It seems wrong to suggest that women working outside the home is a default starting state pre-reforms. In most classes of most societies, women have worked (not meaning housework) as much as men; being pure housewives is a "luxury" of development (see US 1940s-50s). Granted a lot of that work may have been done in the household - farmwork, piecework, laundry - that maintained their subordinate status, but plenty wasn't.

I didn't mean to suggest that I thought spousal violence in India was more frequent than partner violence in Baltimore. I don't. The economist doesn't give figures. My working assumption was that the rates of violence against women are roughly comparable in traditional societies and at the bottom of the heap in conventional ones. Again, I may be wrong. But that was the background to my thoughts.

As for Heebie's take, again, I was rather assuming that the Indian woman beaten up by her husband is by definition part of an extended family. She may become an unwelcome or unwanted part, but if she has a husband there is a social structure around her. And that -- again hand-waving -- is what is much less officially provided in Baltimore. So the stuff about constructing a network through church and/or FB is a very strong plus point for the US model.

But Heebie is right that absolute immiseration is not a useful point of comparison. I'm not thinking about the homeless and starving. Let's look at it from the point of view of mothers who have homes and either (shitty, insecure, low-paid) work outside the home or no place in the market economy of their own.

Median income in India is around $550 per year. The rural poor in India have incomes of around $150 per year. That's not adjusted for purchasing power, but say you adjust it by 10x for purchasing power plus some kind of metric for quality of social bond not captured by income, or something (10 times seems crazy geberous for this). You still end up at around $1500/year for the Indian rural poor or $5500 per year for the median Indian. You are absolutely gonna need to do a lot of work to convince me that there is any meaningful metric on which it is better to be a poor villager in India than a poor person in Baltimore -- the former experiences a kind of poverty that is almost unimaginable to the latter.

the make-or-break line is a strong social network
As long as it doesn't douse you with acid when you annoy it. Which is to say, 2nd 2 last.

I think the "job security" point is completely and totally wrong. You're completely at the mercy of someone else as to whether you have any access to money or not. There's no financial security at all.

In favour of rural India: job security - ie a secure, known, social position as part of a household.

Not sure this is true either. A lot of farm laborers, precariat, and displacement.

Also 1 is right. "Outside the home" does a lot of work there; if you are a subsistence farmer, all work for both men and women is outside the home and your other option is generally piece-work or some kind of bartered farm labor, which would also not count as a paid job outside the home but isnt't housewifedom, which is a middle class thing.

4: If I read the IMF stats right, the PPP converter is about 4. I'm sure that too masks major urban/rural differences.

4: Poor people in India are never Ravens fans.

are roughly comparable in traditional societies and at the bottom of the heap in conventional ones. Again, I may be wrong. But that was the background to my thoughts.

I think this renders the question unanswerable. That is, you're comparing 'traditional societies' with 'the bottom of the heap'. At which point, who has it worse off is completely dependent on where you draw the line between the bottom of the heap and the rest of 'conventional society'.

Obviously, someone like me is much better off in the situation where in middle age my ex-husband moved on to a younger woman: being economically dependent on him and his family would have sucked a while lot two years back. But I'm not in your calculation, as nowhere near the bottom of the heap. Is your line defining the 'bottom' splitting off only women who are chronically unemployed or unemployable? Because women in that category are probably in some sense worse off in Baltimore than the average of all women in India, sure.

Halford makes an apparently solid argument against me there. But there are American families with per capita incomes around $700 a year. 1.5m households live like that, apparently. At that point the necessary multiplier comes to seem maybe less generous.

2.2 she's part of an extended family, yes, but do they take her right back to the husband when he's violent, or do they take her in and chew him out? I was emphasizing supportive extended family, not just extended family.

Oh, the conversation moved on while I was typing. But the general point still stands -- is it better being in a traditional society completely dependent on your husband and his family, who are under some social pressure to support you economically even if there's some level of acceptable abuse, or to be financially unstable in the US? Completely depends on what your line is for 'financially unstable'. You'd have to draw it pretty low for me to take the deal, but there's some line where it's a fair tradeoff, probably.

11: In the past, you could have gotten respectable society to slut shame her, but that wouldn't pay the rent.

