Reply To: The recent "discovery" of Dark Matter

[Warwick]

Rezwan wrote:

But it’s true that the 1st industrial revolution mostly turned into creating new ways to conquer and enslave, and at the height of it the average lifespan for an urban worker was less than 20. The paradigm then was very much one of unenlightened self-interest; there’s no need for history to repeat itself.

What was its “height”? And I don’t know about history repeating itself, but the average worker now lives a much longer time. Perhaps you could say at the inception, conditions for workers were terrible, lifespan short, but as the affluence spread, workers stopped putting up with that. This would imply there is a progression inherent in the thing. Jeffrey Sachs puts a different spin on the industrial revolution and poverty, which I quoted a lot in this post on poverty.

I more or less like your piece of writing about poverty. If you want to see Bjorn Lomborg get taken apart at the seams for the dizzy fantasist that he is, read Monbiot’s website (or regular column in the Guardian).

You may remember from school learning about the reformer Edwin Chadwick. In his ‘Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain’ in 1842, he wrote that the average life expectancy in Rutland (agricultural, not changed much) was 52 years for a gent and 38 for a working man. In Leeds it was 44 years for a gent and 19 for a working man. (Naturally this was probably before they separated out infant mortality, but that’s beside the point.) I’ve got out my old school textbook, P. Sauvain (1987) to tell you that!

Broadly speaking, the quality of life for the working classes was far worse in the 1840s than 100 years earlier as it turns out (just as someone forced at gunpoint into a Chinese factory to breathe plastic fumes is worse off than when they were a rural peasant; just as someone that is displaced from a rainforest to live in Sao Paulo’s shanty town amid the filth and crime is worse off). After the Public Health Act of 1848, conditions improved and thereafter gradually carried on improving, because of more social reforms in the late Victorian era (the main reason for the low life expectancy was disease, which was reduced by public investments in clean water and sanitation). If you ask when life became ‘better’ than before the industrial revolution, for someone at the bottom, well maybe not until late 1800s at the very least I’d guess. Basically, people in an ultra-capitalist society view each other as commodities and people are a commodity that can get very cheap. It took a long while for people to grab part of the fruits of technology, rather than just being exploited alongside it, which is what happened at first.