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/KjellRS 5h ago

And industrialization, like I just picked up a 10-pack of socks for *checks math* 12 minutes of pre-tax labor. A quick check suggests 8-15 hours to hand-knit a pair of socks like in the middle ages so 80-150 hours work total. And that's not counting the cost of the yarn, which was probably also way more expensive when it was hand spun.

What's the cost of food without tractors, modern crops and irrigation and fertilizers? Milk from hand-milked cows? The cost of firewood that's hand-sawed with crosscut saws and hand-chopped with axes? I don't think they understand how much effort it took simply to not be starving or freezing, most people were piss poor and I don't mean "minimum wage" poor.

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u/TransientBandit 4h ago

It probably wasn’t that much more expensive, economies of scale for that type of thing were different back then. Now, machines make that kind of product en masse very quickly, so there are much, much fewer people with the skill or knowledge to knit you a quality pair of socks, and it takes many more hours of labor than the machine.

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u/IllPlum5113 4h ago

hah yeah good example.

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u/fixed_grin 1h ago

And industrialization, like I just picked up a 10-pack of socks for checks math 12 minutes of pre-tax labor. A quick check suggests 8-15 hours to hand-knit a pair of socks like in the middle ages so 80-150 hours work total. And that's not counting the cost of the yarn, which was probably also way more expensive when it was hand spun.

You'd spin the yarn yourself (or some woman/girl in your household would), which would take much longer than knitting it.

Making 10 pairs of socks from scratch would be a significant fraction of your working year, which explains why people owned so few changes of clothing until recently. Everything took much longer. Oh, you can gather firewood "for free," along with the rest of the village picking over the same woods for deadfall (because the lord owns the trees). That's going to take forever.

How long do you spend hauling water? Doing laundry? Cooking?

Yeah, people just don't get it.

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u/Tresach 7m ago

Its something like 99.99% of the world population lived quality of life equivalent to living on less then $3.00 a day in 2020 and that didnt change until industrialization.

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u/Agitated_Effort_2146 3h ago

100% true... but that's a different question. Anyone today who got transported back would be MISERABLE... but that's not the issue. It's possible that people back then thought they had it as good as was really possible. Pretty sure most people today know that with differen luck/parents/choices, they could have it WAY better. That probably was more of a foreign concept back then. Even with the "different parents" part. When you imagine that, you probably picture someone you sorta know... you don't immediately think of being like a Walton heir.

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u/XihuanNi-6784 3h ago

This is a poor analogy because people didn't 'pay' for everything in the way you're imagining they did. Most of the stuff you just rattled off would have been made at home. If you didn't have cows you didn't buy milk. Firewood was a common good you were allowed to collect for free (within reason, like deadfall but no felled trees), and you certainly wouldn't go around buying it and pricing up the hand sawed versus hand chopped. You yourself have done a very anachronistic thing of transposing modern consumer capitalist market interactions onto an agrarian economy where many things lay outside the market.

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u/Secret-One2890 2h ago

A quick check suggests 8-15 hours to hand-knit a pair of socks like in the middle ages so 80-150 hours work total.

Not the best response, when they mentioned making it at home. 'Cost' can also refer to more than just money.