We’re reviewing this in my Modern Western Society class…Right now the teacher is pulling the heart strings of the students by describing the horrid working conditions and long hours with little pay. Immediately before she was discussing the slums of the English cities.
I’m interested in a well described explanation/commentary to both of those topics from an austrian point of view.
Have at it ladies and gents.
She is intentionally ignoring the same data that Karl Marx did more than a century ago when he espoused his ideas to create equality that ended up creating poverty, misery, shorter life styles, large divisions of wealth in society and ended the lives of at least 40 million citizens in Russia and at least that many in China and Indo-China.
That is she is ignoring the increasing wealth of all classes in society, especially the lower and middle classes and the longer life expectancies.
Of course she is also ignoring the worse conditions in the rural areas that made these folks move to the cities in the first place.
Basically, she is ignoring reality.
The key of the analysis is that they always compare English cities in the beginning of the 19th century to today’s standard, instead of comparing it to the 18th and 17th century cities.
When you compare them to what existed before, instead of from our spoiled perspective of few centuries of capital accumulation, one will find that they were far more prosperous than what existed before.
I recommend to read “The Conquest of Poverty” by Hazlitt to understand more in what deplorable condition were the people in Europe living, and why the 19th century was a period of unthinkable improvements in the condition of the people.
Just one metric should suffice to convince anyone: the end of mass starvation.
Give Hayek’s Capitalism and the Historians a read when you can, but I also suggest this. Much of the malaise in Britain came about due to the Enclosure acts that drove the peasants off their lands, impoverishing them. They’d have been even worse off had it not been for the factories. Something similar has happened in China where the government still owns much of the land and disposes of it as it pleases, often forcing farmers off their land to go work in factories.
I knew there had to have been some intervention in there somewhere. I’m not completely up to speed on the Industrial revolution in England [at least not on the governmental side of things]. I’m the product of public schooling, forgive me. My education started several years ago and I’m still learning.
What about the slums such as found in St. Giles?
Any historical perspective that should be taken into account here? Any explanation?
Slums appear to be the result of countries facing industrialization (and the accompanying urbanisation) at a pace that its institutions are unable to accomodate. There are enormous slums in India and Africa today, and let’s not speak of their long history in South America, that exist because the building markets are held back from building.
At least here (argentina), the slums exist for the plain and simple reason that there are a lot of poor people and poor people can’t afford better housing.
Stranger’s explanation sounds logical, though I’d like to see some verification for it…
Juan, lots of poor people sounds logical too, but why are there so many poor people?
the poverty of the ‘labouring classes’ is a direct result of a low productivity of labour, i.e. capital per worker is low, and the divisions of labour is not widely extended.
p.s. we are poor in comparison to future generations that (one would hope) most likely will have had capital accumlate in the interval and are free to function under division of labour.
Because of government interventions/attacks on property rights. Anyway, my point was that as far as I’m aware, there is no special legislation favoring the development of slums.
What do you mean by verification?
I suppose I wasn’t aiming particularly for legislation FAVORING building of slums, but legislation restricting the impoverished to build wealth and move out of the slums.
I just meant some scholarly writing or some modern example you could provide is all.
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