The world we have lost

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1. tuatoruFeb 2023
   Read less fantasy and more history.

   I recommend Laslett's "The World We Have Lost" (or its second edition, "The World We Have Lost Further Explored"), for a glimpse of life a mere 200 years ago. You'll need to pay close attention and read between the lines, though.

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2. iguySep 2018
   Many people thought this, e.g. it was assumed in Victorian England that the past looked a lot like the present of less-developed countries, like Russia.

   But it's not true, we have data. The quite readable book on this is Laslett, "The World We Have Lost". https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-La...

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3. iguySep 2018
   > Before approximately the Victorian age

   No this isn't true. We have excellent data about ordinary people in England, back more than 500 years, and the pattern is very much ordinary nuclear families. More vividly, you know well how much stick a certain Henry got from the pope... for wanting to marry multiple women in series. But Kings are a poor guide. What we are discussing is what the situation was for the average peasant. Do you really think medieval European villages were full of guys with 5 wives? This did not happen.

   Edit: a good book on this is Laslett's "The World We Have Lost", see e.g. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1362413/Peter-La...

   I'm pretty sure that the pattern in the Roman world was also very much 1 man + 1 woman. I'm pretty sure this is the default in Hinduism too, pretty strongly. (Again, with odd exceptions for the very powerful, who don't matter for the data.) And, as I said, the genetic data on effective male + female population sizes has a dramatic dip in it, around 10K years ago -- this dip ends, I forget maybe 2K years later, not in Queen Victoria's reign.

   Whether religion caused this monogamy seems like a confusing question. But somehow societies decided that this was something they wished to enforce, and moral enforcement tended to be the job of the priest. So no, this is not WTF material.

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4. mr_lucJun 2014
   I'd love to ask Andreessen, (or anyone here, really) a question informed by a book on pg's reading list:

   I, too, am dubious about Pikkety's thesis. But I'd like to call out a distinction between the concentration of wealth, and the static nature of the oligarchy. One will continue to happen, the other Pikkety could be dead wrong about.

   Andreessen says (paraphrasing) in the interview, 'Pikkety says wealth and oligarchies will happen, but look at the Forbes 400 and you see lots of churn, where is this supposed stability that will happen with rich people cementing their gains'.

   It's true that Pikkety presents a view of social mobility becoming increasingly static, and reverting to a supposed historical norm.

   But one lovely book I have pg to thank for reading, "The World We Have Lost", talks about how things were in England according to an analysis of actual data (county records etc). One chapter, 'The One-Class Society' ('gentlemen' were the class, the only class that mattered), speaks of how there actually was a large amount of 'churn' in the gentleman class -- even outside of cities and the merchant classes, it was possible for a father to become a substantial yoeman, and his heir to become a gentleman. Families went up, families went down.

   But despite a certain amount of mobility being possible, all effective wealth and power that mattered was still very concentrated, as it has been for much of recorded human history, for many reasons.

   This was momentarily interrupted by the usefulness of humans as wet robots that were briefly able to exert the political and economic leverage necessary to drive hard collective bargains about their compensation.

   That was temporary. (Offshore wet robots, and eventually dry robots, taking the place of the less-needed troublemakers).

   Wealth, even if mobile, will inevitably become more concentrated due simply to better technology and efficiency -- how can this not be so? It seems self-evident.

   So, I guess the question is:

   If technology magnifies individual differences in productivity, and if we accept as a given that attempting to tax away the resulting fruits of that productivity is on the whole economically injurious to an economy, how can wealth not become more concentrated over time?

   (Yes, of course, there will be churn and disruption, and wealth will change hands. Even as it did among the gentleman class in England in the 1500s; families came up and families went down. But because of technological magnification of productivity it should tend to go to fewer people. This just seems like a natural law.)

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5. mmorrisJun 2014
   I think the list mr_luc is referencing is in the second answer on this page: http://www.paulgraham.com/raq.html

   EDIT: Here's the whole list, for completeness: Clark, Civilisation White, Medieval Technology and Social Change McEvedy, Penguin Atlases of Ancient and Medieval History Laslett, The World We Have Lost Bernal, The Extension of Man Franklin, Autobiography Girouard, Life in the English Country House Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires Hadas, A History of Rome Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages Vasari, Lives of the Artists Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors Caesar, Gallic Wars Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution

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6. corporalagumboMar 2013
   There are entire sub-disciplines within history devoted to this sort of stuff. Social history. Micro-history.

   You could try The World We Have Lost. Or The Cheese and the Worms. Among others. Really, the options are almost infinite.

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