-2 - not to minimize the extent of extreme poverty in the USA, but note that the $2/day figure doesn't include the value of social transfers which are (not nearly generous enough but) massively larger in the US than in India. The Indian government does provide subsidized rice to rural areas to fend off starvation but that is basically it.

if you are a subsistence farmer, all work for both men and women is outside the home

What about child care? Care for elderly relatives? Cooking?

Data: according to the National Sample Survey Office (warning: honking PDF), in 2013, based on major source of income, 60% rural households were classified as self-employed in agricultural, livestock, or non-agricultural exercise; 32% as wage/salaried workers, and 8% as "other". 75% of households own less than one hectare of land, 10% own 1-2 hectares, compared to 53% and 15% respectively in the 1971-72 survey. Not all that secure, istm.

The elderly relatives do cooking and childcare until you have to put them adrift on an ice berg.

This is kind of tangential, but relevant to the capitalism/feminism question in the OP. From Westad:

The concept of holding a job with regular hours and regular pay was foreign to most Europeans at the turn of the century. Even for those who worked in industry, older, more paternalistic mores applied, as did rules set by guilds or hometown associations. Aristocrats never held a job, of course, but neither did the peasants and laborers over whom they lorded. Europe had been changing in this sense for a very long time. But the Americanization of the post-1918 era capped the turn toward a market economy with distinctive US characteristics.

exercise enterprise

All the Indians I know are doctors.

But do they practise at home or in the fields?

19: The great struggle of Indian rural life is finding an iceberg for your elderly relatives.

17 - oh, that was a typo. I meant to say *inside* the hine. You are working your plot, maybe doing piece work, maybe working on some kind of arrangement for another farmer in the village, but the inside/outside the home distinction doesn't really exist in the way it does for middle class urbanites.

The *home*. God damn it.

The concept of holding a job with regular hours and regular pay was foreign to most Europeans at the turn of the century.

Which century? Does this mean 1900?

Because... more or less, I suppose. Most Europeans back then still worked in agriculture. 40% of Americans worked in agriculture in 1900 and I would guess that the figure was similar or maybe a bit lower in the UK, France and Germany, and higher in the rest of continental Europe.

Also,

women in India are more likely to have been beaten by their husbands than they are to have a paid job. [...] (Of course, the whole world must have been like that before WW1).

27: I suppose so too, but it's a very big claim, especially since he extends it non-agriculture (in unspecified ways).

27.2: It's about 2000, right? Wasn't everyone living off our income from dot com stocks back then?

28 -- how many women had paid work before 1900? I'm assuming no one who worked in agriculture, none in the middle classes and certainly none in the upper classes. Essentially, only urban women in factory work.
Spousal violence was unfortunately much more widely distributed across class boundaries.

Halford, are you sure that the $2.00 a day doesn't include social transfers? I have the book somewhere and my memory is that these people are ineligible for social transfers as a result of the Clinton and subsequent "reforms". It's the same pattern as "Universal Credit" here.

In the U.K., 7,346,345. Because you forgot about school teachers, governesses, and domestic servants.

27 - much less in Britain which already had only around 10% of the population in agriculture and was the first country in the world to be run that way (with basically its foodstuffs coming from outside the country, especially Denmark, Holland, and Argentina-in fact, according to a factoid I just read, substantially more of the British diet was griwn or raised in Britain in 1970 than in 1910).

The same or higher in the rest of Europe -- around 50% in France in 1900, around 40% in Germany,but worh the difference that the bulk of continental farmers even in France and Germany (especially Germany) lived more like tradtitional subsistence peasants than the relatively wealthy American farmers.

There were lots of women with paid jobs in domestic service in the 19th century, surely? All those maids and cooks. Plus all those doing piece work at home in spinning and weaving and embroidery before the advent of factories.

I think that LB's 14 is as far as the substantive discussion will ever get. But that ought not to stop the fun.

Also, factory workers, the mill girls of Lowell and so on.

36: At that point, it does kind of take all the fun out of it for me. "How terrible would your life have to be before being property would be an improvement?" There's an answer, probably, but it's not really a question I find it edifying to contemplate.

It's probably more fun if you're better at not taking it personally.

32 - they are ineligible for *welfare* as a transfer in most states but the bulk of US social transfers come in other ways -- disability, medicaid, subsidized housing, low-income heating program, not to mention education, etc. etc. Which is absolutely not to argue that shocking horrible poverty doesn't exist in the US, it certsinly does. I just don't think it's comparable to poverty in India -- which for essentially the richest country in the world is a bar so low for taking care of its population that it should gross everyone out that we're even having this conversation.

