If you're complaining about the price of butter, here's a data point to keep in mind as you butter your croissant: "All dairy products have become much more abundant, especially since the mid-1800s, and chiefly for unskilled workers."
The same hours of unskilled work that bought 1 pound of butter in England in the 1200s bought 15.6 pounds of butter in 2022.Read more here at Human Progress.
Instead of 1 pound of cheese, an unskilled worker got 10.6 pounds.
1 gallon of milk became 15.1 gallons.
2 comments:
When most things are getting better, but some things are getting worse, we have a tendency to take for granted what's better, and over-value what's worse. Studies show that the negative psychological impact of a loss (let's say you lose $100), is much greater than the positive psychological impact of the same gain (winning $100) - even when the two balance out and should be neutral overall.
There's a clear explanation for this in evolutionary psychology, in that any negative change to our existing condition, even a minor one had a much greater capacity to lead to our demise in our ancestral past. The 'smoke detector principle' also applies, in that even if a negative change has only a small chance of killing (say 1 in 100), evolution selected for an over-reaction to the potential negative. We're more likely to survive and pass on our genes if we waste our energy over-reacting 99% of the time, then if we are blase in the 1% of times that it really matters.
I find it healthy to keep this in mind. In modern civilisation, it's incredibly less likely that a minor negative will lead to our demise. Rather than 1 in 100, it might be 1 in million now. But our evolution hasn't caught up with that reality. We're evolved for the past when the risk was greater. So we waste a lot of energy worrying about things that usually don't matter much in the greater scheme of things - like the price of butter.
...since the 1800s.
OK.
What about since the 1970s?
Henry J
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