What you’re saying is true in regard to American farmers in general. They owned their land and they owned the crops they produced on their land. If they had an excess above what they needed to live on, they were able to sell it for a profit.
But that was not generally true in history. (It wasn’t even always true in America.) A more common formula was the farmer worked on land that somebody else owned. They were expected to pay the landowner for the use of the land. Hopefully there would be enough left over afterwards to feed their family.
It might have been theoretically possible for a farmer to raise produce enough that they could pay for the land use, feed their family, and still have something left over to sell. But what was more likely was the landowner would announce that the land was obviously more productive than he had realized and he was therefore increasing the expected payment for its use.
In a situation like this, you were better off aiming to be a subsistence farmer. If you produced the amount of food that was expected, you’d be expected to produce the same amount in the future. If you demonstrated you were able to produce more food than was expected, you’d be expected to produce that greater amount in the future.
It’s difficult to talk about the medieval period because it encompasses a great many years and places. But as I understand it, the peasant would pay their landlord rent in the form of some crop like rye or animal goods like eggs, fish, chickens, etc., etc. Such a system cannot exist if subsistence farming is the norm as it requires farmers to produce a surplus over what they need to survive.
I don’t think that would make them subsistence farmers. A subsistence farmer is one who produces only enough food to survive with little surplus. Such a farmer could not produce enough to pay their rent. i.e. The whole manorial system would collapse in short order. At least in England, landowners were often bound by laws and customs just as the peasants were.
While I don’t want to paint a rosy picture of life for the peasant, I don’t think their lives were just abject misery all the time. It would have been hard compared to most of ours, but they were able to live full rich lives.
Perhaps the problem is we’re using a different meaning for subsistence.
I mean subsistence not in the sense that you’re just producing enough food to feed yourself. I mean it in the wider sense that you’re producing enough food to feed yourself and your family, you’re able to feed whatever livestock you have, you’re able to put aside some seeds for next year’s planting, and you’re able to pay your rent. But when you’re done at the end of the year, you have no more than you had at the end of the previous year. You never have anything extra you can put aside. Subsistence farming in this sense is the equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck. You’re doing okay but you have no margin for bad luck.
Malthus was right for most of human history: economic growth where it existed was typically shunted towards bigger families and a larger population. America was different since even before the era of fast economic growth starting in 1870, it had abundant resources for Europeans relative to other places.
From another perspective, growth picked up in 1500. But it really picked up after 1870. Vox report on Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia:
DeLong reports that in 1870, an average unskilled male worker living in London could afford 5,000 calories for himself and his family on his daily wages. That was more than the 3,000 calories he could’ve afforded in 1600, a 66 percent increase — progress, to be sure. But by 2010, the same worker could afford 2.4 million calories a day, a nearly five hundred fold increase.
How the hell do you feed your entire family on 5000 calories, never mind 3000 calories? We are living in the best of times assuming 20 year spans are rounding error, though the first derivative for the US is currently negative. Not so for the average human though.
It really looks that we had as much technological change and progress between 1870 and today as we had between 6000 BC and 1870 AD.
As for 2065, I can imagine a range of plausible scenarios including continued prosperity, accelerating prosperity, a @Der_Trihs hellscape, and continued prosperity with the US in pronounced relative decline to the remainder of the world.
Let’s contrast life for a typical person before 1870 with a typical person today. Since the majority of us are female, that typical person would be a woman.
You cite a very striking statistic in the book: the average number of years of a woman’s life spent either pregnant or breastfeeding. That has gone down dramatically, from 20 years of a typical woman’s life in 1870 to four years today. Explain that number to me, and what it means.
You have this biological situation in which one in seven women appears to die in childbirth; in which [to expect] one son surviving, you need to have two kids survive, which means three reach early adulthood, which means four reach the age of 5, which means seven or so babies born, which means nine advanced pregnancies.
Once you become an undernourished, agrarian Malthusian being, all of a sudden you are biometrically close to being effed completely.
Your children’s immune systems are too compromised to fight off the common cold. Maybe you’re too skinny to ovulate. If you aren’t, maybe you lose two teeth and break an arm as the baby leeches calcium out of your body into itself. Then you add on to that the fact that patriarchy means that if you are female, your only durable source of social power is to have surviving sons. And so any temptation to do much of anything other than have surviving sons, and then have more as insurance, is very hard to resist. Those are the biological, ecological, economic forces tending toward patriarchy, of which men as a group then took absolutely horrible advantage.
And yet once technological progress starts to hit 2 percent per year, then some people begin to have incomes above subsistence and infant mortality falls. But those changes came remarkably quickly.
20 years of pregnancy or breastfeeding. On maybe 5000 calories per day for the entire family, maybe less. Huh.
Let’s also not forget running water and flush toilets. Those are pretty awesome.
I think a lot of people don’t realize how common it was for children to die up until quite recently. Parents started families expecting that some of their children would die.
