I did the standard historical thing and looked at median adult males. Average is usually worse than median.
This is fair, because I’m comparing only Western Europe for the last few centuries, and divisions now are mostly geographical—situation of different people in the same country tends to be similar; but situation of different people in different countries varies drastically. It used to be the other way—and correctly only one way would be rather unfair.
As for women, I’m definitely not going to compare that, as situation of large-family stay-at-home housewife (a model which goes back at least to Ancient Greece) is simply completely different way of life than what 20th century women do. This kind of separation of gender roles is incompatible with modern economy, and modern separation of gender roles is incompatible with most historical economies. I don’t think that assigning low value to such life is based on much more than prejudice, but for this discussion look at clusterfuck which spread out of Bryan Caplan’s article about 19th century women’s freedoms to half of the blogosphere by now.
I did the standard historical thing and looked at median adult males. Average is usually worse than median.
This is fair, because I’m comparing only Western Europe for the last few centuries, and divisions now are mostly geographical—situation of different people in the same country tends to be similar; but situation of different people in different countries varies drastically. It used to be the other way—and correctly only one way would be rather unfair.
As for women, I’m definitely not going to compare that, as situation of large-family stay-at-home housewife (a model which goes back at least to Ancient Greece) is simply completely different way of life than what 20th century women do. This kind of separation of gender roles is incompatible with modern economy, and modern separation of gender roles is incompatible with most historical economies. I don’t think that assigning low value to such life is based on much more than prejudice, but for this discussion look at clusterfuck which spread out of Bryan Caplan’s article about 19th century women’s freedoms to half of the blogosphere by now.