I mean, that's my point.
The fact that "things are less expensive now" is 100% due to the fact that tech has improved, so the poorest of the poor get now things that were inaccessbile to royalty at that time not because things have improved from a societal point of view. Society's dynamics in terms of balances of power have actually gotten much worse from what they used to be in medieval times - think about that.
> Society's dynamics in terms of balances of power have actually gotten much worse from what they used to be in medieval times
Please provide some evidence that a laborer in medieval Britain would have had more political power than someone in the middle class today (since medieval laborers were middle class).
Back then people died younger due to war or disease. Starting in 1350 the black death killed around a third of the population of England. I would say almost certainly the average labourer of the 14th century would have had much more power and influence than the average labourer would today.
I did do a google search though. This link from the economist is quite interesting and cites numerous studies.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/economic...
Isn't it enough evidence that laborers back then could buy a good property in the city for 2.5 years of work, and now you'd have to get a very good salary and be lucky to be able to afford the same in maybe 20, 25 years?
But given the way you've attacked me, I don't think anything I write here will change your mind.
0. Medieval laborers were middle class so it's important we compare medieval laborers to the modern middle class, not to modern laborers.
1. A property cost 2.5x gross yearly income for a laborer. They could obviously not afford to buy it in 2.5 years. Furthermore, I don't know what the access to financing was like in the 14th-16th centuries, but I'm willing to bet it's better today.
2. The definition of "good" property is pretty subjective, can we assume that means median? Google tells me[0] that the median price seems to be approximately a quarter million pounds. Raw salary data for York[1] (again just a single result from a single Google search) gives us £24,323.76. So £25k give or take. This is just for York proper obviously. If England is anything like the US including the outlying areas will increase median income by quite a bit.
So a "good" property in York is about 10x the gross yearly salary of the middle class. On it's face that's obviously terrible! It's 4x harder for the middle class to own their home now than in the middle ages!
That is, unless you want to look at all the things the middle class has access to that medieval laborer does not. All these things cost money, whether you like it or not. Even if you want to exclude the things that were a technological impossibility in the 14th century, you've still got access to representation in government and access to healthcare just to name two things that dramatically increase quality of life.
[0] http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property/York.html
[1] http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Location=York-England%3a...
No, because you're talking about - and I quote - Society's dynamics in terms of balances of power. Buying a good property in the city is a very, very small part of that.
Consider that Mayor DeBlasio can't come in and arbitrarily decree that that house is his, now, and so is my wife and horse. Consider that if I don't like his policies, I can run against him, campaign against him, vote against him. Consider that I actually have a fairly good chance of running into him on the street and actually having a critical conversation about his policies without the possibility of being whisked away and beheaded.
> But given the way you've attacked me
Nobody attacked you, they asked you to back up your thesis with more evidence than "I can't afford to live in New York". You then accused someone of making a strawman argument, when all they did was ask you to compare the same laborer you used against something other than the single point you're offering.
Add Baumols disease to the equation and you don't need "balance of power getting worse" to explain high house prices. It's just that construction worker expects to be compensater roughly equally to assembly robot operator. No matter the latter has lot higher productivity.
But, as a consequence of whatever we're focusing on (what is it really, anyway?) lives have gotten better overall, for everyone.
I think everyone would rather live in a Star Trek world. I would. Maybe we could.
Most other things are cheaper than in 1300. Many other things simply didn't exist in 1300.
You mention Louis XIV (who by the way was ~400 years after the time we're talking about). Was he poor? Obviously not. But for much of his life he suffered from health problems that we could probably treat effectively now; only one of his (legitimate) children lived past infancy, whereas now death in infancy is very rare. Medical care of the sort we now take for granted was not available at any price in the time of Louis XIV, let alone in 1300.
Also not available at any price in 1300: Central heating. Running water. Transport faster than, say, 20mph over long distances. Any sort of near-instantaneous long-distance communication.
Do you like books? You can have, for a sum of money a typical professional can easily afford over a few years, a private library better than anyone had in 1300. Do you like music? You can have, for a sum of money a typical professional can easily afford over a few years, hundreds of first-rate professional performances at your fingertips. Do you like fine food? You can have, at prices a typical professional will pay without a moment's thought, ingredients from all over the world that weren't even heard of in 14th-century York. Do you like to play games? You can have a chess grandmaster in your pocket, or buy a thing that fits over your head and creates a very convincing illusion of actually being in a world that doesn't even exist.
Yes, housing is terribly expensive right now. Yes, that's a big problem, it makes a lot of people's lives much worse than they ought to be, and it's easy to imagine ways it could do a lot more damage in the future. But that's pretty much the only thing that's much more expensive now than in 1300, and there are sooooo many things that are much cheaper and/or more available now.