They were paid $2.50 a day. Which is around $91 in today dollars. On top of that wage theft was all too common. And that's a wage that they had to fight to unionize to get up to
For unskilled labor 6 days a week at 2.50/day = 15$/week which would have been quite tempting especially if the risks where unclear.
It’s worth remembering when doing inflation calculations just how poor people used to be. Take the average person’s budget today and remove their car, gadgets, AC, subscriptions, most of the pricy food options, etc. Healthcare was cheap and largely ineffective, collage was rare and minimalist by todays standards. Most of what people spend money on today simply didn’t exist so not having it was normal.
> It’s worth remembering when doing inflation calculations just how poor people used to be.
And also, how much of the wealth created by the employees ended up in their pockets vs. the pockets of the owners, and how the standards of living were. Basically, back then with such a job you could afford a place to live, to have kids, a wife to take care of housework and, post 1930-ish, a car. Today? Most of my generation struggles to make rent because we're being bled dry.
Lifestyle inflation, urban planning, and choices makes living a quality life more difficult than it should be.
You're able to afford a larger house and a car or two, but you're also spending more money than necessary on transportation and housing. Buying a car is expensive and so is the road built for cars. Trains are more expensive than a car, but its cost can be amortized across many riders.
Housing is a problem of both government and market dysfunction and is directly tied to our transportation woes. People are tied to the idea of real estate as an investment which means they often opposed development. Planners continued to zone only SFH, and made middle housing illegal. They also don't do mixed zoning which improve efficient utilization of land.
I supposed if income goes to workers more, they would just push the housing price higher. It can't be fixed unless we build sufficient housing.
Lifestyle inflation is why people don’t feel so much wealthier than their grandparents, but housing isn’t the economic drain it seems like because so much of its value doesn’t require resources to create. It’s mostly redistribution of income from workers to other people and as such it gets into politics.
Well that and the giant ball of suck associated with long commutes, but I am kind of hoping there’s going to be more pushback on that due to people working from home during COVID. Even those who still needed to go in had vastly less traffic.
We've got richer while food has got relatively cheaper, transport has got relatively cheaper, all the things you need to live have got relatively cheaper, so it isn't really surprising that all the extra money is going towards people's homes.
On top of that all the nice things have gotten cheaper. Listening to music is now cheap. Books, news, entertainment are cheap.
Yes you may have had a car (24 million cars in 1940 v 135million population) but then you wouldn't have had a fridge, TV.
And youre comparing someone relatively wealthy, to someone who can't afford rent.
If you were poor you probably didn't have electricity, indoor toilet, more than one heated room in the house, and probably lucky if you could afford enough food.
I'm from the UK and we went through this a bit later so it's still within living memory. My dad remembers getting an indoor toilet an plumbed in bath for the first time, that was late 50s/ early 60s.
And if we are talking late 1800's/early 1900's, Taxes were essentially non-existent, so people kept and spent more of their money. Taxes as a % of GDP was in the 5-10% range, opposed to ~40% today.
They also didn't have to worry about the same healthcare costs, as they were healthier in general, and the options were far fewer when sick.
That isn't the critical part of the sentence, which is why you didn't spend any time mentioning it.
Yes they were less obese, the issue was the more likely to be the opposite, malnutrition. I dispute they spent less time battling disease, but if they did, it's because they died quicker.
Alzheimers is a disease of the old, and cancer tends to be also.
So all you're left with is obesity and the closely correlated diabetes.
Indeed, but I am talking about the sum of all disease.
Polio is a good example of the opposite, because polio today is effectively zero. Most other types of disease trend the other way with much more significant margins.
Polio lead to some level of paralysis in somewhere between 0.5-0.2% percent of people, many of whom died and needed no further healthcare.
Today, a far larger percent of Americans have lost the ability to walk due to obesity and diabetes.
Polio is just one success story among many. Sanitation, vaccination, and antibiotics don’t just cut down on Cholera but a huge range of diseases.
Tuberculosis, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Cholera, Polio, Smallpox, Tetanus, Varicella(Chickenpox> shingles), etc didn’t individually leave large segments of the population with serious lifelong issues, but collectively they added up. Add in a little cut or malnutrition and even diseases we don’t normally consider serious would more frequently have huge long term health impacts.
Very few young people lose the ability to walk from obesity, that’s generally something that impacts older people who were able bodied up to that point. Infectious diseases however generally hit the young harder more than people with fully developed immune systems.
Health and fitness are different things. Elite athletes are generally doing great harm to their long term health.
Pick 10,000 random people from each time period. 2023 would probably win a tug of war. Increased heigh and obesity not being as detrimental as being under weight.
Cardio would presumably go to 1923. However what percentage of people could walk 1 mile could go either way. Someone that’s paralyzed can’t do it but someone that’s fat need to be motivated.
I think the 1923 group would out perform at the a mile walk completion, simply from age effects alone.
I agree the strongest would be 2023.
I agree that health can have complex and variable definitions. It is also very different than life expectancy.
One measure of health may be baseline fitness and ability to care for ones self. Alternatively, health could be freedom from disability, pain, and health related suffering.
Another definition of health, which I was originally getting at, is how many people rely on continuous medical services to remain alive. That is to say, how many people would drop dead if they stopped receiving medication and medical services.
This baseline, pre-intervention health is relevant if you want to compare health costs.
I agree that it is different that post-intervention health, which might be the most relevant of you want to consider something like quality of life.
It is a shame we dont have better data from the earlier 20th century.
> Today? Most of my generation struggles to make rent because we're being bled dry.
As a kid I remember visiting a friend who lived in an old workers house. I was in awe to see such a small house, and in shock to learn they actually bought two houses and connected them.
