I get they are fictional, but what strikes me from typical Victorian England proletariat dramas... Is that the British empire at the time had the largest empire in the history of the world. And their people lived in squalor in London.
Implicit in your statement is the assumption that the purpose of a government is to maximize the well-being of all of its citizens. This is a somewhat new idea, and shouldn't be taken for granted when we look at historical situations.
Or geographical situations. The UK serves dramatically better in that capacity than the US does at present.
Thing is, though... even the parts of Western history that aren't remembered as atrocities by modern standards were pretty thick with them. For example, thousands of homeless London orphans were enslaved and sent to the early American colonies for the crime of being homeless orphans, and very few of their names are recorded in subsequent colonial documents, so the assumption is that almost all of them died before reaching adulthood. Adult convict slaves commanded very low prices relative to African slaves, and children that weren't as effective laborers, and with fewer rights, were likely seen as burdens.
Victorian England was the richest country in the world by GDP per capita. But the world was just very poor before the industrial revolution: a per-capita GDP around $900. By 1800 England was more than double that. Today almost every country is richer than England was in 1800: https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/how-the-world-became-rich-par...
I think something modern times should emphasize more than ever is that what matters is the lifestyle of the people. Here's [1] a fun graph I just threw together. That's real GDP/capita and real wages graphed alongside each other, both indexed (at 100) to the start date when real median earnings began being measured by by the Fed, which is 1979. Since 1979 real GDP/capita is up 117% while real wages are up 12%.
And if you consider that modern times has far more necessary expenses that often involve rent (internet, computing devices, etc) then it's quite likely that real median wages are down since 1979 in terms of how much money the average person has left to themselves at the end of each month. Even without these adjustments it's likely that real wages today are lower in absolute terms than they were in the 50s as by 1979 inflation had already started getting out of control.
The point of this all is that I don't think the numbers mean much of anything. And that's assuming you could even reliably measure them - you cannot. Go back into reconstructing 19th century data and earlier and you're going to rely on assumptions where the degree of uncertainty is much higher than the differences over time you're trying to assess. So I think far more informative than numbers are personal accounts. How did people live? Of course there's a literacy bias there, but even such accounts will shed light on the illiterate.
Your graph is rather misleading: you adjust for inflation in two different ways to get 'real' data. One series uses CPI, the other uses the implicit price deflator for gross domestic product.
You can avoid this problem, by plotting nominal values and looking at their ratios. The price level will naturally cancel out.
> I think something modern times should emphasize more than ever is that what matters
A while ago the Economist pointed out that one of the Rothschilds died of an illness that would today be easily curable with antibiotics, but at that time the cure could not be bought at any price.
I was curious and I assume you're referring to Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who died in 1836* from an abscess. These need to be drained, antibiotics are not enough to guarantee treatment outcome. And humans have been treating abscesses successfully since at least the iron age.
No offense intended but The Economist is very low-quality.
*edited year of death
What do you consider high quality? I would say they are one of the higher quality news papers of the world. Not everything, but overall yes.
I do not agree with their political views, but I can say the same about most papers. To a large degree this site is also beginning to be troublesome politically.
Nathan Mayer Rothschild probably died of staphylococcal or streptococcal septicaemia, either from the abscess or secondary contamination from the surgeon’s knife. Today that infection would almost certainly be cured with standard antibiotics.
No offense intended but wavefunction is very low-quality.
We have more necessary expenses, but the cost of computers, phones, and phone plans is so low. The expensive stuff is rent, transportation, food, childcare, and healthcare.
If a historian is going to uncover personal accounts from 2026, then they’ll be full of people who are struggling to make ends meet but are still drowning in a sea of inexpensive consumer electronics.
The expenses you're mentioning were also present in the past. Their cost or percent of revenue cost may have increased but this is covered ostensibly by inflation measurements. But the introduction of entirely new defacto necessities is not covered.
Of course inflation measurements are also flawed but that once again gets back into the broad point about how the reality of people is so much more relevant than any given number, especially once those numbers become seen as a goal to maximize, at any cost.
Wow, being that deceptive implies your argument is false.
You imply there some something different around that date, but only show data prior to that date for one of those lines. WTF.
Dig a little deeper and the median wage is calculated by literally asking people roughly what they make and changing the methodology in 1994. Health insurance alone is a big difference in the ratio of people’s nominal wages and their actual incomes between those dates.
