Re: Very gentle reminder to Ed (was Re: community and money

[Ed Weick]

>The point is that a half millennium ago, it was possible to have a pretty good working life with high wages, so why isn't it possible now? >So, there's my question for today. >Harry I agree, Harry, that time were good for workers in many parts of Europe for more than a century after the Black Death.  The plague had wiped out a lot of people, one third or more of the population of Europe, and good labour remained scarce until population rebuilt itself.  Rounds of plague recurred every so often, keeping population from rebounding quickly.  After it had done so, things began to worsen again.   The following passage illustrates this for a region of France at the turn of the 18th Century: "There was a family in Beauvais in the parish of Saint Etienne in the year 1693 named Cocu: Jean Cocu, weaver of serges, and his wife with three daughters, all four spinning wool for him, since the youngest daughter was already nine years old. The family earned 108 sole a week, but they ate 70 pounds of bread between them. With bread up to � a sol a pound, their livelihood was secure. With bread at 1 sol a pound, it began to get difficult. With bread at 2 sols, then at 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 -- as it was in 1649, in 1652, in 1662, in 1694, in 1710 -- it was misery. Crisis in agriculture was nearly always intensified by crisis in manufacturing: it certainly was in 1698, so work began to fall off, then income. They went without; perhaps they were able to lay their hands on a coin or two saved for a rainy day; they pawned their things; they began to eat unwholesome food, bran bread, cooked nettles, mouldy cereals, entrails of animals picked up outside the slaughterhouses. The 'contagion manifested itself in various ways; after hunger came lassitude, starvation, 'pernicious and mortifying fevers. The family was registered at the Office of the Poor in December, 1698. In March, 1694, the youngest daughter died; in May the eldest daughter and the father. All that remained of a particularly fortunate family, fortunate because everyone in it worked, was a widow and an orphan. Because of the price of bread." (Goubert, Pierre (1960), Beauvais et les Beauvaisis de 1600 � 1730, Paris, quoted in Laslett, Peter, The World we have Lost, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1984, pp. 127-8) Before the last two centuries or so, ever so much depended on weather and climate, the incidence of diseases of various kinds, whether or not there were wars among princes or Viking (or Tatar or whatever) raids, and other such factors.  The European world was not really very stable.  This is off the top of my head, but I recall that conditions in the 12th Century were highly favourable, but things then turned miserable late in the 13th and very, very miserable in the 14th and then less miserable again and then quite favourable.  Apart from people being miserable toward each other (always the case), they had no control over their natural circumstances.  Nor did they have the technology that permitted them to store food from good to bad years or the distribution systems to move food to those in need.   All of which suggests that we should be very grateful to live in societies that do have the technology to smooth out food surpluses and shortages, that have learned to control major diseases, that, via fiscal and monetary policy, are able to exercise some control over the trade cycle, and that care enough about their citizens to initiate publicly funded programs in health, education, and welfare.   Regards, Ed W.