Comments on: Were people better off in the middle ages than they are now?

By: Hopefully Anonymous

Hopefully Anonymous — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 12:24:15 +0000

Firozali,
If you’re commenting from Tanzania, very cool. It’s a bit of a mystery why there are not more contributions to blog comments and discussion boards originating in the USA from a broader range of non-USA countries, given that there are many millions of people on the internet for fun and communication in these countries. Brazil tends to be a notable exception (and they’re not even common wealth!). I would expect more posts from people native to and living in countries like India, Nigeria, and the Phillipines.

By: Firozali A.Mulla MBA PhD

Firozali A.Mulla MBA PhD — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 11:43:58 +0000

Yes sir. They had love.

No sir after the IT we have the rich love rich and poor… they are pests.

This is what I read..Since the 1980s, wealthier people have moved to the suburbs while the poor remain in inner cities, the JRF added.

Society polarised

Looking at wealth patterns over the past four decades, the JRF found that the gap between rich and poor actually narrowed in the 1970s.

But during the 1980s and 1990s inequality had increased, as a “polarisation” in British society had occurred.

Sir. Darfur is dying. Somalia and Sudan are beleived to be breeding grounds of Taliban. We are not sure but the countries are to be included in the charter of African unity. Sounds all crazy but there it is.
Hence yes and no.

Firozali A.Mulla MBA PhD
P.O.Box 6044
Dar-Es-Salaam
Tanzania
East Africa.

By: Alan Gunn

Alan Gunn — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:31:33 +0000

“Nowadays, the debates usually go in the other directions, with people on the left being less positive about material progress and people on the right saying that things are great now and are getting better.”

I don’t think these debating positions really contradict the historic pattern of the left being more materialistic than the right (as Bertrand DeJouvenel pointed out in “the Ethics of Redistribution”). Some of the arguments about whether we’re better off materially are just directed at the incumbent administration: if you don’t like the president, you claim that he’s wrecking the economy, and vice versa. And the left continues to go on at length about redistribution. The right’s answer to this, in Chesterton’s time and today, is, at least in part, “money isn’t everything.”

By: Barkley Rosser

Barkley Rosser — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 07:23:26 +0000

Hunter-gatherers get wiped out because ag societies support larger populations, and of course urbanized and metal-using socieities (and later fully industrialized ones) produce weapons that allow for the more complete military domination of such societies. So they disappear. Chesterton lacked both the knowledge and the imagination to go all the way back. The Middle Ages were quite sufficient for his shockingly conservative argument.

By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:13:05 +0000

Barkley Rosser,
You put in a caveat about the absence of agricultural society. Given the choice, as in colonial North America, disproportionately more people flow to the hunter-gatherer society than to the agricultural.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:30:47 +0000

Stuart,

I didn’t label Chesterton as a “rightist.” I called him a “Christian conservative.” A conservative can be anti-capitalist. Depending on the social and political context, support for capitalism can be a liberal or a conservative position.

Barkley,

I suspect Chesterton used the Middle Ages as a comparison to be provocative–to make the point to progressive socialists such as Shaw that material progress is not the solution to happiness. I doubt he would’ve picked the Stone Age, or anything B.C., as his comparison point.

By: Barkley Rosser

Barkley Rosser — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 19:45:53 +0000

Why compare with the Middle Ages? If one is going to push such comparisons to the limit, why not go all the way back to paleolithic man? Marshall Sahlins in his _Stone Age Economics_ presented evidence that in hunter-gatherer societies, in fact people had considerable amounts of leisure time. Humans had physically and socially evolved and adapted to that sort of economy; we were suited to it, and it is not clear that we have been as physically suited to any society as much since. Also, drawing on the happiness lit, given that there were no societies around with agriculture or industrialization to dominate and provide a demeaning comparison, people were free to be happy in their “primitive” but well-adapted states, probably much better off psychologically than in either the Middle Ages or now.

By: Bruce Britton

Bruce Britton — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:24:59 +0000

Joseph Delaney: I’ll send u the links, send ur address to bbrittonva@yahoo.com

By: Doug S.

Doug S. — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 04:01:12 +0000

According to this book, the effects of income on happiness look like this:

1) The effect of absolute income on happiness is non-linear; money has decreasing marginal utility. Raising the income of the desperately poor has a bigger effect on happiness than raising the income of people who already have more than enough to meet basic needs such as food and shelter. Being rich won’t make you happy, but being poor will make you miserable.
2) The effects of relative vs. absolute income actually have been quantified. If everyone gets a raise, your gain in happiness is 2/3 of the increase that you would have if only you get the raise. Because people do care about both relative income and absolute income, people will tend to try to earn more income than is socially optimum. Therefore, the income tax is actually a Pigovian tax on a negative externality and actually increases net happiness.

By: odograph

odograph — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 02:34:00 +0000

Re-reading the other comments, I think you can see why my definition (which I of course think is the proper one), is somewhat wealth independent. People in many states and stations can be happy in the moment … and if they are much of the time, they are happy in general.

I think this explains the decreasing returns, wealth-to-happiness, and might be a prescription of what to look for when you have a little wealth put by.