31: You may well be strictly correct; but the Economist didn't cite the stat to describe the relation between the two variables, it did so for rhetorical effect, and I assume you did too. And so I read you as rhetorically sweeping all pre-20C societies into one basket with pervasive and uniform domestic violence.
This riles me because societies are actually diverse; because I doubt we'll ever have good enough data actually to assess the historic claim; but mostly because that rhetoric smells to me of moronic twitter-style morality*, where everything and everyone that doesn't conform to the bubble's standards of the moment can simply be vilified en masse with no further thought.
*And I know you're better than that.

27, 34: For agriculture, Westad makes sense. But he says the concept of regular salaried employment wasn't really there, even for industrial workers, which surprises me a lot.

The low end for the portion of the working labor force in nineteenth century Britain that was female is around 30%. In fact it was almost certainly much higher because of doing piece-work in cottage industries and other agricultural work in villages. I would be shocked if the same is not true for India today, but that much or most of women's "work" in "jobs" doesn't show up in whatever the Economist is citing for women having a "paid job."

https://eh.net/encyclopedia/women-workers-in-the-british-industrial-revolution-2/

my memory is that these people are ineligible for social transfers as a result of the Clinton and subsequent "reforms"

That's far too broad a generalization. Those "reforms" were mostly to a very specific program, AFDC, making it so inadequate as to today be helping very few people. They didn't gut food stamps (SNAP), Medicaid, and a large number of other programs for the poor, although those have been under assault in other ways. Also in the Clinton years CHIP (children's health insurance) was significantly expanded.

I frequently see posts like, "This is weird, but I just don't have any girlfriends. I need some Momma friends. Anyone else? Let's start a play group!" and they seem to get pretty robust responses.

I don't want to hijack the thread, but I've never seen a post like this. (I guess because I'm not in a mommy group.) Are there dad equivalents?

It's because you're imprisoned by performative masculinity.

"Nineteenth century" in 42 should be "approximately 1850," this is just because I dislike handwaving about whole centuries and feel bad for doing it myself.

Are there dad equivalents?

I'd occasionally see someone trying to start up SAHD groups when I was more of a single parent but, frankly, they kind of scared me.

Median income in India is around $550 per year. The rural poor in India have incomes of around $150 per year.

There's a good reason why the Gulf countries have hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers from rural India despite the generally horrendous living conditions. They can earn that or maybe as much as twice depending on skills in a month.

48 suggests the answer to LB's "How terrible would your life have to be before being property would be an improvement?" is basically "As terrible as an Indian's."

Point in favor of Baltimore - my daughter is a nurse at the Shock-Trauma center there and is very good with, errr, shock and trauma. Lots of practice, unfortunately.

You speak from experience?

wonder whether it was capitalism or feminism which was responsible for the great change
being pure housewives is a "luxury" of development (see US 1940s-50s)
The former obviously is hard to answer, because both developed in parallel. The latter makes me wonder if the question is being framed unhelpfully. If 1960s American feminism was largely a reaction to the aberrant households of the 1950s, and 19C feminism was largely a reaction to the (ISTR*) aberrant sexual morality of Victorian Britain, that suggests to me that the effect of feminism wasn't to change societies so much as to deflect the courses of societies that were rapidly changing anyway.
*For instance, if common-law marriages were overwhelmingly the norm in Europe until the early modern period at least, that makes births out of wedlock historically normal, not scandalous.

44. URPLE! How are things?

My neighborhood fb has a dad's night out. Poker games and sports fandom are social glue for many guys.

Anyway, my 2-bit opinion is that capitalism explains a lot more.

I would have literally forgotten about the world cup if google hadn't had a doodle.

Put another way, as development makes more resources available, it becomes increasingly possible for a society to bring reality in line with its ideals; feminists (and others) argued and mobilized to make those resources available to pursue their ideals rather than those preferred by the existing power structure.

55 It's been a fantastic world cup.

52 is right, I think, though not about C19 feminism. I think that was far more about getting (upper) middle class women out of the home and exerting power in the external world than it was about sexual liberation.

Ume is entirely right about domestic service. A huge form of paid employment that I entirely overlooked. And with many of the disadvantages of the worst of paid employment -- insecurity, sexual harassment, etc.

