it was literally misery on scales that hadn't been seen before. children were expected to work in horrible and abusive conditions. everyone was working very long and gruelling days for next to nothing and had no way to protect themselves from exploitation.

How is that different from subsistence farming?

It was just as bad only with industrial accidents and diseases on top.

Entire families working in the fields all day didn't have accidents or diseases in subsistence farming?

In the UK industrial accidents were commonplace until the passing of The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974. The very many maimings and deaths it has (belatedly) prevented are less common in subsidence farming.

Of course farmers get sick, but they don't get the diseases created by industry. There are a great many respiratory conditions and cancers that don't occur naturally.

Not sure if you're talking about industrial revolution or present day labor conditions...? Okay, we have child labor outsourced to poorer countries, but still confusing.

>Compared to being a peasant subsistence farmer, it wasn't so bad.

the life expectancy in Liverpool and some other parts of England during the peak of industrialisation fell to 25 years, the average height fell by almost 10cm, so actually it was pretty bad and it took decades for the situation to improve. I would have very much preferred to be a self-sufficient farmer during that time. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens goes through a pretty big amount of data that shows that traditional communities and even hunter-gatherers lived much better and longer lifes than people that had to endure the human meatgrinder that was industrialisation.

https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin...

also, "it wasn't so bad?" were you there? suffering is suffering.

> were you there?

Not being Nicolas Cage, I was not. However, there are many, many countries today who are similar to 19th century UK/US. Would you like to go to rural China and compare the peasant subsistence farming still happening there with urban China and its sweatshops?

> suffering is suffering.

Sure. People suffered. They suffered horribly as peasant farmers living on less than $2/day, or they suffered as laborers making possibly a bit more. Work was universally hard.

It's possible (likely) that future people will see what we went through - disease, hunger, unemployment, bad management, personal suffering/alienation and a host of other problems - and say literally the same thing about us. But although I think all of us can think of a few tweaks at the margins, we'd all utterly fail fully to replace the status quo most people accept, many try to change, a few succeed at changing and a precious few improve.

We should give the past the same courtesy we expect from future generations. And we should be willing to make some of the sacrifices today to ensure that future generations will endure. (And this includes things like ensuring the effects of climate change or nuclear weapons don't wipe us out.) The past is and forever shall be a foreign country.