Comparing 2018 and 1918...Are we happier?

[Xantippe]

I was talking about small-scale agriculture in a completely pre-industrial country . By that I meant subsistence farming for a family of 5-10: you grow what you need to feed yourself, and you keep a handful of goats, chickens, maybe some buffaloes.

How small scale could it be and still feed 5-10 people completely?

 

[Xantippe]

But then you still need to cut wood for fuel and carry water, take care of the horses, etc.

Right.

In some parts of the world, acquiring water and fuel consume enormous amounts of girls’ and women’s time and keep girls from being able to go to school.

 

[MonteRCMS]

In some parts of the world, acquiring water and fuel consume enormous amounts of girls’ and women’s time and keep girls from being able to go to school.

I am blown away that after all these decades, so many towns and villages STILL lack pumps and storage tanks for water.

I’ve been doing this all over the world for 50+ years and people are still stunned by it all.

And that so few places plant trees that will grow naturally and provide wood for fuel. And perhaps even a cash crop or an edible crop.

Been doing that as well.

 

[IsaiahSpirit]

And these ideologies have resulted in a ‘culture of death,’ a peer pressure driven, now by attrition starting to be legalized dictatorship of moral relativism — children indoctrinated
to these things every day in every facet of society.
Thousands of years of warfare & atrocity resulted in one-half billion deaths; extremely sorrowful. A conservative estimate of the tens of thousands of helpless children
being killed by the most massive atrocity in humankind’s history, this far world
wide has resulted in one-billion seven hundred thousand deaths in a little over 50 years.
This human mind incomprehensible number is staggering, in a tiny fraction of history.
~
Because over time with playing at heartstrings rhetoric marginalizing each of these
children’s God given intrinsic dignity and Sacredness of Life — the ideas put forth
by the likes of John Paul ii, Mother Teresa, John Cardinal O’Connor, and Bishop
Fulton J. Sheen — have quieted down — when the heart wrenching situation
has not improved much — as a matter of fact late term born children dying
brutal deaths are tolerated by our society by complicity and complacency.
~
When we let time anesthetize us from something that used to be almost unthinkable
by most (temptation to do so increased from early in the 1900s and through
the century by the playing at heartstrings rhetoric) — then we lose solidarity
with the parents/mothers who need a conscience informed with compassion;
silence doesn’t help someone they trust reach them — and the internal damage
to their psyche no matter how euphoric in escapism & denial is great —
and solidarity with each child in a human stage of development each of us started
with — it is very difficult for many to see we live in a decidedly worse time;
even in industrialized nations.

 

[DarkLight]

Keep in mind OSHA and non-US equivalents are also much later. For many years we were ok with factory work that often maimed or killed those too poor to find another job - often including children. (One of the earlier factory acts in the UK was progressive for forbidding the employment of children under the age of 9 in factories.) In the US lynching was also still a very real concern for minorities.

I’m not really convinced we’re not just finding different ways to disregard human life.

 

[rfournier103]

I would’ve loved to see the Babe pitching and slugging for the Red Sox - and the Sox beating the Cubs in the World Series!

Other than that, I can’t think of a reason why I’d like to visit 1918 rather than stay here in 2018.

 

[GEddie]

Spending your whole life in the same place and with people you are blood:fearful: to is ne

15 hour days in factories

Pup7:

15 hour days in factories

Not sure you’re clear on when the 8-hour workday was established throughout large parts of the US.

outrageous cost of telephones, people unable to afford travel

Less need for technological communication and travel as people tended to remain in familial communities.

yes.

No.

Not

Blockquote

en the 8-hourither admirable not inadmirable, it’s just different to what we know now. Familial dysfunction is a reality, and has been since the Bible. (Cf. Abel, Joseph and the sons of David).

An
d the ability of travel is a benefit to intellectual life, at least.

ICXC NIKA

 

[Augustinian]

Do you think it is possible to say that we are actually better off in 2018 compared to 1918?

Probably. In 1918, the world was at war and the great Spanish Influenza scourged the earth.

Not a great year at all.

Although by 1921, America would be on the move, the Roaring 20’s, prohibitions, the advent of radio communications and the consumer electronics business, the beginnings of American car culture and suburban living.

