Brad DeLong is absolutely stunning when he writes about economic history:
A quarter of American households in 1900 had boarders or lodgers (compared to two percent today). Half of American households in 1900 had fewer rooms than persons (compared to five percent today). A quarter of American households in 1900 had running water (compared to ninety-nine percent today). An eighth of American households in 1900 had flush toilets (compared to ninety-eight percent today). Less than a fifth had refrigerators, less than one-twelfth had gas or electric lights, less than one-twentieth had telephones or washing machines, and of course there were no radios or televisions or vacuum cleaners or central heating, to list just those major appliances that have greater than ninety percent coverage today.And even if you did have a four room house, could you afford to heat more than one room of it? Many Homestead four-room houses became two-room houses--the kitchen and the bedroom--in the depths of the western Pennsylvania winter.
The diets of workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania at the turn of the century were composed primarily of meat of widely variable quality, bread, butter, potatoes, oatmeal, and tea and milk–with luxuries such as sweets added in more or less regularly. We would find the diet somewhat monotonous (however, a lot of time and effort went into Þnding different ways to make potatoes). Almost always the first luxury that a working-class family moving up would purchase would be the services of a laundress: since laundry was expensive and difficult, few working-class families could maintain upper-middle-class standards of cleanliness. How often would you take baths if the water had to brought in from an outside pump, and then heated on the stove? How often would you wash your clothes if everything had to be washed out in the sink, if the fabrics were three times as heavy and the detergents one-third as powerful as the ones available today, and if as a result the laundry was a full day’s chore? Hand laundry was not a two hour a week task. Those who could afford the resources to maintain bourgeois styles of cleanliness flaunted it. White shirts, white dresses, white gloves are all powerful indications of wealth in turn of the century America. They said "I don't have to do my own laundry and ," and they said it loudly.
As a rule married women did not work outside the home–unless they were African-American, in which case they might well do their own family’s housework and be paid for doing a share of some white family’s housework as well. Meal preparation was not a one-hour-a-day but a four-hour-a-day task. Barring a shift toward larger-scale communal or cooperative living–a shift which simply did not happen even though anticipated, hoped for, and worked for by many feminists–within-the-household production and maintenance soaked up one-third the potential adult work hours. It made it next to impossible for married women (unless they were quite rich, or quite poor) to have independent careers and still fulfill the social expectations of household maintenance.
Infant mortality at the turn of the century was high. One in five babies in Homestead, Pennsylvania died before reaching his or her Þrst birthday. Adult men died, too, like flies (and adult women faced substantial risks in childbirth). Accident rates in the factory were such as to leave 260 injured per year–30 dead–out of a total population of 25,000 and a steel mill working population of 5,000. Each year, five percent were injured enough to miss work for some time (although only one percent per year were permanently disabled), and 1/2 percent per year were killed in factory accidents.
You can do the math. Start to work for U.S. Steel when you are 20. There is one chance in seven that the factory will kill you before you reach 50, and almost one chance in three that the factory will disable you. Is it any wonder that life insurance–disability insurance--group lodges that provide benefits (because the company provides few)--loom so large in American working class consciousness at the turn of the century? And is it any wonder that the Þrst component of the welfare state put into place, in many parts of the United States, was workmen’s compensation? Of course, in 1910 Homestead (or in 1930 Detroit, or in Los Angeles today) the most arduous and difficult jobs were done by minorities and immigrants: in 1910 Homestead by Slavs, in 1930 Detroit by Blacks, and in 2000 Los Angeles by Hispanics. At the micro level, such groups are concentrated in the most arduous and lowest-paid jobs because they are poor, because they have limited other options.
Most of the Homestead workforce only worked six days a week: for four out of five workers, the mill was shut on Sundays. U.S. Steel viewed this--shutting most of the mill on Sundays–as a major concession on their part, a concession that they hoped would produce large public relations benefits. From U.S. Steel’s perspective, each hour that a modern plant like Homestead stood idle was tremendously expensive. Variable costs--wages, raw materials, and transportation--made up perhaps 2/3 of total costs. The remainder were fixed: capital costs on the construction of the plant, and maintenance that had to be performed whether the plant was operating intensively or not.