And Barry on migration is very strong. If working in Arrakis is preferable to life in rural India, then rural life in India is shitty indeed.

All in all I've seldom been so thoroughly and instructively beaten up.

58.1: That sounds then like a precursor to 1960s economic liberation.

48: One of the key data they see fit to report in that rural statistics report I mentioned above is how many rural households have at least one member living and working outside the village. It was 77% of households defined as marginal landholding (up to 1 hectare), 16% of small landholding (1-2 ha). And in 7 states, the first figure was 90%!

56. Mossy, I would like you to meet my unfortunate acquaintance, 2017.

I didn't say they won.

58 - I think the overall question is very reasonable, though, just not at the level of comparison rural Indian woman/Baltimore resident because the income gap there is too large. There's some very real point at which the benefits of family structure, relative security, whatever exceed the pure benefits in income you might get from being richer and more "free." And also it seems very likely that humans are often not great at weighing those particular kinds of costs/benefits, maybe in either direction. The " Is it better to be in [social] prison or out on the [metaphoric] street?" seems like a very real issue, just one that's maybe not well illuminated by the India/Baltimore comparison. Maybe try this: would you rather be a relatively poorer person with a strong family structure in, say. (middle-income overall country) Mexico, or have a higher income (but maybe not felt income), more freedom, but arguably more insecurity in East Los Angeles? People actually make those kinds of tradeoffs all the time, and pick different answers.

If 1960s American feminism was largely a reaction to the aberrant households of the 1950s

I don't think that follows. Even when "wife shouldn't work" was strictly limited to a small upper class, there was a pretty clearly male power structure (couverture, sexual harassment, etc.), and I definitely see second wave feminism as going against that more broadly. It wasn't the "women should work" movement.

63 - yes. that's a better illustration of the trade-off. I just happened to be kicked into this line of thought by the Economist, which pitched the whole question in terms of productivity and GDP in a way that seemed to me smug even for the Economist. East LA/Mexico is more interesting if there is in fact migration both ways.

Well, there's no wall.

Two reasons I think one should be skeptical of any argument that the situations of poor women in India and in Baltimore are even comparable.

(1) The gap between the poor and the middle class in India, is a yawning chasm, compared to the gap in the US. By which I mean that, for all that it appears like the gap is large in the US, and the poor can't get ahead no matter what they try, you ain't seen nuthin' yet.

(2) the particular situation of women, and esp. of women in rural areas, is pretty dire. Google "rape in rural india" and prepare to be horrified.

This is very easily solvable by looking at immigration patterns.

India to US: ~2mm (per this...horribly labeled chart. maybe just a million in last 5 years?) https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/indian-immigrants-united-states

US to India: Could not find in google, but this implies less than a couple hundred thousand, cumulative. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/03/india-is-a-top-source-and-destination-for-worlds-migrants/

Sure sure there are caveats, quotas, local and family issues, gender issues and other that go into this question. But given the generality and with that big a gap in population flows, I think your answer is clear.

Also, this is an absurd statement.

/i Both countries have enough extreme misery to make the comparison of "who is worst off" meaningless. /i

I think a stark difference is made very clear by the first sentence of the guest post.

URPLE! How are things?

It's amazing to me how much my honest answer to that varies on a daily basis. Ok overall, I guess. Thanks for asking.

Concidentally, Brad Delong wrote a little something about this general subject: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/07/feminism-in-the-long-20th-century-an-intake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-the-economic-history-of-the-long-20th-century.html

I see the centrality of the economic and the extraordinary upward leap in prosperity as the principal news that the future will remember from the history of the Long 20th Century. But I am male. If I were female, would I see the demographic transition--the shift of the typical woman's experience from one of eating for two for twenty years (and of having one chance in seven of dying in childbed) to eating for two for four years--and the rise of feminism as the biggest news?

Quite possibly.

55, 57: Germany's early exit will probably show up in national-level economic statistics.

72: On alcohol consumption?

Germany's early exit will probably show up in national-level economic statistics.

In which direction? Are dispirited Germans going back to work instead of spending hours watching and discussing football, or is the disappointment causing them to work less energetically?

"Which would you rather have: a sombre, unmotivated German sitting at home thinking gloomy thoughts, or a high-spirited German overflowing with nationalist fervour?" is the central question of modern European history. Discuss (20 marks).