A dark year, but one where the dawn wasn’t far off, at least in America. Of course, Europe had a bad time in the 1920’s.

 

[DarkLight]

Yeah that is always the flip side of closer family bonds. Not everyone has a happy, loving family, and stronger expectations of reliance on family can trap people in relationships with those who hurt them.

 

[kill051]

Yep. 42 for men.

I’m a few weeks away from 45. I’ve already lived longer - way longer - than I was supposed to have lived back then if I’d been born in 1873.

IMO the low life expectancies had much to do with A) the high likelihood of dying in childbirth, and B) overwork. No modern conveniences meant women were working day and night with little rest. And men didn’t have it much better. Neither the eight hour workday nor the five day workweek had yet been instituted. Men who had physically demanding jobs often worked fifteen hours a day, seven days a week. And no Social Security: a laborer usually worked until his death, which often occurred at his job, unsurprisingly. No, I’ll take 2018 any day.

 

[alice24]

Please don’t misunderstand the age-of-death stats in the way people became only 40-something. Infant death is included, and also childbirth. Those who luckily passed this critical points became 60- and also 70-sth. Often. My medievistic prof pointed this out often because it’s in almost every history tv docu simply wrong.
The badest average life dates had mine and factory workers in the late 1900s.

 

[Pup7]

It was partially that, but it was also due to a lack of vaccines, poor nutrition, and a lack of antibiotics. The rates of death in childbirth were quite high - most were due to what they called “childbed fever”, which we now know was a form of sepsis. This just doesn’t happen anymore.

(Picture this - doctors back then just went from bedside to bedside or house to house and may not even rinse their hands off between patients…even as recently as the early 1900s there was little thought to infection control, mostly because we didn’t understand it.)

Please don’t misunderstand the age-of-death stats in the way people became only 40-something. Infant death is included, and also childbirth.

Of course. The numbers were merely averages, just as they are today. Most people in the US live into their early to late 80s with modern medicine - my mom was born in 1935 and her life expectancy was likely in her late 50s to early 60s. She’s 83. My grandmother was born in 1906 and lived to be 86.

 

[Rob2]

Comparing 2018 and 1918…Are we happier ?

Well in 1918 my country and the rest of Europe came out of a war in which the total number of military and civilian casualties was more than 41 million , over 18 million deaths and 23 million wounded, ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history.

That would leave many widows , many orphans , many maimed for life , many insane . They certainly would not be happier than we are .

 

[alice24]

Yes, and it´s interesting to see which life periods are more or less healthy compared to former times (pre-industrial). The 50s-60s are far more dangerous today because of heart and brain attacs/diabetes/substance caused cancer forms people didn´t had that much because they either died far, far before with a bad general condoítion or food and physical fitness was better in general. And here modern medicine has a huge benefit. On the other hand, as you said, the age 2-5 is really no longer a problem today…People who passed this age lived often a way longer than I thought some years ago, I was surprised one of my family members stored a family tree and I luckily find that most people died in their late 80s.
If me misuse antibiosis that much as we do today in germany, we will have another huge problem in the next decades

 

[Pup7]

If me misuse antibiosis that much as we do today in germany, we will have another huge problem in the next decades

It will be sooner than that. It’s already happening.

 

[alice24]

I know. I was given wrong antibiotics for years and I´m naturally allergic against peniciline. This is really not funny.

 

[Pup7]

Penicillin is a very common allergy. Second and third generations from their type are usually okay for short term use in most people.

 

[alice24]

amoxiciline is second generation, isn´t it? I had a really bad meeting with this substance

 

[Pup7]

Actually that’s just a different beta-lactamase antibiotic.

Second and third gens fall under the cephalosporin class - similar to the penicillins, but different enougn that they typically are okay for those allergic to the B-lactam class. A common one is cephalexin, which is known as Keflex stateside. (I said “class” above - a bit misleading, so I edited myself.)

 

[alice24]

ahh ok, thanks for making this clear Cefuroxime should then fall under cephalosporine, right? This was the doctors nr. 1 for people with peniciline allergy. So, it was given for almost everything (I´m resistent now )
I can´t remeber cephalexin, maybe I was never given it because of the resisences…