Were U.S. Steel to move from two 12-hour shifts a day to one 12-hour shift, its output would be halved but its costs would be reduced by only 1/3, so total costs per ton of steel made would rise by 1/3. This was not a margin that U.S. Steel could afford. As long as it could Þnd workers willing to work the night shift, the Homestead mill (depressions and recessions apart) stayed open 24 hours a day on weekdays. And when things did change, they changed all at once-from two 12-hour shifts before and during World War I, to two 8-hour shifts (or three 8-hour shifts) during the 1920s, and during and after World War II. Yet Homestead jobs--at least Homestead jobs taken by native-born Americans--were good jobs by the standards of the United States. As historian Ray Ginger put it:
their expectations were not ours. A man who grew up on a Southern farm did not think it cruel that his sons had to work as bobbin boys [collecting spun thread in a textile mill]. An immigrant living in a tenement and working in a sweatshop yet knew that for the Þrst time in his life he was wearing shoes seven days a week...
And Homestead, Pennsylvania jobs paid well both by the standards of the United States and much more so by the standards of the world economy of the time. White households could make around $900 (of 1910 value) a year, placing them well the upper third of the U.S. population in terms of income per household in 1910. Relative to what could be earned by people of similar skill levels anywhere else in the world, a job in the Homestead mill was a very attractive job. Even the unequal America at the turn of the century was a very attractive place compared to the rest of the world. America was exceptional. In spite of the hours, in spite of the risk of death or injury, in spite of the working conditions, these were very good jobs by international standards: jobs worth moving 7,000 miles for, from Hungary or Lithuania to suburban Pittsburgh. For the economy of the late nineteeth century was for the first time in human history a truly global economy, filled with long-distance trade and migration, so people could take advantage of the opportunities opened up by industrialization.
It is memories of these times that fuel the welfare state. It appears that the safety net could only be shredded once those who had lived like this were gone, say in 1980.
Funny, when I tried to point this same thing out to him and his fans at his blog, for the current day, that often got deleted by him.
For a woman who claims to be concerned about intellectual property, you certainly were generous in reproducing his material on your blog.
What's your understanding of the fair use doctrine?
As long as it could find workers willing to work the night shift, the Homestead mill (depressions and recessions apart) stayed open 24 hours a day on weekdays.
A vertically integrated steel mill cannot shut down completely. Blast furnaces have to be kept running 24/7.
This post is great.
There's only one sentence that superfluous.
And one writer.
This post is great.
There's only one sentence that is superfluous.
And one writer.
The good old days everyone talks about generally weren't that good. Talking with folks who lived during that era makes that pretty clear.
It is memories of these times that fuel the welfare state. It appears that the safety net could only be shredded once those who had lived like this were gone, say in 1980.
But it wasn't the welfare state which changed this lifestyle; it was wealth -- the same thing that allowed the creation of the welfare state.
Patrick,
I no longer try to post comments at his site. Every one I have ever posted was deleted (four altogether, if memory serves).
TJIT,
It seems to be human nature to lament the passing of the good old days. You see it so often when people talk about how the 50s and 60s were so much better than today. For the United States, other than for the periods of full war (and people can argue with these) and the singular example of The Great Depression, things have always been better 10 years in the future from any point in time. I will be terribly surprised if, ten years from now, things are not better than today.
Talking with folks who lived during that era makes that pretty clear.
TJIT, are your relatives a hundred and twenty years old?
People who argue today that the American economy was structured better at some previous point are generally talking about the 1950s and 1960s. Other people refer to the mid- to late 1990s. Given that median wages in the US rose dramatically in the postwar period, then stalled around 1972 and have not improved since then, except slightly in the '90s, that seems a very reasonable view of economic history.
There are other people who for some reason are nostalgic for the Reagan years. That is a sentiment I truly fail to understand.
Wow, the good old days sound great. Let's roll back the New Deal and crack down on organized labor so we can return to the wonderful standards of living of the old libertarian economy.
Brooksfoe,
Do the math. A person would not have to 120 year old relatives to have talked with them about what it was like to live in the good old days.
I think you are neglecting the role the younger relatives age plays in the situation.
Peter Bautista,
Organized labor represents a tiny fraction of the workforce. There is not much organized labor left to crack down on even if that was the goal.
Yes, people have more material wealth now than in 1900. Discouragingly, though, I haven't seen large-scale studies supporting the notion that this type of aggregation of material wealth increases happiness (in fact, all the studies I have seen say that absolute material wealth is completely uncorrelated). Now we have washing machines to save us all those countless hours, which we simply fill with cheap TV and complaints of boredom. From what I understand, what really matters to our happiness is how much better off we, as a country or as individuals, are than our neighbors. The obvious conclusion is that global happiness is a zero-sum game. Now where does that leave economic policy? Are there some qualitatively different economic advancements (immortality, for example)?