1979 is when the Fed began collecting median wage data. Here [1] is inflation data since 1947. You can see that 1979 was well into the funny money inflation era. The reason this is relevant is that it's impractical to literally lower wages - that's going to turn your labor force hostile like nothing else. But with inflation this is suddenly very easy to do - just give people a 2% 'raise' and they're content enough. Some might even be happy, even though that's generally a direct pay cut, thanks to inflation.
Real wages started becoming grossly detached from other metrics in society once inflation started going wild, and I don't think it's just a coincidence. In any case this is why it's very reasonable to think that real wages were even higher prior to 1979.
You are using two different inflation measures in the original graph.
How many vacuum cleaners is a hansom cab?
I would be interested in hearing an actual historian's opinion on whether conditions were better or worse in England at the height of the British Empire, compared to continental Europe.
I got the impression from Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London that English workhouses near the end of their life were basically the predecessor of the modern homeless shelter, where visitors would get a single night of accommodation by law. The conditions a century earlier seem to have been truly hellish and tantamount to slavery. I have no idea whether either was better or worse than the rest of the world at the time.
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_France to see how much better the Brits had it than the French. Many of the accounts in the book are drawn from British working class _tourists_. Ordinary people in Britain had enough disposable income to visit France.
It’s well known that living conditions went down for the average person as they moved into cities and industrialised. So the average living condition of someone living in London for e.g. being lower than that of a farmer in a country less far along on the industrialisation journey isn’t that surprising really.
If you had land yes. For a landless laborer in a rural area the conditions weren’t necessarily that great either. Of course population growth played a significant factor too.
Yep.
Britain controlled the largest empire in history, yet most of its own population lived in dire poverty. I don’t believe this was accidental.
Imperial profits flowed almost entirely to a small propertied class (the landed gentry). The working classes.. who provided the soldiers, sailors, and labour.. saw virtually none of it whilst living in squalor. Before 1918, most British men couldn’t vote at all; franchise was tied to property ownership.
When we discuss ‘the British Empire,’ we’re largely describing the actions and enrichment of perhaps 3-5% of the British population. Most Britons today can trace their ancestry back through generations of poverty and disenfranchisement, not imperial beneficiaries. It’s an important distinction that’s often lost in broader discussions of imperial responsibility, as if those who are generationally impoverished should share guilt.
One could argue that they privatized the profits and socialized the costs. The costs being the army, navy and to a lesser extent an army of colonial administrators. You can see a similar shape in the decision to end slavery in 1833 by, essentially, buying it out. The money for that buyout had to come from somewhere.
(I'm not a historian, I've no idea how well this idea would stand up to scrutiny).
You seem to be implying that the landed gentry financially benefited from the Empire?
Dire poverty by modern standards, sure. But the 19th century saw a spectacular rise in living standards even for average Britons. The literacy rate in Britain was ~60% for men and 40% for women in 1800, by the end of the century it was near universal for both genders. Life expectancy at birth rose from ~40 to 50. Median wages rose, too, climbing ~50% from 1800 to 1850 (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Real-wages-during-the-pe...).
It is simultaneously true that the average Briton (arguably wealthy Britons, too) in 1900 lived in abject poverty compared to 2025, and the 19th century saw one of the fastest rises in living standards in Britain even among average Britons.
You’ve rather missed my point. I’m not saying nothing improved. I’m saying the imperial profits didn’t go to the people doing the dying for empire.
50% wage growth over fifty years whilst Britain’s running the largest empire in history? Compare that to the United States over the same period. The US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever. If imperial profits were trickling down, you’d expect Britain to outpace non-imperial industrialising nations. It didn’t, if anything it was worse.
The literacy and life expectancy gains you’re citing came from industrialisation and public health reforms, not imperial dividends. Meanwhile the landed gentry who actually controlled the imperial trade were getting obscenely wealthy.
Life expectancy of 50 in 1900 still meant working-class Londoners in overcrowded tenements with open sewers, whilst their supposed countrymen lived in townhouses with servants. The Victorian poor saw industrial revolution gains, not imperial ones.
The Empire wasn't profitable.
