Technology makes a lot of things better. Like eliminating symptoms of 95% of cystic fibrosis victims.
> even widen the gap between the haves and haves not
America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
> even widen the gap between the haves and haves not
America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.
So, by this logic, a homeless person with a used iPhone is better off than Louis XIV (who literally owned all of France) just because the king couldnt play Candy Crush?
This statement confuses global technological progress across centuries with an individuals actual financial security, social power, and quality of life within their own modern society.
I simply just cant understand why would someone repeat such a statement (and I have seen it everywhere).
(French isn't that bad a language)
* https://thisisversaillesmadame.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-lack...
> False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.
There's a lot of reasonable arguments to unpack here.
But no, it's not that Louis XIV didn't have an iPhone, it's that the vast middle class in developed countries has central heating and access to penicillin and don't die from giving birth as much.
Also, America's poor are definitely worse off than medieval kings. They don't have access to those basic things that keep most modern people wealthier than medieval kings, like food, shelter and health care.
Some of the older (pre-medieval) king's ruins in Denmark are (by our standards) small stone houses with a moat, and what makes them remarkable is that they're made of stone, and the moat is rather big, so it keeps people out. Like metal doors in apartment buildings, sort of. (Correction for the historians: The oldest king's ruins are of course just holes in the ground where wooden beams used to stand.)
s/America's poor/Europe's lower middle class/ and you're there.
probably more that Louis XIV was not a medieval king.
Some more thoughts for you: since 19xx workers are productive to the scale of 10x (feel free to downplay it to whatever factor over 3x as this is the minimal amount, everyone agrees on except of those that harvest the difference) against those times. But we are still working 8/8/8. Who takes the difference? Of 10x (or 3x)?
Being available is not equal to a person being able to afford it.
Maybe you were writing about middle class and not the poor?
On the other hand kings had free-range organic grown meat prepared by personal cook anytime they wanted which is a true luxury even today.
The very oldest book in the bible contains the basic recipe for keeping meat fresh for ~week, and that's what Kosher, Halal, ... are really about.
And yeah, it depends. Roman emperors, for example, would have had fresh meat available whenever. Medieval kings, no way. Renaissance kings ... probably not constant fresh meat, and certainly not constant fresh fish, but a lot better than medieval kings.
There is no refrigeration, so "fresh" meat has to be slaughtered the same day. Kings tended to live in populated areas, so wild game would be scarce. Majority of meat would have been pork kept in pens (not free-range in the modern sense), or mutton/goat (free range, but typically older and tougher). At the same time, even a king likely wasn't slaughtering 365 pigs/year just to have fresh meat every day - lots of dried, smoked, or even salted meat in the diet...
The government provides food to the poor with SNAP.
The only starving people in America are drug addicts or very ill people. Obesity is the usual problem for poor people.
I mean, it’s no wonder people move from uganda to mississipi (or other places in the us) and not rhe other way around.
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/feb/25/us-evang...
My parents had access to cheaper housing, less red-tape and fixed working hours, more job security than my generation, when I was born.
So now insert BUT THEY DIDN'T HAVE FLAT PANEL TV AND IPHONE in retarded Sponge Bob chicken meme here.
Clean water depends on how you define "clean" e.g. from https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/united-states-water-poll...
> Current EPA data reveals that nearly half of all tap water in the United States contains detectable levels of PFAS chemicals
There's also plenty of contamination violations (apart from maybe Hawaii with only 2) of the water supply.
As far as health care goes, I thought that most people in the USA will refuse to get an ambulance due to the expense. I've also heard of plenty of reports that poor people will not visit a doctor for minor health issues even though they may be early signs of much more serious issues.
> Clean water depends on how you define "clean"
Always, back to arguing about the definitions of words. Let's put it simply. People before 1800 had little idea about clean water. They didn't know what bacteria was. They didn't know about contaminants. They had very poor sanitation practices. They died of cholera regularly.
Probably the greatest advance in health care in history was the introduction of a clean water supply.
So if you want to quibble about what "clean" means, I'll take municipal water, water filters, and boiling any day over what anybody in medieval times drank. If you don't think your water is clean enough, get a water filter from Amazon. They're cheap, and they work.
In the US, emergency rooms cannot turn away anyone. The care delivered there is light years ahead of anything any king got in medieval times.
Amazon filters would not have remotely been a reasonable solution to that problem.
My memory might be faulty but I remember watching "The Lion in Winter" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqz3gkrmBbo) and feeling really happy I was not alive then, even as royalty. (hope that's the movie)
You're somehow succumbing to the fallacy of the edilic life of old.
The same life where you had to have a dozen of kids to overcome infant mortality, and each time a woman gave birth it was like a Russian roulette.
And the average life expectancy was what? 40 years? You didn't had a midlife crisis because you'd be dead by then.
The answer to this riddle lies in the previous paragraph
If you lived to 20 you had a pretty good chance of making it to 70
The facts don't quite line up with your belief. In the middle ages, those reaching 20 had an expected remaining life of around 20 years.
“ At age 21, life expectancy of an aristocrat was an additional 43 years.[40]”
Maybe not quite 70, but pretty close
i keep telling them they’re free to have their own personal monarchy in their own family as long as people are free to leave and also to leave the rest of us out of it. but for some reason they don’t seem to like the idea as much then.
Do America’s poor have a standard thing like a roof on top of their heads? Nevermind a castle, just a basic house which has already been paid for.
Obviously that isn’t to say there is isn’t room for improvement or that we shouldn’t try, but the current system has worked incredibly well.
Counterpoint: any leaking abandoned oil well. Check out YouTube videos documenting the abandoned oil wells in West Texas, which are dumping industrial volumes of water into abandoned land.
According to whose defintion for standard of living?
https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-an... You can read https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-an... which is by a working historian.
I also want to add that, none of this is relevant to the point of whether or not the current system is "just" or reasonable given and I think overall that argument is mostly a red herring.
But also, no they don't. Standard of living includes one's agency over their environment. An medieval king could say things and the kingdom would bend to their will. No one making $18,000 is having hundreds or thousands of people bending over to serve them.
Utter nonsense.
No, it doesn't.
Lol nope? This is utter ignorance. Medieval kings were constantly balancing power with people directly underneath them.
Whole dynasties have been eradicated in the continuous power struggles, particularly from rich families.
Not only that: medieval kings had to bow to religious authorities as well (something ee don’t do anymore). In 1077 kind henry iv had to stand three days bare headed in the snow to convince pope gregory vii to reverse his excommunication (an excommunication would effectively invalidate him as a king, btw).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Canossa
You comment shows your utter general ignorance and complete misunderstanding of medieval times.