Hacker News Reader

Comment by 9rx | Hacker News Reader

> are you referring to subsistence farming?

It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

Remember, subsistence farming first had to end before people could start working off the farm. Someone has to feed them too. For 50% of the workforce to be working a job off the farm, the other 50% being subsistence farmers would be impossible.

View on HN

> Look at the farms that still have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

Those are usually large plantations, and the people who owned them weren't just farmers but vast landholders with very low paid labor working the farm (at one time usually enslaved). I doubt they were representative of the typical turn of the 20th century farm.

If we're speaking from vibes rather than statistics, I'd argue most 19th century farmhouses I've seen are pretty modest. Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.

> Those are usually large plantations

There are no plantations around here. This was cattle and grain country in that time. Farmers got rich because all of sudden their manual labour capacity was multiplied by machines. The story is quite similar to those who used software to multiply their output in our time, and similarly many tech fortunes have built mansions just the same.

> Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.

Well, they weren't palaces. You're absolutely right that they don't look like mansions by today's standards, but they were considered as such at the time. Many were coming from tiny, one room log cabins (stuffed to the brim with their eight children). They were gigantic, luxurious upgrades at the time. But progress marches forward, as always.

> Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

> There are no plantations around here.

FWIW you haven't really stated where "here" is for you. It's not necessarily going to be the same for everyone, and based on the parent comments, the potential area under discussion could include the entirety of the US and Europe (although the initial comment only mentioned UK specifically, it doesn't seem clear to me that it's explicitly only talking about that). I'm not sure you can categorically state that no one in this conversation could be talking about areas that have plantations.

> Farmers got rich because all of sudden their manual labour capacity was multiplied by machines.

This sounds like a semantic disagreement.

I think you are using the word "farmer" to mean "large agricultural landlord". Today, those terms may have a lot of overlap, because most of us don't work in agriculture like we did then, but in the past, it wasn't so much the case.

Back then, the landlord who had the "big house" wasn't called a farmer, but often a "Lord" or "Master".

"Farmers" were mostly people who worked as tenants on their land. The confusion in US history started early as the local feudal lords of the time (the founding fathers) rebranded themselves as farmers in opposition to their British rulers, but the economic structure of the societies was scarcely different.

> Back then, the landlord who had the "big house" wasn't called a farmer, but often a "Lord" or "Master".

Feudalism in North America, in the 1900s? Your geography and timelines are way off.

Sharecropping was very common. And a hard way to earn a subsistence living.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, slavery and sharecropping were primary forms of agricultural labor.

Those are far closer to medieval feudal peasantry than 20th century industrial labor, regardless of the lack of an official hereditary aristocracy in the US.

> 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.

> 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?

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

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.

I think it’s pretty dependent on where you farmed. Orchards in California being vastly more profitable than like North Dakota.

Also hard to ignore the survivorship bias there. The small/bad/ugly/whatever houses are gone.

> Also hard to ignore the survivorship bias there.

It's not ignored. It is already encoded into the original comment. No need to repeat what is already said.

> It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Already in the original comment. Already in other replies as well. How, exactly, does one end up not ready anything in the thread before replying?

> Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

TLDR: survivorship

The typically large farms with nice houses were making reasonable money, and in a lot of places, only the house remains of the farm. My old neighborhood was a large farm, subdived into about 1000 postage stamp lots around 1900; the owner's house got a slightly larger lot and stuck around as your mansion.

The small farms that were within the means of more people tended to have shanty houses and those have not persisted. If the farm is still a farm, it's likely been subsumed into a larger plot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com