I’ve done more digging now because even though its apples to oranges, the UK itself is now no longer an empire, and we have a 50 year window on when it wasn’t…
So just for additional context on how wage growth compares across different periods (I’ve average across decades):
Victorian Britain (with empire):
- 50% real wage growth over 50 years (1800-1850)
Modern Britain (post-empire):
- 1970s-1980s: 2.9% annual real wage growth
- 1990s: 1.5% annual growth
- 2000s: 1.2% annual growth
- 2010s-2020s: essentially zero growth
Real wages grew by roughly 33% per decade from 1970 to 2007, then completely stagnated. By 2020, median disposable income was only 1% higher than in 2007; less than 1% growth over 13 years.
The really depressing bit? Workers actually did far better in the post-imperial period (1970-2005) than they ever did during the height of empire.
Which tells you everything you need to know about who was actually pocketing the imperial profits.
And the post-2008 wage stagnation shows the same pattern's still alive and well, just without colonies to extract from. Capital finds new ways to capture the gains; financialisation, asset inflation, whatever: whilst labour still gets the scraps.
Different methods, same fucking result.
The Victorian poor weren't sharing in empire's spoils, and modern workers aren't sharing in productivity gains either. I guess mechanisms change, but the outcome doesn't.
Asset inflation going into non-productive assets like land or monopoly privileges. Tech monopolies are famous example of this, which is why they're large percentage of the SP500.
Most loans are for land, which mean your banking system isn't directing loans toward productive assets which increase economic activity.
So, no, the mechanism didn't change FMPOV.
> Which tells you everything you need to know about who was actually pocketing the imperial profits
No, not really. Britain did not exist in isolation. Economic growth was generally very slow in the 1800s.
So you need to compare Britain with its peers like France or Germany in both periods.
> US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever
Yes, having infinite farmland in a still mostly agrarian economy gives you a massive head start.
Before the 20th century the link between the population and the amount of productive land was very direct.
Everyone bringing this up is missing the point entirely.
I thought people would be able to “get” it on their own so I didn’t bother replying but you’re the fourth person, so let me help you understand.
Britain had 1/3rd of the fucking planet, including an active workforce and their accumulated generational assets.
The US had: barely arable farmland, the trials and tribulations of european settlers are well documented.
Yet wages went up more in one of these, and not the one that was controlling 1/3rd of the planet.
Wages were higher in the North American colonies even before their insubordination.
Did something happen after 1860 in the USA that suddenly caused a large proportion of the working population to start receiving wages, thus boosting "average wage growth" artificially?
I'm fairly sure statisticians know about history and account for it.
> The US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever
You are right that common people in Britain didn't get as much out of Pax Brittanica as America's did during its own period of expansion.
Quite a different situation. An empire is when you go to a populated place and extract wealth from the people who live there. That’s not what manifest destiny was. America expanded into land that was sparsely populated by natives americans and mexico who had no wealth to extract.
> expanded into land that was sparsely populated
Yes, that’s exactly the situation that results in highest income/wealth per capita. As long as that land can be utilized productively.
The wealth was in and on the land.
"America expanded into land that was sparsely populated"
What does this remind you of?
You’re absolutely correct. The UK built an empire because it industrialized early and had the money and technology to do so. But the empire isn’t what made it rich in the first place.
> The US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever.
Um. Weren't they carving one out of the American West? I mean, there were people there beforehand... it feels like a not-dissimilar situation.
Was that due to the british empire, or was that broadly happening across the western world during that same time period?
Britain was much richer per capita than every other major European country and almost all smaller ones. Whether that was because of its much bigger industrial sector or its enpire is debatable.
It's instructive to compare the wealthiest nations in Europe, with the largest colonial-era European empires. There is not much overlap.
Wealthiest countries in Europe: Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, San Marino, Sweden...
Some historians believe that once you account for the costs of subjugation and development, empire is not usually net profitable for the sovereign. Basically just a gigantic monument to the ruler's ego.
As Carl Sagan put it: Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
How is that instructive? The British empire was mostly gone by the 1950s and a hell of a lot happened after that. It would be more instructive to look at Britain just before WW1 compared to the other countries.
At their peak, virtually all of the aforementioned empires brought enormous wealth to the homeland. It might not be profitable in the long run, but the long run can mean centuries before it becomes a net negative.
Also, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were part of a Danish empire at one point.
Empire was always a net negative financially. The British empire was big because Great Britain was rich enough to fund it.