I'm fairly sure Baltimore has mains water and sewerage. (Yes, yes, Flint, but the difference here isn't "might you face a slightly higher risk of cancer?", it's "might any given contact with the water kill you dead within the week?")

Also 67 is absolutely right about the level of social violence tolerated in much of India.

I had a certain stereotype of Germans based on World War 2 movies, and while it doesn't really fit actual Germans, it fits the (German) Swiss perfectly. I could see the Swiss committing mass murder if there was a flow chart that had "mass murder" on it as long as we followed the previous steps on the chart. I always wondered if there was a certain aspect of German culture that was discredited because of the association with Hitler, while Switzerland preserves it.

It's interesting to read about the Franco-Prussian war and the extent to which, back then, the popular image in Britain was that Germany was this land of absent-minded philosophers and eccentric chemists, and France was the militaristic terror of Europe.

Which is much the more accurate picture, averaged over history.

I mean, most of the time Germany doesn't even exist, much less kick ass.

76. Mains water and sewerage were in the original post.

67 yet another nail in my coffin. Oh well.

80. Not "kick ass"? You need to read my book, if the damn chambermaid hasn't burned it again.

And which vaguely Germanic barbarians kicked the most ass? Yes that's right, the Franks.

THEY REALLY DID.

THE RELENTLESS GENOCIDAL WARFARE DIDN'T HURT AS MUCH THE SUPERCILIOUSNESS THEY DID IT WITH.

74: Positively. It's like a year when more of the public holidays fall on weekends.

Ah, thanks.

If a public holiday falls on a weekend, Germans don't observe it the following Monday?

88: Nope. Immovable feasts.

And if it's a Saturday, shops are closed all weekend. Whee!

77 - I remember reading that in the 80s some West German conservatives looked to East Germany as the repository of the supposed traditional German, I guess here meaning Lutheran/Prussian virtues of loyalty, modesty, obedience, etc (this was different than the Stasi was chock full of ex Nazis, which was true but not the point of that particular fantasy). I assume this was mostly disabused after the wall came down although I guess Angela Merkel the protestant pastor's kid is maybe an example of that story.

90: same thing in Korea, if BR Myers is to be relied on: a lot of South Koreans see North Korea as being more pure, more truly Korean, than the South, which has had foreign influence, miscegenation and so forth. (Also a big part of North Korean domestic propaganda.)

I remember reading somewhere that the only lasting achievement of the GDR was to make Germans lazy.

AHEM

GDR, FRG, what's the difference?

No word of a lie, back in 1971 a guy came in to work pleased as Punch; he'd bought a brand new German car. A Wartburg.

Where was this guy?

From the 1950s, Wartburgs had a three-cylinder two-stroke engine with only seven major moving parts (three pistons, three connecting rods and one crankshaft).

I wonder what the asthma rate in a city filled with them is?

Suddenly this brings back the way the Eastern European cities used to smell. Jesus.

I love the smell of lignite in the morning.

if BR Myers is to be relied on

I'd like to settle that definitively someday...

I feel like that might involve the total collapse of the DPRK. Which, you know, good news/bad news.

I worked in Germany for the summer of 1989 - near the Bavarian /Austrian border - so before the Wall fell, but there were a small number of Ossies around. The stereotype was that their personal hygiene could be improved (the West Germans were used to a constant supply of cheap hot water, in fairness more than I was used to myself coming from "turn off that immersion!"-land).

The Germans used to turn up to work 20 minutes early the day after a football match so they could have a good chat about it before work started.

||OT but this does sound rather entertaining: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/12/yes-he-can-obama-debuts-as-sherlock-holmesian-detective

|>

Speaking of non-Trump dystopias, another signpost along Europe's march towards abandoning its values entirely: Germany's big respectable weekly paper, Die Zeit, has a pro- on contra- on that most "reasonable people disagree" question of whether it's legitimate for NGOs to save drowning people in the Mediterranean. I shit you not.

(Background picture: an NGO boat with a bunch of African-looking refugees on it, in life jackets, with a couple white NGO-dudes handing out more. Title: "Or should one let it happen?" [Ugh, an example of my shitty German - not sure if it means, "Or should we let them die?" or "Or should we permit the rescuing?" or whether it's intentionally ambiguous.] Subtitle: "Private helpers rescue refugees and migrants from drowning in the Mediterranean. Is that legitimate? A pro and contra.")

