Reddit Reddit reviews The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!

We found 10 Reddit comments about The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!
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10 Reddit comments about The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!:

u/Raiancap · 11 pointsr/lewronggeneration

It's a bit dated, but I really enjoyed "The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!"

I found it at a used book store years ago and couldn't put it down.

u/GoodKingWenceslaus · 8 pointsr/starterpacks

>In 1890 the average person didn't have electricity, indoor plumbing, television, computers, phones, internet, or a car. There were no planes or really fast means of transporting goods.

And now basically everybody has those things in the First World. (except planes) It's incredible, the great accomplishment of the free market.

>In 1900 90% of people lived at our current poverty line. How can you compare the two?

It's not just income. Ice was something for just rich people. Going in planes was just for rich people. Sugar was still pretty expensive. People's lifestyles have only improved.


>The world was simple back then. Most of what people consumed was made locally out of necessity.

Yes, it was simple, and most people lived friggen awful lives. I'd recommend this book: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Old-Days-They-Terrible/dp/0394709411 People lived in cities working 14 hour days living in hovels, or they lived in the country ploughing the land by hand to the possible great reward of being evicted and starving. Now we all complain about surprisingly small things comparatively.


>They didn't need to worry about absurd costs of living.

Yes, because they lived in basically closets. Or they lived in company houses where the mine owners basically kept them as slaves. Or they worried about being able to eat.

>So you're saying because they made about 15-20% less, comparatively, 120 years ago that means everything is okay now?

It's not all ok now. I'd never say that. But, if you took 99% of people today, and 99% of people 100 years ago, they would all choose to live today. No question. No question at all.


>If you took an extra 15-20% of someone's income but they didn't have to pay all these extra bills, I don't think people would complain.

But they also wouldn't get twitter, tinder, Facebook, tv, air conditioning, fans, ice, college, literally anything that people these days may take as a "right."

>Health Insurance

Yep, if you got sick you'd just die on the street or hope a church would take care of you.


>Power/Heating Bills

No, instead they had a coal stove that would put soot everywhere and choke everyone up. People lit with candles and would worry about fires.


> Cell Phone Bills

People clearly think their cell phones are worth it, they have them. I think anybody would pay their cell phone bill to get it given the chance.


>Internet Bills

Who is being forced to buy internet?

> Cable Bills

Who is being forced to buy cable? I don't think my family had cable until this year for watching the election. Nobody needs to worry about cable bills. If they can't afford it, they don't buy it. People choose to worry about it instead of going without. People back then just went without. My family could afford cable, they didn't want it. How is it a worry? If you can't afford a luxury, don't buy it.

>Credit Card Bills

Because people lived on only 3 shirts and 2 pairs of pants.

>Daycare fees (most women simply didn't work, obviously)

Rich women didn't work, normal women did. Either in factories, farms, or taking care of rich people's houses. Or just managing everything. Washing clothes by hand, making food, basically making a livable house without electronics.

>Gym Fees

How is that a worry? Again, if you can't pay for gym, don't use it. Or, if you want to worry financially so you can use the gym, that's absolutely your choice, but thats not a modern worry. Somebody back then would come home and pass out.

>Kids' Sports/Activity fees

Don't need sports or activities if they're working in the factory. ;)

>Car Payments, Car Insurance

Cars are a great modern luxury, yes. I will agree they are necessary for most people, especialy for those outside of a city. But plenty of people live without cars.

>Trash collection fees

Is't a great privilege that we get our trash collected?

>Water fees

It's so nice people don't worry about cholera.

Almost all the things you mentioned are incredible privileges that anybody from any time in history would kill to be able to have. I doubt anybody would honestly go without phones, internet, running water, electricity, etc and trade to live 100 years ago.


I think you are making a good point though, which is in simpler times people simply didn't think this stuff was possible, but now we take it for granted. And the baby boomers and greatest generation definitely had it better than us, but 100 years ago compared to now was a living hell.




u/RestrainedGold · 4 pointsr/antiMLM

According to this book, The Good Old Days, They were Terrible!, people have always been this way.

u/Owlie · 3 pointsr/BabyBumps

You should really check out some of Dr. William Sears' books. He is a pediatrician and author with something like 9 kids. He has written lots of books on parenting and is a huge advocate of attachment parenting, co-sleeping (what he calls "sharing sleep"), breast feeding, and baby wearing.

He certainly has the credentials to back up what he is saying, so if you are interested in co-sleeping and attachment parenting I'd check him out.

The Baby Book.

The Attachment Parenting Book.

u/squidfartz · 2 pointsr/TheWayWeWere

For anyone curious, this book is an excellent overview of this time period.

u/blurryfacedfugue · 2 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

Yes, definitely an informative article, and well written at that. The only issue I personally have with it are some of its claims which IMO hurts the legitimacy of the paper. I'm having trouble imagining a situation where ancient people did not succumb to middle age, disease, and other injuries. So some of the things that the doctor mentions, like easy childbirth, no disease, heal quickly, and so on are anecdotal or hearsay. While possible, I doubt it is the norm. The article also doesn't talk about lifestyle at all. It's not so much our food that is killing us, but our poor lifestyle choices. Modern people live longer and healthier, and get better nutrition. The rest of it, to me, is fantasy, of the "good old days". A good example of a book that talks about this, is: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Old-Days-They-Terrible/dp/0394709411 I really recommend it, it dispelled a lot of my romantic and fantastic notions of the past.

u/chefhanabal · 1 pointr/HistoryMemes

this is the closest I could find.

u/TMWNN · 0 pointsr/dataisbeautiful

>You're basically saying the two countries (Mexico and America) took the routes to what they are today based on their competency then?

Yes. Another example: At the same time Mexico was dealing with the Texans' revolt, the Yucatan also broke away for similar reasons (dislike of the central government's corruption). Had the US agreed to its request for help, today there could be another US state there.

>As effective as the American government may have been back then, today's culture of pseudo-intellectualism, overzealous reactionaries and the jaded may be reflected in the incompetence we see in Washington.

People have always been complaining about corrupt politicians and they always will.

Whether speaking as Americans or humans, we are living in the greatest era in history. (For more detail, I recommend Bettmann's The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!)

u/ccpetro · 0 pointsr/bicycling

> There is no human right to pilot an arbitrarily sized death machine on every possible inch of public space. No such right exists.

No one argues there is. However there is--over most of the industrialized world--100s of years of custom, culture and practice of being able to travel distances using public roads. There are already laws--in every industrialized nation--concerning the size of motor vehicles, and what roads they can be driven on, etc.

A huge part of the problem already is the social engineering of people who weren't nearly so bright as they thought they were. Early progressive "urban planners" attempted to design spaces so that people lived over here, and worked over there. They tried to design neighborhoods the way they thought people *should* live, and it turns out that like other progressive plans they failed utterly, and in doing made things worse.

Banning cars from the inner city won't solve any problems, it will just move the problems to the edges of the banned area, and force people to make draconian changes in their lives. It will push *more* families out into the suburbs and increase the number of people commuting in to the urban centers.

Creating MORE stress, more anxiety, more pollution, more cars on the road.

Stress and anxiety are already a LARGE part of the problem expressed as road rage and "othering" (spit) of cyclists, pedestrians, SUV drivers, Truck Drivers etc. When we are anxious and stressed we get *angry* and then can *literally* start using the same parts of our brains we use to think of non-human dangers to start processing *human* interaction. And that is one of the times people start to die.

> Motorists kill an absurd number of people all the time

Do they? An "absurd" number I mean. In 2016 less than 6 thousand pedestrians were killed in total, out of a US population of say 320 million. Even assuming that none of them contributed in *any* way to their own death[1], how does that compare in a "per 100,000" to pre-automobile deaths from horse, and horse and wagon accidents?

I've found reference to one article (that I can't really afford to pay for right now) that asserts[2]:

> The mortality attributed to auto travel should be placed in perspective, however. The world of horses and wagons that existed prior to the motor age was also quite dangerous to life and limb. Accidents involving horses killed thousands of riders and pedestrians during the 19th century (Bettmann 1974: 23). At least two kings of England, as well as many other distinguished persons, lost their lives to horse-related accidents prior to the motor age (Hair 1971: 9). One famous early study found that 280 of the Prussian army's finest horse cavalrymen died from horse kicks in the 19-year period between 1875 and 1894 (Preece, Ross, and Kirby 1988).

("Bettmann 1974: 23" appears to be https://www.amazon.com/Good-Old-Days-They-Terrible/dp/0394709411 , which is now on my reading list)

This article purports to claim that:

>...the dangers of automobile use are substantially lower than the dangers posed by early horse‐driven and steam‐driven transportation methods, especially in terms of fatalities per mile. It finds that on a per‐mile or per‐trip basis, automobile travel is safer than virtually any other means of travel used popularly in U.S. history,

This means that while the number of deaths and injuries caused by automobiles isn't *absurd*. If it's true, it is just part of a trend of life getting better and better as technology goes on.

The streets we have today are an *evolution* not just from pedestrian pathways, but from that through roads for horses and carts, then cars. People do fine on sidewalks and paths. Roads were always for carriages and wagons. Well, and marching armies.

Now, there's probably more than a few things we can do with road and sidewalk design that can reduce pedestrian, cyclist and automobile high velocity interaction.

And there's probably a LOT we can do with zoning laws so that people can live closer to work, or other things to reduce the amount of commuting people do (I don't ride my bicycle to work OR drive a car these days because I've been working from home for the last almost 4 years. I "walk" to work, often barefoot).

You know that after the car was introduced bigger cities got a lot *cleaner*? And this was in those nasty old cars from the first half of the 20th century that were AWFUL[2]. They got cleaner because *horses* were eliminated. Horse manure, urine, and flatulence was a major problem.

​

> but we've normalized it to the point where it's viewed more as an act of nature than a human failure.

I don't know that most of them are consider "an act of nature". I've never seen that.

It's that it *always been normal*. Both as a function of what came before AND as it has been since the automobile moved from being a rich man's toy to something that the working class could afford https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qIH8o6BXrE

Hell, there were probably two people sitting in a cafe in Rome in the 300s arguing about whether they should allow chariots and in Mumbia getting in a pissing match over palanquins.

There are also a non-zero number of pedestrians killed by cyclists. Given the number of cycle miles per year and automobile miles per year I'd bet the number is a LOT closer than you'd think.

>It does not have to be that way.

Human nature is really hard to change. Every movement that has tried to change man has either learned to accommodate man, or has wound up with gulags, concentration camps and killing fields.

Which means it may not "have" to be that way, but it's a hellishly intractable problem.

>There is no human right to drive a living room of metal around at 50 mph inches away from human beings.

Most roads posted at or above 50 mph are *not* roads where people routinely walk for any distance, and people don't have the right to exceed the posted speed limit (except under specific conditions in some states).

You have *no* right to just wander safely all over creation, never have. Moving safely has *always* been the responsibility of the individual.

Most pedestrians are killed (70+ percent) *away* from intersections. That is 4200 of the 6k from above. Why are they IN A POSITION to be struck by a car? I'm sure in some cases it's the car leaving the roadway--too many stories of drunks hitting someone on the shoulder etc. But those are as much to my point as anything--We have been attempting to stop drunk driving through a variety of methods since at least the late 1960s and not failed, but not succeeded.

[1]Like walking down a street talking on a cellphone and walking into a crosswalk against the red light, thereby getting hit by a driver ALSO talking on a cellphone, but at least he had a green. This BTW my wife witnessed in downtown Chicago. Not a place you should be heads down at *any* time.

[2] Roots, Roger, (2007), Dangers of Automobile Travel Reconsidered, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 66, issue 5, p. 959-975, https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ajecsc:v:66:y:2007:i:5:p:959-975.

[3] When I was in highschool in the 1980s, well after some of the emissions control legislation, and you could *taste* the exhaust during the summer. This was in a smaller town (less than 60k permanent residents)