The Empire was self-financing. Taxes on trade paid for the ships and sailors to protect the trade routes (with a fair bit left over).
The British East India Company didn't create "billionaires" with vast estates?
The Dutch East Indies weren't returning home with spices of greater value than gold?
Spain didn't plunder so much gold and silver it devalued to the floor?
Belgium went broke under the crushing cost of exploiting the Congo?
I'll go with all empires eventually fall - but many grow on the inflow of wealth from their colonies.
Perhaps you mean "true" accounting - no resources are created, they just move from those that have them to the seat of Empire which wanted them - no net gain, just added costs of transport and military forces.
Historically, though, that's never been how wealth was counted by those that ran ledgers on everything they wanted.
> Wealthiest countries in Europe: Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, San Marino, Sweden.
Microstates and tax havens account for half that list, which grossly distorts wealth measurements. Such as Apple Europe being accounted for in Ireland.
The rest: (Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden); former kingdom of Denmark, also Hanseatic League? Apart from the brief period around 1700 at the height of the Swedish Empire, none of these count as imperial powers and did not have overseas empires.
Netherlands: had a substantial navy and overseas trading empire, although not as big area-wise as the UK. Probably more cost-effective as a result.
What happened here is that all the great empires spent all their money and a vast quantity of human lives fighting each other to the death. Twice. I suppose Spain and Portugal collapsed on their own to ineffective dictators.
(special "fuck Belgium" entry here for just how brutal the small Belgian empire was; Belgian occupation of the Congo cost more lives than the Holocaust)
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Wasn't the literacy rate in New England substantially higher than the literacy rate in Old England, both in 1800 and in the years prior to its declaration of independence?
New England had a male literacy rate of around 70% compared to Britain's 60% in 1800. But New England was one of the most literate regions in America around the time of the founding, including the other American regions into the literacy rate would bring the literacy rate down (even more so when if one includes the enslaved population). Comparing the literacy rate one specific region of one country, to the national average of another country is comparing apples to oranges.
But the important thing is, the 1900 Britain's male literacy rate was 97%. Illiteracy went from something that was fairly common to exceptionally rare.
The dire urban poverty was so much better than the pre-industrial rural poverty that nearly half of Great Britain moved from the countryside to a city during that period.
You see the exact same patterns in India and China today.
Not quite. There was more work in the cities, but living conditions were more cramped and pollution was rife.
You can second-guess their decision all you want but they voted with their feet
Sounds pretty much like today
A poor person today has a better standard of living than a rich person in the 1700s
That seems improbable unless they, say, own hundreds of slaves, travel extensively in Europe, never want for food or alcohol, own multiple houses, etc.
No they don't. I don't live in a mansion with dozens of rooms, servants and footmen.
Everybody now has antibiotics, oral contraception, machines to preserve and cook food, clean, heat your home, pass messages and put on music and plays in your living room.
Who now needs dozens of personal physicians (practicing 19thC medicine!), prostitutes, cooks, maids, messenger boys and musicians?
Poor people have hundreds of servants, they're just robotic: a dishwasher, a laundry washer, a water heater, a door announcer, a courier who can travel at the speed of light, etc.
>You’re hitting a crucial paradox
AI?
Just curious
No, just trying to open friendly.
I sweated over the opening for 5 minutes because I didn’t want to go in really hard with “don’t you know most brits had it bad ackshulee!”- because I’m one of those generationally poverty-stricken brits and it hits a bit too close to home to sound neutral.
Removed it; I’m getting flagged regardless, I might as well own it.
I'd give the dramas a miss mate and stick to boring old history or efforts to try and describe what happened in the past, with evidence. This article is in the second camp.
The article is describing an "early" veteran's struggle to deal with being disabled in a war and how society treats them. London isn't mentioned at all.
Luckily in the US there is no poverty, as their GDP is so enormous
Imperialism is expensive, so it's generally only profitable once exploitation of the local population has been maximised.
I've never heard anyone suggest that Britain should have focused on improving conditions at home before engaging in empire building. I always assumed the two were not mutually dependent. The expenses in running an empire probably paid for itself and no doubt returned a lot on the initial investment (after all the whole point of having an empire is to secure better trading). Meanwhile the conditions in the cities were a separate problem, and one which was hard to fix quickly given the population explosion and the Industrial Revolution.
