SleuthSayers

Isn't this the case with any invention that greatly improves productivity? Ask early 1800s English textile workers. Their wages did not return back to late 1700s peak, inflation adjusted, till WWI. Does that mean that mechanisation of textile industry was a bad thing? It meant people no longer had to wear $5000 T-shirts (https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.… - I inflation-adjusted $3500 from 2013 to today).

This is enormously informative (and also long) article. It reminds me about shorter one https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.… containing following calculation: So, 7 hours for sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 for spinning, or 579 hours total to make one shirt. At minimum wage - $7.25 an hour - that shirt would cost $4,197.25. And that's just a standard shirt. And that's not counting the work that goes into raising sheep or growing cotton and then making the fiber fit for weaving.

Candles were certainly more labor intensive and valuable when he stole them than today. Consider the example of the $3500 shirt: http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.h… As in one of the other comments, you'll see that it is worth about $6000 if you look at GDP per capita; which would be more than a month of someone's effort at the current US median income.

We also had thousands of years where basically everyone was poor and there wasn't anywhere near enough production so that there was a hope or a prayer of not everyone being poor. The middle class is a relatively recent phenomena. A great example of this is "The $3500 shirt" article that made it to HN a while ago: http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.h… > Which is why we invented governmental action to solve them. Which has proved extremely effective. I was under the impression that the whole point of the article -- and also the book -- was that the programs in place currently are not effective. If they were, there would be no "Mary Sue"s, there'd be only "Miriam"s and there would be no problem.

Because efficient companies produce goods and services for lower prices than inefficient companies, which, happening at scale throughout the economy, lowers the cost of living and raises the standard of living for everyone. An increase in the amount of goods and services produced per head is the definition of economic growth, which most of us consider to be a good thing. Improvements to our quality of living essentially require economic growth. Take a listen to this NPR Planet Money podcast (and article) called "The History of Light" [1]. It describes how much it cost to light a room, in terms of a typical day's wages, at various points in history until today: > The history of light is the history of economic growth — of things getting faster, cheaper, and more efficient. In Babylonian times, 4,000 years ago, a day's labor would buy very little light. You could buy enough light to illuminate a room but not for very long. Maybe 10 minutes. It was really expensive. Today, a day's worth of wages can afford to light a room for thousands of hours. This affordability has radically changed our society, mostly for the positive. It's now possible to study and be productive in the evening. Many of the improvements to the efficiency of lighting also enabled cheap heating as well. Another related interesting article is "The $3500 Shirt - A History Lesson in Economics" [2]. This one traces the cost of clothing from the middle ages to today. Consider: why did people used to wear…

There are a bunch of similar articles describing costs in the Middle Ages. Here's one example (there's another on the bookandsword.com site, too): https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.…

Perhaps this: https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.… And yup, it took around 600 hours of labor to spin the thread and weave the cloth needed for a single shirt.

Also important was mechanized spinning of thread. https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.… cites making a shirt in the middle ages as 7 hours of hand-sewing, 42 hours of hand-weaving, and 500+ hours of hand-spinning. https://thefreelancehistorywriter.com/2015/10/23/was-medieval-spinning… has much higher estimates of spinning rates, but would still result in at least 40 hours of spinning (9000 yards from that first post divided by the 200 m/hr very generous overestimate from the second post; estimates of spinning speed seem to vary _very_ widely). One difference, of course, is that weaving was much more centralized to start with (spinning needed next to no machinery and a lot less training), so the economic impacts were very different.

> Three hundred years ago, full-time wives did about 60 hours/week of housework. This is a woeful underestimate before labor saving machinery. Here is a talk about the $3500 Shirt and the fact that women spun thread in any idle time: https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.… Here is a Hans Rosling visualization of wealth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo I remember a story about historian couple (sadly I can't find it) who tried to live like the 1880's. The husband basically came home completely exhausted every single day. The wife, however, literally broke down because the housework was completely relentless. She was completely busy maintaining the household every single waking moment. Big families weren't just because of lack of birth control.

In this article the price of a medieval shirt is estimated at $3500 (2013): http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.h…

And everyone who was not a weaver (most of the population, and mostly not skilled workers) could now afford unthinkable luxuries in their daily life, like a second or third shirt (lightly used). I think this has been posted around here before: http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.h…

Yep, your comment reminds me of the $3500 shirt: http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.h…

"You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge." - George Carlin The luddites are also what happens when a group of people who have a historical corner on a market revolt. IF we let them have their way a shirt would be 8k (at 15 bucks an hour) https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.… Further, those looms, they evolve to jacquard looms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine) , that are backed by the punchcard. Primitive numerical control at its finest! The fountainhead for Babbage and Lady Ada to conceptualize computing! IN the end the luddites were skilled labor (the gig economy for the most part isn't). They were being displaced by mass production. Something that happens over and over again (bricks, files, pots...). Industrialization led to us all having enough free time for vacations, the internet and hacker news. The price of progress, haiving to keep up with it.

https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-lesson-in.… "So, 7 hours for sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 for spinning, or 579 hours total to make one shirt. At minimum wage - $7.25 an hour - that shirt would cost $4,197.25. And that's just a standard shirt. And that's not counting the work that goes into raising sheep or growing cotton and then making the fiber fit for weaving." https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-i… > Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person). These figures come way down once we get the spinning wheel and horizontal loom, but what seems fairly readily apparently is that women did not necessarily work less so much as produce more, selling the excess via the ‘putting out’ system we mentioned last time and using that to support their families.