I am keenly interested in history. Mainly military history, but all the other disciplines leak in over time. And the one thing that any serious, rational student of our species' past understands right quick is that life sucked for just about every single one of our ancestors.
Oh, there are a few exceptions if you hunt long and hard for them. If you were even moderately wealthy it was pretty keen to live in Rome for most of that city's ancient past, for example. But for every one person who was able to enjoy the good times, there were literally thousands upon thousands of faceless commoners who slaved away every day for just barely enough food to keep going.
There is no way to adequately convey just how lucky we are. Consider how one of the biggest health problems we face today here in the Western Hemisphere is that we are growing fat. Program the Wayback Machine to travel back even one century and you will notice that people were having problems getting enough to eat, not too much. Heck, my dogs eat better than most of the humans who ever lived!
But there are still billions of people who do not enjoy the benefits and luxuries you and I consider to be the bare minimum. What about them? Can we just snap our fingers and create an Industrial Revolution in their back yard overnight?
Squander Two is a blog that is worth reading, even though his occasional harsh language might put some of my readers off. I was very impressed with this post, where he discusses how the Western reaction to child labor might just hurt those we wish to help.
"We know how we got to our current comfortable lifestyles, because our ancestors helpfully wrote it all down. We know how to get on top of infant mortality and have an industrial revolution and create such massive amounts of wealth that luxurious civil rights become viable and end up working puny eight-hour days and eating foreign food three nights a week in our multi-bedroomed houses. It took about two hundred years, and it took our recent ancestors a lot of bloody hard graft; it killed a lot of them. I for one am grateful to them that they worked their arses off and lived through appalling crap so that I wouldn't have to.
"Now, two hundred years is a long time. Having had quite a few societies find their way down the painful road from getting up at five to milk the goat to staying up till five playing Tomb Raider, I'd hope that by now some people out there had some decent ideas of how to get that time reduced. Maybe we could get it down to a hundred years of sweatshops — that'd be cutting it in half, which is really pretty damn good. Or maybe even fifty years, which would surely be an astounding achievement."
You guys should read the whole thing.