around an “us vs. them” mentality with the Red Menace; today, danger seems to lurk around every corner and it’s hard to identify).
- On average, the family unit was more stable. It may be un-PC to suggest, but IMO the family hierarchy model of one parent at home with the kids leads to more comfort and security (at least for hubby and the kids
). Were ‘50’s women happier than contemporary women? That question is more difficult to answer, but I still think “yes”. It may be hard for a contemporary woman to happily transition into a stay-at-home-mom, but the average 50’s married woman did not know any different and they were not chastised for staying home. - You don’t long for what is not available. Indeed, people in the ’50 had, at best, 1 B&W TV, 1 car, few advanced appliances etc, but this was all cutting edge to them. If they had a time-machine glimpse into the 21st century, perhaps they would envy our technology, but as it was, they were thrilled with what they had. Me? I long for some of the ‘50’s technology – I still can’t figure out how to get the red 12:00 to stop blinking on my VCR.
If the OP wishes to morph the question from SOL through time into happiness/unhappiness ratio through time, I would be interested in hearing other opinions. If not, I’m sorry for the hijack and maybe I’ll pose a similar question in Great Debates.