I recently visited Stanley Mills, on the river Tay just outside Perth in Scotland. It's now a fascinating museum, and focuses on the history of the cotton mill and its workers.

In the early 1800s the mill employed 885 workers. 540 were female and 497 were children as young as seven. Their working day started at 5:30am, 45-minute breakfast at 9:00am, 45-minute dinner at 2:00pm and work finished at 7:00pm. Children finished at 3:15pm to attend the company school.

The Factory Act, passed in 1833, changed how the mill treated its workers. The act restricted working hours and also prohibited employment of children under nine.

>How do you think the West got rich in the first place?

By increasing productivity through industrialization and technology advancements, and by doing those things before the rest of the world. (and by having economic systems that accomplished this faster/more effectively than others, possibly also as the result of plagues that decimated the population a few times)

>> By increasing productivity through industrialization and technology advancements, and by doing those things before the rest of the world.

You seem to be ignoring the human labor part that happened around then and the backbreaking work that they did. Robots didn't get it done nor did the 40 hour work week.

Increases in productivity would have been _faster_ with shorter work weeks, but would have been detrimental to the wealth concentration such is the cost of capitalism. Reduction of hours is, to a point, a source of growth.

> By increasing productivity through industrialization and technology advancements

yes, but if you think your great-great grandparents had it easy, well you should ask around and read books written around that time. I think you forget the standards for everyone was just plain misery not long ago.

I am not really sure what you are talking about.

I have actually read a bit about how one of my great-great grandfathers lived, and it didn't seem he was miserable and could arguably be said to be better off.

More to the point though, the question was how the West got rich. I was talking about the last ~1000 years, maybe a little less, of history in the western world and how their development led in part to the differences in development today. What that has to do with how many ancestors 100 years ago were miserable or not doesn't really connect.

Taking on that subject though, I have this idea that people regardless of situations are on a grand scheme equally miserable. Whether living in a cave 20,000 years ago or a New York penthouse, if you had a way to quantify misery I doubt you would be able to find a significant discrepancy. (corollary: much of the depression and other mental illnesses experienced today are a result of the drastically different environment and set of hardships experienced compared to the ones we evolved in)

> I was talking about the last ~1000 years,

The West was still pretty poor even 200 years ago. Going back 1000 years ago makes no difference. Economic development and the fact that almost everyone benefited from it in the West is very, very recent History.

Plague? What plague? The west didn’t industrialize in the Middle Ages.

A lot of things happened that made the west wealthy in comparison with the rest of the world. Plague also didn't just happen once, it was a continuous thing with a few large events.

The reduction in population of some of those epidemics made fairly large improvements in the survivors' lives and can be seen as the stimulus in a lot of the progression of Europe.

Progress that led to wealth in the west wan't just the industrial revolution(s), it started long before and was the effect of several technological and social developments.

Good one.

In case nobody gets the joke: the economic system was the plague.

No it wasn't. Don't be foolish.

I agree with ekianjo in this sentiment, although we can pass some of our lessons to developing nations, preventing tragedies like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

Development doesn't happen immediately, but it can happen fairly rapidly (50 years for Korea vs 200+ for the US).

>How do you think the West got rich in the first place? 30 hour work weeks?

By profiting on other people’s labor time; not their own.

But it also just happens that, in the US, 30 hours is just the right amount to forgo providing benefits and job security, so your proposal was not that far off.

> By profiting on other people’s labor time; not their own.

Certainly not. During the early ages of industrialization, workers made a better living in the cities than in the countryside, but had to work a lot for it too.

The railroads didn't build themselves

Slave Labor. Colonising other countries and exploiting their lands.

No, this is a false justification, since "The West" is not just the US, and many other western countries had abolished slavery for a long time already before becoming really rich. So, your claim is just wrong.

How did the 3rd world massively grow in the 20th and 21st century?