All of which to say, is while you raise an excellent point all the evidence i've seen suggests the two are entirely unrelated projects. If anything increasing globalisation in the long term increased prosperity for everyone involved (just not necessarily by equal amounts) and vastly improved conditions.
If anyone has a counterpoint, by which i mean historical complaints or serious academic analysis, i'm happy to hear. None of this is a moral judgement on the relative evils and merits of empires and Victorian England, which is not the topic, just my opinion of why from a practical standpoint one has very little to do with the other.
“The book highlights that most of Britain’s economic growth in the imperial period did not come from its colonies. Trade only accounted for about a quarter of economic output, and most of that trade was with Western Europe and North America — not the Empire. For that reason alone, the Empire cannot have been the decisive factor explaining domestic investment and later wealth.”
I think this misses something fundamental. Most of the colonies Britain created until the race for Africa were to support the Navy. During the 16th century they were efforts to create colonies to support trade (i.e. North America, India). Britain then needed a strong navy to support its merchant vessels who sold English goods all over the world, and bought goods from all over the world to Britain. Which is why colonies like the cape were created. It is this growth in merchants that brought riches. Those riches would not have lasted without a Navy to protect the merchants from piracy or privateers.
Colonies were not originally intended to be profitable, they were way points for ships to stock up on goods, water, men, etc. Leaders in those colonies on their own initiatives then looked to expand the colonies to make themselves a big name.
I mean you can only judge squalor if you also talk about how other people in capitals that were not London lived. Relative squalor might have been nice comparatively, or not, I have no idea.
Plenty of poor people in the US yet people still go there.
That's because any "Empire" is the extension of the ruler's ego.
They weren't being imperial for their people.
It was so they could brag to other royals and rulers that their kingdom was bigger.
The people were resources and toys for the rulers' entertainment.
That isnt how international relations works. Lesson based on contemporary IR Systems Realism:
>Great powers are forced to manage the international system, or become a client of a great power. There are benefits to being a great power.
>When 1 great power builds weapons, everyone else is forced to too. This is called the Arms Race.
>Colonialism is one example of the Arms Race. If you didn't join the party, you were going to lose.
>Great powers put international politics above domestic politics. Its why we see the US do things like spend heavily on the military and get involved in unpopular wars.
Colonialism arguably ruined the Spanish economy.
IR Systems Realism is bullshit.
Yeah? Whats a better model?
The discussion was about redcoat era Britain.
The physics of anarchy hasnt changed.
This sounds like a bunch of lazy stereotypes, especially the bits about bragging and entertainment. (I would agree with the line about not being imperial for their people.)
The British empire was an aftereffect of a long power struggle of several European countries, which was, for its participants, way more existential than you admit it to be. Look at the Seven Year War, the first truly global war in history. France, England, Prussia, Russia, Austria etc. stood to lose a lot if they lost decisively, and were strongly incentivized to improve their militaries and navies to prevent precisely that.
The same scenario was replayed during the Napoleonic wars. One power eventually emerged victorious, it now had the best navy in the world and no peer competitor left. (It was also gripped by dangerous internal struggles, google "Peterloo".) That is a situation with a single person having a lot of hammers and the rest of the world looking like a nail park.
And the conditions for their vaunted military (both army and navy) was as bad or worse. A trip to the Fusilier Museum in the Tower of London really drove that home. Being a soldier absolutely sucked until pretty much the 20th century.
You might like to note that Florence Nightingale largely invented the concept of effective treatment of broken soldiers and she was from these parts.
The thing about history is that it is remote until it is personal.
My dad was a soldier (so was mum but she left to marry dad, because that was an "option" in the '60s). We lived in West Germany quite a lot and the LSLs (Landing Ship Logistic): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFA_Sir_Galahad_(1966) were an option for travel to and fro' the UK. Me and my brother were teenagers at the time. The cooks on the LSLs were Chinese (Honkers - Hong Kong) and inveterate gamblers. I don't recall all the crew being Chinese as the wiki article says.
After dinner, "pud" (sweet/pudding) was often apple fritters with syrup. Me and my brother had quite an appetite and my mum told me later that the cooks would bet on how many bowls of apple fritters we would demolish.
Another thing I remember from the LSLs is that the tables had a ring around the edge about 1" high and very sticky table mats. They were flat bottomed, being designed to run up a beach, which had no chance because they were pretty old by the '80s. In any sort of a sea they pitched and yawed and made you wish you were a better person!
