I know this is a popular talking point that commentators reflexively agree with, but is it actually true? The most famous French novel, Les Miserables, is about a guy who goes to prison for stealing bread. In the most famous Charles Dickens story, A Christmas Carol, the main character literally thinks if people don’t want to starve to death they should just wOrK hArDeR (libertarian moment). The moral of that story is rich people will only pay their employees properly if they’re threatened with burning in hell forever. And remember, Dickens was writing when Britain had the largest empire to ever exist.
Western Europe did have certain geographic advantages over the East, and the USA had even greater advantages over both. Yet there is Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which describes federal agents destroying food in front of the starving people to make stonks go up. Food prices collapsed but people still couldn’t buy it because they didn’t have jobs, so the solution was to destroy food. Our government was playing 12-dimensional chess beyond the understanding of the simple commoner.
So maybe on paper the USA and Western Europe throughout history were more “prosperous” than Russia, and maybe proportionally fewer people were living in extreme poverty, but there was still extreme poverty, and for the same human and systemic failures as in Russia. Sorry and call me a communist, but I don’t think Dickens’ London was materially better than Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg.
I think the actual answer is that western apologists are better at making up moralistic excuses than Russians. See, the Russian peasant starves because Russia is a bad prison house of nations. The British child laborers in Oliver Twist starve because they’re lazy and don’t appreciate the value of hard work to generate maximum productivity for your employer.
So yes, I was taught basically from birth about the so-called prosperity of western civilization, but I’m just not seeing it. I see no evidence for the idea, but I do see modern people insisting that this thing existed while the actual contemporary writers alive in those periods of history all unanimously said people were starving.
That did change after WWII. The USA, the only major country to get through the war unscathed, started the greatest economic and military protection racket in history, eventually gobbling up and incorporating all the remaining western empires. At that point, the West did start to become quantifiably “better” than the East, as that’s when people got the proverbial 97 brands of toothpaste and pineapples in winter. Then, as we all know by now, Gorbachev saw a Pizza Hut for the first time and it was all over.
But it is important to remember that even at the absolute pinnacle of western prosperity, whenever you want to mark that specific point, the prosperity was not distributed evenly. If you don’t believe me, watch some classic Sophia Loren movies. Maybe 1960s New York City and Paris were great, but Italy looked no better than provincial Russia in that same time frame, sorry. And in fact that is how the vast majority of people lived in the post-war years, in hastily built concrete apartment buildings. The dream of the American suburbs was just that, a dream.
Here’s a famous photo from America, “4 Children for Sale.” At first glance you might think this was during the Great Depression, but no. This was 1948.
Ian Kummer
I now have a new YouTube channel that I will use to upload videos from my travels around Russia. Expect new content there soon. Please give me a follow here.
Also feel free to connect with me on Quora (I sometimes share unique articles there).
I’ve had the impression that the wealth generated by the industrial revolution didn’t really start to be distributed downwards until after World War 2. The world wars required mass conscription, then western countries were in competition with the Soviet bloc and its egalitarian ideology, so elites saw the need to actually work to raise the standard of living of the masses. This started to go in reverse with the end of the Cold War.
Conscription? No. They were fearful of unions, socialist and communist political movements, and actually seeing the political scene shift towards confiscating capitalist ownership. The shift to “social democrat” policies and a “mixed economy” which we saw in all jurisdictions, regardless the political color of the administrations involved, was a last ditch effort to preserve the capitalist’s control. They were afraid of popular movements like Hitler’s, Mussolini, and communism which had shown that it is easy to replace the ownership class.
I've had the impression that the wealth generated by the industrial revolution didn't really start to be distributed downwards until after World War 2. The world wars required mass conscription, then western countries were in competition with the Soviet bloc and its egalitarian ideology, so elites saw the need to actually work to raise the standard of living of the masses. This started to go in reverse with the end of the Cold War.
Conscription? No. They were fearful of unions, socialist and communist political movements, and actually seeing the political scene shift towards confiscating capitalist ownership. The shift to "social democrat" policies and a "mixed economy" which we saw in all jurisdictions, regardless the political color of the administrations involved, was a last ditch effort to preserve the capitalist's control. They were afraid of popular movements like Hitler's, Mussolini, and communism which had shown that it is easy to replace the ownership class.
A country like the Netherlands was relatively poor in the 19th century, compared to Belgium, France, or Britain, and compared to prior and subsequent periods.
The industrial revolution largely passed them by.
And yet, there was a lot of wealth, and a lot of capital invested in the surrounding countries and in America, which fueled the incomes of the well to do even without local industry.
You see the same dynamic in Eastern European countries today: The supermarket chains, financial services, retail, transport, telecom service providers — at the top of the capital chain it’s Austrian, German, Italian, and Western banks and capital, raking off enough of the proceeds (as well as rents; mortgages; loans) to keep Western capital growing at a better pace than local capital.
There is thus a complete divide between capital concentration and accumulation and the population and local conditions involved. I think this is also largely true for pre-war Eastern Europe which never had colonies and the vast concentration of capital wealth this brought. Peasants historically often produced more than enough for comfortable conditions and housing; privation was always the result of larger forces and war impinging, serving to feed the owning classes, war, and the towns.
A country like the Netherlands was relatively poor in the 19th century, compared to Belgium, France, or Britain, and compared to prior and subsequent periods. The industrial revolution largely passed them by. And yet, there was a lot of wealth, and a lot of capital invested in the surrounding countries and in America, which fueled the incomes of the well to do even without local industry. You see the same dynamic in Eastern European countries today: The supermarket chains, financial services, retail, transport, telecom service providers — at the top of the capital chain it's Austrian, German, Italian, and Western banks and capital, raking off enough of the proceeds (as well as rents; mortgages; loans) to keep Western capital growing at a better pace than local capital. There is thus a complete divide between capital concentration and accumulation and the population and local conditions involved. I think this is also largely true for pre-war Eastern Europe which never had colonies and the vast concentration of capital wealth this brought. Peasants historically often produced more than enough for comfortable conditions and housing; privation was always the result of larger forces and war impinging, serving to feed the owning classes, war, and the towns.