What society mass-moved individuals from menial work to better work?
Many societies have made generational improvements: children raised with more opportunity, but I'm not aware (hey, I'm ignorant of a lot) of any that moved significant numbers of menial laborers themselves up significantly in standard of living besides the USA post-WWII or new technology (electricity, plumbing).
Parents usually sacrificed so their children have better lives, not themselves. The USA is currently an interesting example of the opposite.
I haven't heard of mass movements of farmers into professional work late in life. The immigrant story of America is the parents sacrificed for their children to do better. Why would existing citizens want to bring in large number of unskilled people and give them better jobs than themselves? I'm not aware of such generous circumstances working out.
Well, that‘s not related to this specific conversation, but industrialization in socialist states did that in a number of cases. Soviet Union between 1950s and 1970s has seen significant growth and by various accounts achieved up to 5x improvement in purchase power compared to Russian Empire at its peak, in 1913 (how much goods could a worker buy for their salary, not including welfare, which was obviously superior in SU). I‘m not saying socialism is good, the price paid for that was terrible. And anyway my argument wasn’t that there were better societies, just that America of 1800s was ugly place to live even for many white Europeans (and let’s not forget that 60% of the time in that century there existed slavery). People went there not because it was great (and not everyone went there, many German settlers chose opposite direction, moving to Wild East, helping colonial expansion of Russian empire). It was just marginally better than certain places in Europe with its wars and famines.
> America of 1800s was ugly place to live even for many white Europeans
Not when compared with the rest of the world.
Life in pre-Colonial America was pretty hard. Building a civilization by hand from wilderness is a tall order, and life was short. But after 1800, life improved by leaps and bounds. You can see this in statistics of average height.
As for the Soviet Union, I recall newspaper accounts from the 70s and 80s that if you were traveling there, be sure to load up your luggage with blue jeans. Blue jeans were in high demand and would fetch a nice profit. And how many Soviet consumer items do you have in your home?
What society mass-moved individuals from menial work to better work?
Many societies have made generational improvements: children raised with more opportunity, but I'm not aware (hey, I'm ignorant of a lot) of any that moved significant numbers of menial laborers themselves up significantly in standard of living besides the USA post-WWII or new technology (electricity, plumbing).
Parents usually sacrificed so their children have better lives, not themselves. The USA is currently an interesting example of the opposite.
I haven't heard of mass movements of farmers into professional work late in life. The immigrant story of America is the parents sacrificed for their children to do better. Why would existing citizens want to bring in large number of unskilled people and give them better jobs than themselves? I'm not aware of such generous circumstances working out.