By what metric? Around me it was all sheep farming or weaving.
It seems to me having the agency to choose your own hours, to be able to collect fire wood for the fire is better than on paper earning more, but being in a slum a family to a room, with all the diseases, perhaps the mill owner having a monopoly on what you could buy, or banning alcohol. Yes you may have more money, but I don't think the quality of life was better.
We could make the same point today. I live in an area why you can buy a house for £150k. So am I better or worse off than a Londoner that earns twice as much but paid £1M for the equivalent house?
> They actually were better off, which illustrates how bad rural poverty was at that time.
Perhaps at the start of the industrial revolution, but not during most of it. Which is says a lot about how pricing shifts and finds equilibrium, not only for raw materials but also for human workers.
It seems to me having the agency to choose your own hours, to be able to collect fire wood for the fire is better than on paper earning more, but being in a slum a family to a room, with all the diseases, perhaps the mill owner having a monopoly on what you could buy, or banning alcohol. Yes you may have more money, but I don't think the quality of life was better.
We could make the same point today. I live in an area why you can buy a house for £150k. So am I better or worse off than a Londoner that earns twice as much but paid £1M for the equivalent house?