104 I'd read that only if it involves Sherlock-Obama and Watson-Biden investigating the pee tape.

It's unambiguously "Or should we just ignore it"
More literally "Should we let [the shipwrecks] be"

Let Reagan be shipwrecks.

I have thought about a version of this question extensively, because I live in close proximity to some of the most immiserated neighborhoods in the US and have worked with some of the poorest people in China, where I got asked this question all the time. (Usually framed as: America is such a rich country and China is such a poor country, the poorest American must be better off than the wealthiest Chinese). My feeling is that being really poor sucks all sorts of tangible and intangible ways such that being really poor in the worst neighborhood in Baltimore is different and perhaps incomparable to being poor in a developing country but not necessarily better.

I need to work, but here are a few points.

1. In Baltimore/Chicago, a poor person lives constantly with a pervasive threat of (gun) violence. In rural China, people might worry about migrant children being injured or killed in industrial accidents, but it's not an all-pervasive and valid worry that your child/grandchild could be shot any time they leave the house or sit too close to a window. Violent crime is still rare and losing multiple family members to murder (by the police or other community members) would be an unheard of tragedy. Rural India might be more violent than rural China, particularly for women, but there's a level of violence that the urban poor in America face that adds a significant psychological burden. Additionally, the trauma of grief and possibly seeing family members killed with no access to mental health support is a huge problem. Given the level of untreated PTSD and grief and depression that poor urban Americans deal with, I think this alone makes it possibly a wash.

2. Incomes are much lower, but rural Chinese/Indians should have access to some level of subsistence farming and have knowledge on how to grow crops to supplement purchased food. Landless former peasants in "ruralish" China often have smallish plots of land or even grow vegetables and raise chickens on vacant scraps of public land, like alongside roads. This might be an area where China and India are different and not totally comparable, given that China's child malnutrition rate is 2% and India's is 44% last time I checked (maybe 2016?). In the urban US if you live in a food desert you have access to unhealthy food that longterm contributes to poor health, and even if you do have access to an affordable grocery stores, you may not have the time or knowledge to cook cheap nutritious foods from scratch.

3. Similarly, housing for rural Chinese/Indians may be free or very cheap, whereas rent in cities is expensive proportionate to income even in bad neighborhoods and public housing is hard to get into, plus there's an issue of safety. Rents in the part of the "bad" neighborhoods that directly abut my neighborhood are not really affordable for someone on minimum wage, especially if you need a place big enough for a family.

2 & 3 mean that comparing wages even with PPP taken into account isn't totally accurate, given that it's possible for a poor Chinese peasant to shelter themselves for free and feed themselves at bare subsistence-level for probably 100 USD/year, but not possible for a poor Baltimorean to do so.

4. Extreme urban poverty also has different problems from rural poverty. A doctor I talked to noted that there a massive Vitamin D deficiency epidemic in my neighborhood and adjacent ones, since poor lower-mobility people have a hard time leaving their homes to get sunlight. Malnutrition separate from undernutrition is also problem, plus the longterm effects of unhealthy diet and chronic stress + environmental racism/exposure to toxins & rodent droppings lead to lots of terrible health problems in middle age for American urban poor. On this the developing world wins out (at least until Trump undoes the EPA), because exposure to pollutants is far worse for the Chinese/Indian poor, urban or rural, and there is a difference between "this will kill you at 60" and "this will kill you in three months."

5. I don't know about India, but in China there is probably some premium to be placed on a general sense of hope that life can and will get better, vs. a pessimism that one is permanently stuck at the bottom of a heap. The rural poor in China are overwhelmingly old; any able bodied rural adult has probably found much better-paying work in a city, where they face unsafe and/or unpleasant working conditions but also make decent enough salaries to reasonably expect a much more comfortable life for themselves their children. The Chinese welfare state is also expanding with mind-boggling rapidity, so people are growing to expect more from their government rather than less. I met a lot of very angry, very poor elderly peasants, but even the peasants I met calling for another violent Marxist revolution still thought their grandkids would be materially much better off than they were under the current system.

Caveats are of course a sense of general hope and optimism may not exist in India, and it's possible hope & optimism exists to the same extent in urban Baltimore, but I would have a hard time thinking any poor person of color would see the Trump administration and not think the US is going backwards.

