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Originally Posted by Arragonis
Thats because of your defintion of "standard of living". By most standards it is measured as deaths in childbirth, deaths per thousand at ages such as 5, 10 or 20 years, average age at death or perhaps in more developed places the number of people who receive state assistance.
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That seems a very strange way to measure standard of living, and one I've never seen used.
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EDIT - also income per person, income per household etc.
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Now that's getting closer, but absolute income is only part of the equation. What happens to your definition of SofL when income goes up by X, but the prices of important classes of goods go up by 2X, 3X, or more - as for instance land, because there's only a fixed amount? And meanwhile the cost of beads & trinkets goes down...
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The idea that industrialisation leads to a lower standard of life is a common myth. For example during the UK industrial revolution (the first one in the world) people who moved from the country to work in the "dark satanic mills" typically lived longer and earned more than those who remained behind.
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Earned more, yes, but also spent more because many necessities of life (starting with food) had to be purchased, through a food chain that added costs of transportation & storage, plus profits for any number of middlemen. I'd really have to see some irrefutable evidence of longer (and healthier) urban lives. Certainly it's not at all hard to find evidence of excess urban deaths. Here's a good one from air pollution:
Clearing The Air Bradford wasn't even a major city, like London or "Auld Reekie". Then there were things like cholera epidemics caused by contaminated water, deficiency diseases like rickets...
It should also be noted that a substantial share of the migration from country to city was anything but voluntary. From the Highland Clearances & Enclosure Acts down to China's Three Gorges Dam (which forced the displacement of over a million people), governments have long pursued policies of forcing people into cities, where they can be more easily controlled.