[bpt3]

> farming was insanely lucrative during that time

That is wildly inaccurate. Do you think people were flocking to cities to flee the "insanely lucrative" jobs they already had?

Farm labor paid significantly less than industrialized labor at the time. I suspect in addition to just making things up, you're looking at a few landowners who were quite wealthy due to their land holdings (and other assets) and what they have left behind while completely ignoring the lives led by the vast majority of farmers at the time.

[9rx]

> Do you think people were flocking to cities to flee the "insanely lucrative" jobs they already had?

The non-farmers were already accounted for. Did you, uh, forget to read the thread?

[anonymars]

I read the thread. I don't see where that's addressed

I also see survivorship bias keep coming up. Each time it claims to be have been addressed in the original comment, and that's that. Yet I don't see how the existence of surviving mansions today proves anything about the prevalence of wealthy farmers at the time

Similarly, there's no inherent reason subsistence farming should prove or disprove work outside the farm. The existence of farms large enough to grow and sell surplus food, that doesn't mean all farms could do so

[bpt3]

No, I absolutely read the thread. You either are just refusing to accept you're wrong, you have an exceptionally incomplete definition of farmer you refuse to share (which is really just a specific form of wrong that seems likely in this case), or you have some very exiting undiscovered data to share about life in the early 1900s in the US.