105 - it seems due in party to insanely shitty editing/headline writing, with the question being "should there be *private* (as opposed to public) refugee rescues." Which frankly still seems super bizarre to my US ears (why the fuck shouldn't NGOs do something even if the government can and should also do it) but maybe is a little less weird in the European context where there's a bigger difference between what is accepted as private vs. public action.

https://blog.zeit.de/fragen/2018/07/12/zum-pro-und-contra-zur-seenotrettung/

Or it's possible I've misunderstood the clarification, my German is read-only and super shitty.

109: I guess this is China specific, but the availability of jobs runs directly counter to the expanding welfare state idea, thanks to hukou issues. Also, family separation is endemic for the same reason.

But to follow up, there's a blindness in Western social science to think about the harms of poverty primarily economically, but there's a huge psychological factor in terms of daily quality of life that isn't simply reducible to material goods.

A second unrelated point in terms of domestic violence is that there is a component of trauma that is cultural, such that experiencing sexual violence in a culture where it is an expected norm is probably not as traumatic (or perhaps traumatic in a different way) than it appears to an outside observer with different expectations. This isn't to excuse or condone domestic violence, but it does mean that it's almost impossible to understand people's inner states by taking our own as a model. Anthropologists and political scientists who study rape and violence against women in wartime situations note that women who experience what we would consider daily spousal rape and chronic sexual abuse do not find that traumatic but are often extremely traumatized by being raped by soldiers, because one is seen as normal and acceptable and the other isn't. Anthropologists who study feminist and women's empowerment NGOs note that the common tack of rocking up and telling people that their lives are terrible and they should feel traumatized generally are not well received by the women they work with, even if women learn to "perform" trauma for donors and to get free stuff. Again, I think that DV is terrible, but I don't think that we can extrapolate that women necessarily feel day-to-day misery just because we would.

There is also the issue that if domestic violence is expected, you end up with a bell-curve type distribution where a small number of men never hit their wives, a majority of men hit their wives a bit, and a small number of men beat their wives to the point of disability or death. In a society where wife-beating is socially frowned upon, the men who might have otherwise hit their wives a little don't, and you're left with pathological forms of abuse. If it's shocking to think about this in terms of wife-beating, corporal punishment for children is a better example. Corporal punishment is no longer widely acceptable, and most parents who might have otherwise spanked their kids occasionally no longer do so. You still have child abuse as you did in the past, but it's hard to extrapolate from present day child abuse that all children who were spanked experienced the same sort of trauma pre 1990s. You also have the added complication that people impervious to social pressure are probably off in other ways as well, i.e. someone who hits his wife in the present US is someone who is likely violent and antisocial in other contexts as well, which may not be true of someone who occasionally hits his wife in rural India.

I'm about to have dinner at an Applebee's, if anybody wants me to ask questions of the natives.

112

Right, in China there's an expectation you'll live apart from your spouse/children/parents for an extended period of time, which we might find miserable.

One thing that rural people feel pretty adamant about is actually maintaining rural property, and people are willing to live in abject conditions while working for the sake of building their giant dream mansion in the home village. You see massive four or even five story homes with giant silver gates and flat screen TVs and air conditioning and brand-spanking new furniture and appliances that sit empty while the people building them live 10-people to a dorm and work 14 hours a day. (The parents might live in it but often feel more comfortable living in their own much smaller houses next door). I would argue getting through the day though, depends in large part on knowing that you have your blinged-out mansion waiting for you when you retire or decide to stop working.

People also tend to migrate with their villages, so even while being a poor migrant worker there's both a strong social network and also social prestige to having the biggest, blingiest mansion in the village that you can lord over your coworkers during lunch break.

Probably no one cares anymore, but I read the "contra" private sea-rescue piece in Die Zeit. AFAICT it's a McMegan-esque argument but not a facially morally horrendous one. The idea is that (a) private sea-rescues encourage more migrants to go to sea, risking more lives (b) private sea rescues create a climate in which "open borders" are imposed on states against their will, making it more likely that ultimately states will react by shutting down asylum completely; therefore (c) the best answer is to have states determine who they want to admit as refugees and have states do that, as opposed to having private boats out there encouraging migration over the Mediterranean, because this will minimize deaths and help to preserve the right of asylum in Europe.

Still a shitty argument -- the best response is "if you tell me I'm not supposed to help these drowning Eritreans who set to sea looking for a better life than fuck you" but not "eh fuck 'em let 'em drown" monstrous, either.