Despite all that, one made it to the Falklands and died horribly along with a fair few soldiers. Galahad was actually one of the later ones. Lancelot was an old one and would never have managed the journey.
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Sadly, i dare say in the US, except for advancements in Medical, disabled vets have a somewhat rough time these days :(
Probably not as bad as Byfield, but compared to the standard of living now to back then, probably not that different when matched against the general population.
100% disabled vets in America get a tax free allowance of $4,000 a month, plus free medical care, plus a great deal of support including full free college to pursue the possibility of employment, which won’t reduce the disability pay at all.
I’d say America is taking care of them pretty well compared to Dickensian conditions.
Experiences with VA can be wildly different.
Disability can be easy or hard to get, depending on which generation you got injured in and whether or not they think you're playing it up. I've heard both people saying that they were pushed to claim disability when they didn't actually need it, as well as men who definitely needed it getting turned down.
Actual health care at the VA can be really uneven too. A friend of mine got a knee injury and was basically given a three month supply of an addictive painkiller and told to go sit at home and take however much he wanted.
What do you think happens to a young man in his prime who is stuck glued to a couch other than sit around playing video games drunk all day addicted to painkillers?
Well, in his case at least, he managed to get off of them and turn himself around before it became too destructive, but the lack of care he was shown by the doctors put him at significant risk for permanent harm.
I've heard other horror stories, and stories of nothing but praise as well. YMMV.
I know a guy who retired from the Air Force and got 100% disability that included tinnitus, ptsd, and something about his joints. This person was an aircraft maintainer and never saw combat, although he was deployed a few times. The lady evaluating his case really hooked him up, he brags bout it all the time. He gets retirement and disability.
There are reddits, discords, and even companies that assist vets in working the system. many of whom never got close to deployment and were never combat arms. If you're persistent you'll get paid. As a combat vet it makes me sick.
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Good friend and former colleague has 100% disability and coarsely brags about it.
He has no combat deployments. He has a home gym, rolls BJJ 6 days a week. Has a government (tax payer) paid Bachelor’s and Master’s in Comp. Sci. and makes 6-figures working as a civilian DOD employee.
So I’m not sure in what meaningful sense of the term he’s “100% disabled” but he’s enjoying his salary so good for him?
Both this and the earlier post emphasize the lack of combat deployments in the examples. I should think disability would cover any service-related injury.
It does, I’m just emphasizing the lack of material injury. Spending 25 years in the military in an administrative office role and going “my hearing is less good, I have carpal tunnel, I have sleep problems” now give me $4,000 seems rather off when you’re otherwise a completely healthy normal human being.
After all, it’s not as if normal people in normal society lack these conditions as they age. Connecting them to the service is spurious and often fraudulent. By all means, let’s take care of the folks with serious physical and mental injury that cannot provide for themselves, but let’s be real our system is heavily gamed and abused.
Then there are those veterans who live under a tarp on the sidewalk along the VA campus in West LA. Not everyone is doing alright.
I’m a 100% P&T veteran from the Iraq war and you have no idea what you’re talking about so stop
Even this bullshit response is exactly what the author discussed
Disdain and contempt for servicemembers who fought, were hurt or maimed in wars
Could you provide a material rebuttal instead of insulting the author? The USG provides a generous disability package for disabled veterans that are in no real sense disabled, even.
I mean you demonstrate exactly why that is a disingenuous question directly.
So again, ironic, given the topic context
i watch Caleb Hammers financial audit show on youtube and while I'm sure it's not all accurate, every single veteran they have on that show (keep in mind these are people with money iasues) who without exception get a package that would qualify as a part time salary, many get more than a full salary and often work other jobs. The system is healthy
What leads you to dare say that?
> It had been assumed that Byfield died around 1850, but O'Keeffe's discovery of the veteran's 1851 memoir, along with additional evidence from newspapers and archives, adds new chapters to his astonishing life story.
I hate to be obnoxious, but what O'Keeffe did was happen upon a rare book in a small library the he recognized had been written by a semi-famous author. Instead of scanning it (or having it scanned) and putting it on archive.org, then writing his article, he's actively concealing these "new chapters" from the world. My assumption is that he's planning to put it into print in order to make a few bucks.
