What did the Industrial Revolution ever do for us?

Perelandra

Generali wrote: »

Only by a few years. You have to go back 50 years to see genuine absolute poverty in the UK.

The global financial crisis is little more than a blip on the charts.

TruckerT

Perelandra wrote: »

The global financial crisis is little more than a blip on the charts.

The totality of human existence is little more than a blip on the charts...

We are animals, and we should never forget it. Animals mostly devote their lives to finding food, and reproducing themselves.

The industrial revolution changed nothing, except that we may be destroying our own habitat.

TruckerT

vivatifosi

Perelandra wrote: »

You may well be right- but it doesn't look as though it translated too well into real earnings?

Possibly not, but it may have impacted on wealth. An example I've found through digging around in family trees (not my own) is the immense wealth that some families suddenly found that they had as a result of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. A modern parallel might be how oligarchs have come into a lot of money through being in the right place at the right time.

Early empire is another example apparently, many families benefitted from trade with the East Indes.

Also, trade was occurring on a large scale a good couple of hundred years before the Industrial Revolution. For example, the city of Worcester had a population of 8000 trading all over Europe during the Elizabethan period and was centre to a massive cloth trade. Commerce was bustling, even if the means of production had yet to be truly established.

Moby

Earnings stayed at that level for so long because of the control of resources ie land, the mineral wealth that is on it etc? The feudal system was designed as a hierarchy with the aristocrats at the top and marriage was used to protect ownership and make sure wealth/land was kept within the class; the church and other institutions were used as bulwarks to keep people in their place! As summed up in that wonderful hymn I was forced to sing at school...'All things bright and beautiful'....
''The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate, He made them High and lowly, He ordered their estate″

Of course the industrial revolution resulted in great changes because wealth was not so wrapped up in land anymore and therefore couldn't be controlled so much by the aristocrats...and we see the emergence of the 'upstart' mercantile middle classes...whose wealth had a basis in trade and production of goods etc. Such individuals wanted more and more political say and then we see the mass political movements of protest etc, such as the chartists and the battles over the corn laws:-
http://www.victorianweb.org/history/cornlaws1.html

StevieJ

History often rhymes

Can there be a more lamentable picture than that of a Chancellor of the Exchequer seated on an empty chest by a pool of bottomless deficiency fishing for a budget?
Robert Peel 1841

Generali

TruckerT wrote: »

Animals mostly devote their lives to finding food, and reproducing themselves.

That's quite a sweeping statement.

Most big hunting carnivores (large cats, crocs) eat about once a week and spend most of their time doing very little.

Similarly, a person who wanted to grow their own food and meat and had no aspiration beyond that would spend much of the time doing very little.

Perelandra

Generali wrote: »

That's quite a sweeping statement.

Most big hunting carnivores (large cats, crocs) eat about once a week and spend most of their time doing very little.

Similarly, a person who wanted to grow their own food and meat and had no aspiration beyond that would spend much of the time doing very little.

Oh, I don't know Generali...

A person who wanted to grow their own food and meat and had no aspiration beyond that would spend much of the time... doing the second part of TruckerT's statement!

Thrugelmir

Perelandra wrote: »

The global financial crisis is little more than a blip on the charts.

Blip? More like attempting to walk the Himalayas in a pair of flip flops. :eek:

System

Isn't it astonishing that all our ancestors managed to survive, battling against all these adversities, in order that we could all meet round this forum and chatter away together?

Each of us could change places with any one of those millions we liked, and the result would still have been exactly the same.

grizzly1911

Generali wrote: »

Only by a few years. You have to go back 50 years to see genuine absolute poverty in the UK.

Perelandra wrote: »

The global financial crisis is little more than a blip on the charts.

The point at which we became unable to sustain our trajectory came many years, even decades, before the financial crisis. We may be closer to the start of that 50 year progression than we care to admit.