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At JFK and about to leave this Trumpian dystopia for a non-Trumpian dystopia in a few hours.

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This is quite possibly the worst flight I've ever been on and we've yet to take off.

117: When did you start reading stuff?

That was me.

120 - a kindly zookeeper taught me.

119:?

Don't order the shrimp.

124 to 114.

113: This is the kind of thing I meant when I was talking about "heroic assumptions" comparing across cultures and times.

"the common tack of rocking up and telling people that their lives are terrible and they should feel traumatized generally are not well received"

See also discussions of why we have apparently got so much worse at treating military PTSD over the last few decades.

127: Has that been demonstrated? Implications are interesting if so.

128: it would be difficult to demonstrate because of the huge changes in medical practice since, say, 1918, but some statistics are suggestive: the far higher rate of suicide among Falklands veterans compared with WW1 veterans, for example. If you were in the Falklands, you were more likely to die of suicide over the next 15 years than you were to die actually during the conflict. That certainly wasn't true in WW1, even though the fighting lasted longer and was far more intense.

As Buttercup implies (I think, and please tell me if I'm getting the wrong end of the stick) there is a degree to which people become as traumatised as they think they ought to be, regardless of the actual physical injury they have suffered. If you go around telling people that being hit by their wife, husband, mother or father is a very serious event, then they will believe you, and when it happens they will react accordingly; if it's something that happens on a semi-regular basis to everyone you know, then you probably won't take that too seriously.

You see this happening even between different parts of the same population; well-meaning people in the media write "OMG how can she stay with him after he BEAT her??" articles, but the woman in question has grown up in a culture where physical violence just happens from time to time in intimate relationships, and as long as no serious injury is done it's just a point or two above a nasty argument; not pleasant, at all, but not a relationship-ending moment.

If you were in the Falklands, you were more likely to die of suicide over the next 15 years than you were to die actually during the conflict. That certainly wasn't true in WW1, even though the fighting lasted longer and was far more intense.

This doesn't seem like an "even though" kind of relationship. I can believe that the suicide rate among survivors of the conflict was higher, of course.

How does the Falklands compare to WWI in terms of casualties as a proportion of force?

132: Falklands are nowhere near. 255 British dead out of over 10,000 service personnel involved. UK WW1 dead were about 900,000 out of a total roughly 5.7 million who were mobilised (and there is of course a difference between "mobilised" and "actually saw combat").

re: 132

260 UK deaths during the war.

WW1 had a death rate of about 11.5% for British soldiers.

The best numbers I can find, suggest the UK task force for the Falklands was around 26,000 give or take. So the death rate was about 1/10 of the rate for WW1.

As one would expect, then. Sometimes the numbers don't match with popular memory.
The comparison is still hard to make though. The Falklands force was professional not conscript, so presumably significantly different demographics, and wars other than the Falklands for some of them. And suicide isn't the only index. If one looked at alcoholism for instance among veterans from WWII on I wonder what could be found.

I believe the suicide rate amongst US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is significantly higher than that for Vietnam, and way way higher than for older wars (though databis spotty). But I remember reading somewhere that the rate was not clearly linked to combat deployments, or even PTSD, suggesting something else going on. Maybe I can look.

A lot of suicidal people in WWI presumably had a chance to make it happen during the war itself.

129, 130, 132: Wait, I am completely confused about what's being said about the statistics here. Is the suicide rate among Falkland vets higher than among WW I vets? Or are you just saying that the suicide rate among Falkland vets was higher than the (extremely low) rate of deaths in combat in the Falkland war while the suicide rate among WW I vets was lower than the (extremely high) rate of deaths in combat in WW I?

130 is saying that Falklands vets think they shouldn't be beaten by their wives, so they get really traumatized when it happens, whereas WWI vets thought wives could beat their husbands whenever they wanted, so for them it wasn't a big deal.

119 I was one row in back of about 3 constantly screaming children and in the window seat of a row where the aisle seat was a 95 year old man with knee trouble (so had to minimize getting up and walking around). Also the entertainment system was down the whole time. But now I'm in balmy Arrakis where it's 7:30 PM and a balmy 100F with 50% humidity so it's all good.

Holy shit you've in a plane this whole time.

The Faulkland vets are traumatized because they miss their waffles.