According to the Google Books entry (which I don't quite trust, because why would there be a Google Books entry?), it's 80 pages, so he'll either have to write a hefty introduction of what seems to be a story about a disabled vet talking about Jesus, or he'll combine the war narrative and the post-war narrative (both obviously long out of copyright) into a single volume and hawk that, and the article he's written will be the introduction.
I guess I advise him to self-publish and to make sure to also target Christian bookstores rather than just academic libraries? Survey a brick and mortar Christian bookstore of possible and get an idea about what covers sell?
I get they are fictional, but what strikes me from typical Victorian England proletariat dramas... Is that the British empire at the time had the largest empire in the history of the world. And their people lived in squalor in London.
Implicit in your statement is the assumption that the purpose of a government is to maximize the well-being of all of its citizens. This is a somewhat new idea, and shouldn't be taken for granted when we look at historical situations.
Or geographical situations. The UK serves dramatically better in that capacity than the US does at present.
Thing is, though... even the parts of Western history that aren't remembered as atrocities by modern standards were pretty thick with them. For example, thousands of homeless London orphans were enslaved and sent to the early American colonies for the crime of being homeless orphans, and very few of their names are recorded in subsequent colonial documents, so the assumption is that almost all of them died before reaching adulthood. Adult convict slaves commanded very low prices relative to African slaves, and children that weren't as effective laborers, and with fewer rights, were likely seen as burdens.
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ec9Al5ezYs and source https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3231742601...
Victorian England was the richest country in the world by GDP per capita. But the world was just very poor before the industrial revolution: a per-capita GDP around $900. By 1800 England was more than double that. Today almost every country is richer than England was in 1800: https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/how-the-world-became-rich-par...
I think something modern times should emphasize more than ever is that what matters is the lifestyle of the people. Here's [1] a fun graph I just threw together. That's real GDP/capita and real wages graphed alongside each other, both indexed (at 100) to the start date when real median earnings began being measured by by the Fed, which is 1979. Since 1979 real GDP/capita is up 117% while real wages are up 12%.
And if you consider that modern times has far more necessary expenses that often involve rent (internet, computing devices, etc) then it's quite likely that real median wages are down since 1979 in terms of how much money the average person has left to themselves at the end of each month. Even without these adjustments it's likely that real wages today are lower in absolute terms than they were in the 50s as by 1979 inflation had already started getting out of control.
The point of this all is that I don't think the numbers mean much of anything. And that's assuming you could even reliably measure them - you cannot. Go back into reconstructing 19th century data and earlier and you're going to rely on assumptions where the degree of uncertainty is much higher than the differences over time you're trying to assess. So I think far more informative than numbers are personal accounts. How did people live? Of course there's a literacy bias there, but even such accounts will shed light on the illiterate.
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1QHEN
Your graph is rather misleading: you adjust for inflation in two different ways to get 'real' data. One series uses CPI, the other uses the implicit price deflator for gross domestic product.
You can avoid this problem, by plotting nominal values and looking at their ratios. The price level will naturally cancel out.
> I think something modern times should emphasize more than ever is that what matters
A while ago the Economist pointed out that one of the Rothschilds died of an illness that would today be easily curable with antibiotics, but at that time the cure could not be bought at any price.
I was curious and I assume you're referring to Nathan Mayer Rothschild, who died in 1836* from an abscess. These need to be drained, antibiotics are not enough to guarantee treatment outcome. And humans have been treating abscesses successfully since at least the iron age.
No offense intended but The Economist is very low-quality.
*edited year of death
What do you consider high quality? I would say they are one of the higher quality news papers of the world. Not everything, but overall yes.
I do not agree with their political views, but I can say the same about most papers. To a large degree this site is also beginning to be troublesome politically.
Nathan Mayer Rothschild probably died of staphylococcal or streptococcal septicaemia, either from the abscess or secondary contamination from the surgeon’s knife. Today that infection would almost certainly be cured with standard antibiotics.
No offense intended but wavefunction is very low-quality.
We have more necessary expenses, but the cost of computers, phones, and phone plans is so low. The expensive stuff is rent, transportation, food, childcare, and healthcare.
If a historian is going to uncover personal accounts from 2026, then they’ll be full of people who are struggling to make ends meet but are still drowning in a sea of inexpensive consumer electronics.