This was brought home to me when I read Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s about Lincoln forming his first administration and Goodwin gives brief biographies of the men in Lincoln’s cabinet. And I noticed that most of them - Lincoln, Edward Bates, Montgomery Blair, Hannibal Hamlin, William Seward, Edwin Stanton, John Usher, and Gideon Welles - had experienced the death of at least one child.
These were not men on the fringes. Quite the opposite; this was a collection of some of the most successful men in the country. But even in this group, losing a child was a common experience.
To those arguing that being a peasant was anything but a grueling existence:
There is a job opening to live in my shed and be our indentured servant. If you want I can beat you senseless no more than 6x a years (no medical services are provided)
If you have any children I will do with them as I please.
Boys will be conscripted in my private army, girls… well you know what medieval lords did with peasants girls.
(I on the other hand will send them to school, one with proper history education)
I’ll await your application with bated breath.
Or you can just admit this whole line of reasoning requires an unbelievably romantic and ignorant understanding of medieval life.
There are no peasants without nobility. You cannot have nobility without exploitation of the peasants.
If you think life during the black plague was preferable to our experience with COVID I don’t know what to tell you.
To answer the OP:
I think in the US the best time was just before COVID/Trump (as reflected in life expectancy data). Mostly everywhere else in the world the best time is now (again: as reflected in life expectancy data)
Regardless of the endlessly debatable question of “best time,” the use of life expectancy alone without some measure of quality of life is a reflection of how blind our view of what a life is has become.
I’ll reiterate: One of the problems when it comes to discussing the medieval period in Europe is we’re lumping in different cultures in different locations across a significant span of time. The medieval period covers the 5th century AD and ended in the 15th century. The life of a medieval peasant in Northumbria wasn’t the same in the 6th century as it was in the 9th or 11th centuries nor was it necessarily the same as the lives of peasants in Bavaria or the Duchy of Aquitaine.
I’m not here to romanticize the medieval period. The skeletal remains of medieval peasants show evidence of malnutrition, disease, and years of hard labor. I subscribe to the belief that we’re living in the best time and I wouldn’t trade that for the life of a peasant. I wouldn’t trade it for the life of a medieval noble either. But I categorically reject the idea that a peasants life was necessarily miserable.
I’d say it’s a necessary foundation. If you want to form any kind of assessment of how good people’s lives are, you have to start by saying they’re alive. People who are dead are, by default, not living in the best time in history.
Certainly. Again though, this metric alone tells us almost nothing about “best.” How do you compare a 100-year-old who suffered miserably each day of their life with a 10-year-old who lived a rich and comfortable, though short, life?
The point is that when you are looking at large groups of people there are not many indicators more effective in determining the wellbeing of them all than life expectancy.
It is an effective stand-in for health and happiness.
Of course it doesn’t do any justice to individual experiences, it is just a number. But also makes it sort of objective.
What are your cites for this? And how do you explain that they kept revolting, even knowing that revolts were doomed and leaders were subjected to horrifying deaths?
ninja’d, but if you are trying to compare individuals instead of populations perhaps you’re in the wrong thread.
Is the “J Curve of Rising Expectations” that you brought up earlier in this thread relevant here?
But I think @Odesio’s point is that “the medieval period” and “medieval peasants” cover such a wide range, chronologically and geographically, that it’s dangerous to generalize. Were there times and places when the peasants didn’t revolt?
Reminds me of a list - not the same list, of course, but very similar in feeling - that I came up with, off the top of my head, in a conversation back in the mid-1970s. Wars, environmental disasters, the ever-present threat of nuclear Armageddon, the U.S. supporting horrible authoritarian rulers all over the globe because they were ‘anti-Communist’, meanwhile life absolutely sucked for practically everyone ruled by the Communists.
That idea had already been set out in Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), that revolutions arise from a period of rising expectations interrupted by an abrupt reversal.
(Dammit, was it Mr. Gorman in Government class, or Mr. Hupart in Modern European History, that had us read that book? I think it must’ve been Hupart. RIP, good sir. Lordy, did I ever have some great teachers that year. Groveton Tigers, represent!)
I think it’s inarguably true that in pure raw material terms, we’re living in the best of times.
As far as it goes, it’s an uncontroversial enough observation, but the problem is that it tends to be deceptively used to advance other conclusions - i.e. “things are great, there’s no urgent need to understand risks or threats or injustice or all the very real problems that are still with us.”
This also applies to Pinker’s work with evolutionary psychology as well, which makes me highly suspicious of Pinker in general. In the scientific arena he’s “just asking questions”, but he’s a little too cozy with race scientists, IQ truthers, “free speech advocates” who mainly seem interested in advancing stereotypes, and of course the fraud known as the “Intellectual Dark Web”.
Sometimes you need to observe how ideas are being used in order to fully understand why they’re being propounded.