"Everything was awful for a very long time, and then the industrial revolution happened."
Not completely awful though. In answering the question "How many days a year did people work in England before the Industrial Revolution?":
As I noted in a 2011 rant against some of Jared Diamond's work, the life of a medieval peasant was not so completely filled with drudgery as some popular histories might lead one to believe:
...Painting the image of hunter-gatherer superiority he makes no mention of the agricultural peasants of the middle ages who worked between 180 and 260 days per year, the rest of the time being taken up with Sundays, feast days, holidays, fair days etc.On top of that, in a world where light was either by sun or by fire, the winter workday north of, say, the 45th parallel, was reasonably short.
Of course it wasn't all Holiday partaaay--famine, pestilence and war made their periodic visits--but the actual time spent working was most likely less than at present, at least for those folks who are currently attached to the workforce....MUCH MORE
For an answer to the headline question, a mix-n-match of two posts from Luke Muehlhauser:
Note: As usual, these are my personal guesses and opinions, not those of my employer.
In How big a deal was the Industrial Revolution?, I looked for measures (or proxy measures) of human well-being / empowerment for which we have “decent” scholarly estimates of the global average going back thousands of years. For reasons elaborated at some length in the full report, I ended up going with:
- Physical health, as measured by life expectancy at birth.
- Economic well-being, as measured by GDP per capita (PPP) and percent of people living in extreme poverty.
- Energy capture, in kilocalories per person per day.
- Technological empowerment, as measured by war-making capacity.
- Political freedom to live the kind of life one wants to live, as measured by percent of people living in a democracy.
(I also especially wanted measures of subjective well-being and social well-being, and also of political freedom as measured by global rates of slavery, but these data aren’t available; see the report.)
Anyway, the punchline of the report is that when you chart these six measures over the past few millennia (data; zoomable), you get a chart like this (axes removed for space reasons):
(And yes, there’s still a sharp jump around 1800-1870 if you chart this on a log scale. 1 )
Basically, if I help myself to the common (but certainly debatable) assumption that “the industrial revolution” is the primary cause of the dramatic trajectory change in human welfare around 1800-1870, 2 then my one-sentence summary of recorded human history is this:
Everything was awful for a very long time, and then the industrial revolution happened.
Interestingly, this is not the impression of history I got from the world history books I read in school. Those books tended to go on at length about the transformative impact of the wheel or writing or money or cavalry, or the conquering of this society by that other society, or the rise of this or that religion, or the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, or the Black Death, or the Protestant Reformation, or the Scientific Revolution....
....MUCH MORE
And, as he notes above, the prequel, the headliner:
