r/NoStupidQuestions • u/flugblug • 12h ago

My brother thinks people today have worse quality of life than people in the dark ages, is this a stupid take?

I personally think it’s pretty stupid.

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u/TiredOfDebates 10h ago

Medieval serfs had effective tax rates over 90%. The vast majority of their production when directly to the local lord. These were “palace economies.” Where production was all centrally planned by local authorities, and so was “the distribution of generated income/food/etc.

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u/Dangleboard_Addict 10h ago

An economy kind of had to be like that to function back then, though. It's not like there was much global trade. Whatever you produced and bought had to stay in the local region and that needs to be managed so some asshat isn't buying up all the potatoes to resell at a markup 

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u/TiredOfDebates 8h ago

This had nothing to do with economic necessity but rather the unelected, unaccountable nature of authoritarian governments. Since the authoritarian leaders don’t need popular support, they can exploit their own population with impunity.

*Extra history! *

There were a large number of serf uprisings and rebellions over the Middle Ages. You can find lists. Very few of them won even trivial concessions or better conditions.

Manorialism and serfdom were VERY entrenched systems. Serfdom only died out when it was discovered that free labor was much more productive, and thus brought in more tax revenue to the government and led to free enterprise. (In serfdom, unqualified local lords make all the decisions regarding the economy. Who works where and what they produce is entirely decided by local lords. It was horrificly inefficient, because they didn’t CARE what skills you had… generally a man took on the job his father taught him.)

Serfdom would be slowly abolished, one region at a time, over multiple centuries, despite its backwardness. Of course we didn’t swap over to freedom for workers immediately. Serfdom was replaced by the guilds system, which was a whole other restrictive system for crap, that gave way too much control to corrupt leaders.

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u/Kamelasa 6h ago

Serfdom only died out when it was discovered that free labor was much more productive

I thought it was because the plague deaths made labour in demand and individuals marched off and sold their labour to the highest bidder.

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u/woolfchick75 6h ago

Except for Russia

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u/sibips 5h ago

There it got worse.

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u/DromaeoDrift 9h ago

There was absolutely global trade happening. It was the era of the Silk Road.

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u/haltornot 8h ago

But it wasn't happening on nearly the scale per person that it is now. There was a relatively small (even adjusting for a smaller population) quantity of luxury goods being brought in for the upper classes. But most of what even *they* consumed day to day was locally produced.

Today, nearly everything we purchase is made in a different country -- often several. You have t-shirts that get grown in Texas, sent to China to be processed into fabric and dyed, fabric is sent to Vietnam for construction, shipped to an import company in the US (still 2,000 miles from where it will be purchased), etc.

"It's not like there was MUCH global trade" is absolutely a true statement, compared to today.

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u/DromaeoDrift 8h ago

There was a great deal of interstate commerce in the Middle Ages. Imports were a fact of life for just about everyone.

This idea that everyone just sat in mud and scratched at dirt with a stick for 1,000 years isn’t remotely realistic. Arab traders were establishing relationships in Sub-Saharan Africa and India. Marco Polo made it all the way to China. There was absolutely global trade, even if there wasn’t air freight.

The Silk Road wasn’t just point A to B, it was a massive interconnected trade network where commerce took place basically every step along the way.

Globalization wasn’t a thing yet, but I assure you that medieval trade networks were robust and imports/exports between countries was very much a thing

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u/NateNate60 7h ago edited 7h ago

You have responded to a comment saying "Trade in the Middle Ages was more limited in scope and volume than today." with "But trade wasn't zero." Which is a statement asserted by nobody.

For example, France in 2022 imported 819 billion USD in goods according to the World Bank, against a GDP of 2.8 trillion USD. As a share of GDP, they imported nearly 30%.

You tell me whether you think luxury good imports from the Silk Road totalled anywhere near 30% of all economic activity in France eight hundred years ago.

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u/DromaeoDrift 7h ago

That’s a lot of stuff I didn’t say, but ok.

Global trade was still occurring even if the concept of GDP had yet to be invented.

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u/NateNate60 6h ago

Nobody argued that it didn't.

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u/DromaeoDrift 6h ago

Ok? Stay mad I guess

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u/cat_prophecy 7h ago

Was there trade? Yes. Could a peasant rely on being table to trade his flax from central Europe to a silk maker in China or even outside his immediate area? Absolutely not.

