[ETH_start]

This is not true. We have reliable indicators of pre-modern poverty levels [1], and they were indeed brutal. India (in the mythical pre-invasion period) was no exception. [2]

>>Most of the population lived in thatched huts or wood beam supported houses constructed from soil based cement like stuff. I assume this was true all over the world.

This is what extreme poverty (pervasive in pre-modern times, aand still present today in the poorest regions of the world) looks like:

"Official reports for Burgundy between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries are full of 'references to people [sleeping] on straw... with no bed or furniture' who were only separated 'from the pigs by a screen'."

- Civilization & Capitalism [3]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

[2] https://theunbrokenwindow.com/Development/MADDISON%20The%20W...

[3] https://archive.org/stream/fernand-braudel-the-structure-of-...

[kumarvvr]

Depends on what you mean by poverty. I mean, how does one even measure it a 1000 years ago.

I am suspicious of these reports.

Every country has a history of good times and bad times. However, the culture of India is unique in the sense that the most strongest unit was the collective society and cultural practices (food donation being held as the highest ideal, practical prohibition of sale of food, a multitude of rituals for householders wherein donation of money, clothes, grain, etc was part of the ritual, societal support for disabled persons, etc). This led to a fairly decent life and times.

Were there not people in extreme poverty, sure. Was the whole country in poverty, surely not.

[formerkrogemp]

> Depends on what you mean by poverty. I mean, how does one even measure it a 1000 years ago.

It's called anthropology, linguistics, geology, and history. They're legitimate fields with highly qualified and knowledgeable professionals. Through their efforts we have a decent idea of what various cultures and lives were like even a thousand years ago through carbon dating, archaeological digs, artefacts, and so forth.

[cyber_kinetist]

I see some anthropologists themselves quarrelling over the definition of 'poverty' though. Yes they are much knowledgeable than us, but you shouldn't think of them having a straightforward 'answer' like what you usually have for math problems.

So if you are bringing academic authorities to the question, at least namedrop some academics/books/papers, so people can have a constructive debate about this.

[9dev]

That’s not how this works; you cannot discredit an entire scientific field and then demand some papers and books for the lazy to get into it. Anthropology has a corpus of millions of papers, and you demand what? A proof that they aren’t full of themselves.

[cyber_kinetist]

I wasn't discrediting the field at all, quite the opposite! A healthy discourse is what keeps the academia in motion, especially for fields adjacent to the humanities. (Although you see this even in the field of 'hard' science like physics or mathematics, where people argue about even the most fundamental things like the validity of renormalization techniques or the usefulness of the law of the excluded middle).

And also, how can you possibly start a conversation about anthropology (or anything generally academic) without bringing any written literature? The worst way for academics to start a conversation with people outside of the field is "We are the authority on this topic, and you are ignorant so you should stop talking". Give us something interesting to ponder about, that's all!

EDIT: Since maybe I'm being a hypocrite by not providing any interesting links/sources myself, I'll have a try. The whole sub-field of developmental anthropology (some Wikipedia links below) seems to have close relations to the current modern concept of poverty (and to a broader extent global neoliberal politics) and is surely interesting. I'm also seeing many criticism towards their approaches from other anthropologists (Arturo Escobar is one prominent example), and taking a close look at this debate seems much more interesting than just claiming "Anthropologists are experts and we should let them just do their research" (which is a dead end to any interesting discussion on HN). And no, don't get started with "These people are fake anthropologists, real anthropologists use carbon dating and 3D scanning all that scientific jazz..." Anthropology has historically been intertwined with politics and ideology from the start, since it doesn't just end with obtaining the facts, but extrapolating and interpreting from the facts to infer what kinds of human societies were there in the past. And it is in that interpretation that all kinds of disagreements come in to play.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_anthropology

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_poverty

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropology_of_development

[ETH_start]

We can see in markers of extreme poverty in remains of people who died in pre-modern times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_bioarchaeology#

>>Anne L. Grauer, Professor of Anthropology at Loyola University Chicago, assessed the presence of porotic hyperostosis and periosteal reactions in the population (n=1,014) from St. Helen-on-the-Walls in York, England. She used porotic hyperostosis and periosteal reactions to examine health and disease in urban medieval England. Grauer discovered that 58% of the population displayed evidence of porotic hyperostosis and 21.5% displayed evidence of periosteal reactions.[6]

Without industrial civilization, the amount of labor people do is not sufficient for most of the comforts of modern life, like insulated and waterproof shelter, sanitary pads, diapers, vaccines, bandages, regular laundrying of clothing, etc etc.

[swatcoder]

This would be more useful with detail on what share of the population lived in urban environments, as well as insight into what life was life for the share that didn’t.

Do you know that? Do you have that?

[simonh]

We have the Domesday Book from the 11th century which was a complete survey of the entire country, and we have parish and monastic records, wills, town charters and tax accounts from later periods. Of course there are gaps and ambiguities but we’re far from blind about those times.

[ch4s3]

There have been plenty of collectivist societies in history and some had gift economies, this isn’t really unique. There are several Native American cultures that would have fit the same description. You could even see a faint parallel in cross-tribal clan membership.