I knew my greatgrandmother who was born in 1864. My grandparents were born in the 1890's, and I knew them. Why did my greatgrandparents leave Sweden for the mild sunny winters of Chicago and Minneapolis? Many reasons. One was economic opportunity. The other was the pull of cities. One ggf wanted to never plant another anything. And the only factories going were in America at the time. One ggm realized that since all the young men were going off to America, if she was ever going to get married she had better emigrate. Lots of reasons to emigrate.
TJIT -
My overall point was actually to point to the important role organized labor had in the positive economic improvements between 1900 and now. True, today organized labor is a small percentage of the work force, but in the early and mid 20th century, they were a much larger percentage, and vitally important for helping us put the conditions described in the excerpt behind us.
If organized labor is a small percentage today, that's because they've won most of their battles. For those who pine for the "good old days," though, it would mean undoing the gains of organized labor (and, consequently, would mean the heavy handed crack downs on labor that the "good old days" required).
To Patrick R. Sullivan & TJIT: You seem to have an exaggerated sense of self-importance -- evidently a common psychological condition among Ayn Rand's disciples -- if you really think that DeLong is bothering to excise your amusing defenses of predatory capitalism. Just search his site for your handles and I'm certain you'll find many of your comments. If indeed you're being honest and a comment never showed up, then it's probably due to a technical snafu or commenter error.
As a principle the major liberal blogs do not censor comments, for any reason, but especially on ideological grounds, and I don't think DeLong's is an exception.
Kanenas,
I just search for comments I made on his site, and as I wrote, they are all gone (I already knew this since they disappeared as I was engaged in the discussions). I have seen numerous other comments (off the top of my head, probably over a 100 during the brief time, about a week or so, that I even bothered reading the comment threads on his site) that I read disappear that had no other content other than that they disagreed with one of DeLong's arguments, or pointed out an error that he had made. Indeed, I did a test a few weeks back on another topic linked through MarginalRevolution in which a commenter wrote that he had tried to post a comment that made a strong, well-reasoned argument that countered DeLong's position on a topic, and he wrote that the comment disappeared within minutes of being posted. Now, the comment did make fun of DeLong at the very beginning, and I took the challenge editting out the mild insult, and reposted the same argument, and it also disappeared within a half hour.
DeLong may not be removing the comments, but someone is, and I know for a fact that they are being removed not because of profanity or incivility, or because they are thread-jackers- they are being removed because they disagree with DeLong. If he has a moderator, then he needs a new, more intellectually honest one.
Kanenas, said
Kaneans would you do me a favor and point out how the content of my brief comments on this thread here and hereProvided enough information to allow you reach the striking conclusion that TJIT you seem to have an exaggerated sense of self-importance -- evidently a common psychological condition among Ayn Rand's disciples.
I would really like to hear how you did that.
.
Thanks,
TJIT
Noah - Now we have washing machines to save us all those countless hours, which we simply fill with cheap TV and complaints of boredom.
Samuel Johnson - "The publick pleasures of far the greater part of mankind are counterfeit. ... The general condition of life is so full of misery, that we are glad to catch delight without enquiring whence it comes, or by what power it is bestowed."
It's an old problem. Yet people seem to be resolved on living longer when given the opportunity.
jobs worth moving 7,000 miles for, from Hungary or Lithuania to suburban Pittsburgh.
And those 1900 Hungarians could look back a century, and be amazed by how much life had improved.
cathedra purport noisemaking preascitic unrousable polychromic oxyhaloid prepossessionary
http://www.poodlesinaustralia.com >Poodles in Australia
http://www.weatherunderground.com/US/OH/Bowerston.html
cathedra purport noisemaking preascitic unrousable polychromic oxyhaloid prepossessionary
http://www.thetasigma.org/ >Delta Sigma Pi - Central Florida, University of - Theta Sigma Chapter
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Philosophy/Hume.htm
cathedra purport noisemaking preascitic unrousable polychromic oxyhaloid prepossessionary
http://www.laptopsgoingcheap.com/ >LaptopsGoingCheap
http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/11/02/teacher.wounded.ap/
elaborative tapet pearlstone warratau stereomatrix on cassie vaticinatory
http://www.bitheads.ca/ >bitHeads inc
http://www.dfreer.com/
bvex wnrtljy gxkwa hcgims jfvcwpgm thksecav jyoad