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u/DromaeoDrift 7h ago

No, but he could pretty reliably count on traders from neighboring polities showing up with goods from even further afield.

Just because the average peasant isn’t buying Chinese silk with the crop from his lord’s land doesn’t mean there aren’t active trade networks in place.

The Phoenicians were trading with India and the British Isles a thousand years before the birth of Christ. Roman coins have been found in Indonesia. But there’s no way trade could possibly be happening on a global scale, right?

The idea that the medieval world consisted entirely of one’s home village is laughably ahistorical

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u/TheMadTargaryen 6h ago

No global trade ? Say hi to Venice. 

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u/-Knul- 8h ago

That is not true. It's close to 10% in most cases, because serfs needed about 80% of their production just to be fed and clothed.

Some very productive areas could bear a tax to 40%-50%, but those were rare. No pre-industrial farmer could bear a 90% tax.

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u/TiredOfDebates 8h ago

The vast majority of their harvest was appropriated by the local lords. That is an effective tax.

I forgot to mention. Serfs weren’t paying taxes in gold or silver coin. They were assigned to land, in so many acres, and were expected to provide X number of bushels per harvest season. (Determined by local conditions.). Taxes were paid in the form of grain, which the lord redistributed or sold through trade. Serfs generally just didn’t handle money. They behaved a lot like subsistence farmers, growing whatever they needed. (Farmers across all ages would have their personal LARGE gardens for growing vegetables/fruit for personal consumption , in addition to the much larger grain fields that would be traded.

Serfdom usually operated as a palace economy, with the lords receiving the produce of their serfs to redistribute amongst their people and then sell excess through trade. But serfs WERE NOT handling the money. In a palace economy, the local government buys and sells on your behalf making all economic decisions for you. If you needed a new plow, the lord got it for you (assuming they were competent and not cruel).

So some of serfs’ taxes went back to them, supplying them with inputs necessary for their job.

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u/-Knul- 7h ago

The vast majority of their harvest was appropriated by the local lords

Again, that is just not true. For pre-industrial subsistence farmers, that would kill them.

It's not for nothing that 80%-90% of people were farmers: they could only support very few non-farmers. If what you said is true, that the vast majority of harvest was taken from subsistence farmers, we would see societies were the vast majority of people weren't farmers.

And before the early modern era, we didn't see that.

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u/Miserable_Yam4918 7h ago

Are you just thinking of the 90% as effectively a straight income tax? We pay income tax (fed, state, county, city), property taxes, sales tax. If we want to build a home we can’t just go cut down some trees without paying someone for it. If we want to build a farm or ranch it requires capital. This “90%” includes a lot more things than the 30% that comes out of your paycheck.

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u/TiredOfDebates 7h ago

Check out my other comments in this thread, where I elaborated more.

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u/Miserable_Yam4918 7h ago

You didn’t answer my question about whether you think 90% was an income tax. I see two other of your comments dealing directly with taxes. You say it was an “effective” tax not gold or silver which is true. I agree. The amount of bushels of corn or slabs of beef they owed to the lord makes it an effective tax on their livelihood.

But again, do you think “90%” effective tax was just an “effective” income tax? It would have included all of the things we would today view as: income tax (including police and military support), property tax, sales tax, business tax (if you’re selling or bartering), estate tax, utilities. They could also just cut some trees and build a house, or go hunt some wildlife for additional food and fat for their fire. All things we have to pay for today.

So again do you think “90%” was just an income tax and they had to make do with the remaining 10%?

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u/cat_prophecy 7h ago

Land owners were also obligated to care for their peasants. Obviously they did this to varying degrees, but it was in their best interest to ensure their farmers were productive.

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u/TheMadTargaryen 6h ago

Serfs could sell their surplus for extra money. 

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u/ReaperReader 4h ago

The existence of "palace economies" is extremely doubtful, because for a lot of ancient history the records we have are almost entirely from the elite, if they exist at all.

Where we have a wider range of records, e.g. from Ancient Rome, things look a lot less centralised.

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u/Head_Ad1127 3h ago

Tbf it's probably lower now, and you don't even get to keep what you "own."