The expenses you're mentioning were also present in the past. Their cost or percent of revenue cost may have increased but this is covered ostensibly by inflation measurements. But the introduction of entirely new defacto necessities is not covered.
Of course inflation measurements are also flawed but that once again gets back into the broad point about how the reality of people is so much more relevant than any given number, especially once those numbers become seen as a goal to maximize, at any cost.
Wow, being that deceptive implies your argument is false.
You imply there some something different around that date, but only show data prior to that date for one of those lines. WTF.
Dig a little deeper and the median wage is calculated by literally asking people roughly what they make and changing the methodology in 1994. Health insurance alone is a big difference in the ratio of people’s nominal wages and their actual incomes between those dates.
1979 is when the Fed began collecting median wage data. Here [1] is inflation data since 1947. You can see that 1979 was well into the funny money inflation era. The reason this is relevant is that it's impractical to literally lower wages - that's going to turn your labor force hostile like nothing else. But with inflation this is suddenly very easy to do - just give people a 2% 'raise' and they're content enough. Some might even be happy, even though that's generally a direct pay cut, thanks to inflation.
Real wages started becoming grossly detached from other metrics in society once inflation started going wild, and I don't think it's just a coincidence. In any case this is why it's very reasonable to think that real wages were even higher prior to 1979.
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
You are using two different inflation measures in the original graph.
How many vacuum cleaners is a hansom cab?
I would be interested in hearing an actual historian's opinion on whether conditions were better or worse in England at the height of the British Empire, compared to continental Europe.
I got the impression from Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London that English workhouses near the end of their life were basically the predecessor of the modern homeless shelter, where visitors would get a single night of accommodation by law. The conditions a century earlier seem to have been truly hellish and tantamount to slavery. I have no idea whether either was better or worse than the rest of the world at the time.
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_France to see how much better the Brits had it than the French. Many of the accounts in the book are drawn from British working class _tourists_. Ordinary people in Britain had enough disposable income to visit France.
It’s well known that living conditions went down for the average person as they moved into cities and industrialised. So the average living condition of someone living in London for e.g. being lower than that of a farmer in a country less far along on the industrialisation journey isn’t that surprising really.
If you had land yes. For a landless laborer in a rural area the conditions weren’t necessarily that great either. Of course population growth played a significant factor too.
Yep.
Britain controlled the largest empire in history, yet most of its own population lived in dire poverty. I don’t believe this was accidental.
Imperial profits flowed almost entirely to a small propertied class (the landed gentry). The working classes.. who provided the soldiers, sailors, and labour.. saw virtually none of it whilst living in squalor. Before 1918, most British men couldn’t vote at all; franchise was tied to property ownership.
When we discuss ‘the British Empire,’ we’re largely describing the actions and enrichment of perhaps 3-5% of the British population. Most Britons today can trace their ancestry back through generations of poverty and disenfranchisement, not imperial beneficiaries. It’s an important distinction that’s often lost in broader discussions of imperial responsibility, as if those who are generationally impoverished should share guilt.
One could argue that they privatized the profits and socialized the costs. The costs being the army, navy and to a lesser extent an army of colonial administrators. You can see a similar shape in the decision to end slavery in 1833 by, essentially, buying it out. The money for that buyout had to come from somewhere.
(I'm not a historian, I've no idea how well this idea would stand up to scrutiny).
You seem to be implying that the landed gentry financially benefited from the Empire?
Dire poverty by modern standards, sure. But the 19th century saw a spectacular rise in living standards even for average Britons. The literacy rate in Britain was ~60% for men and 40% for women in 1800, by the end of the century it was near universal for both genders. Life expectancy at birth rose from ~40 to 50. Median wages rose, too, climbing ~50% from 1800 to 1850 (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Real-wages-during-the-pe...).
It is simultaneously true that the average Briton (arguably wealthy Britons, too) in 1900 lived in abject poverty compared to 2025, and the 19th century saw one of the fastest rises in living standards in Britain even among average Britons.
You’ve rather missed my point. I’m not saying nothing improved. I’m saying the imperial profits didn’t go to the people doing the dying for empire.
50% wage growth over fifty years whilst Britain’s running the largest empire in history? Compare that to the United States over the same period. The US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever. If imperial profits were trickling down, you’d expect Britain to outpace non-imperial industrialising nations. It didn’t, if anything it was worse.
The literacy and life expectancy gains you’re citing came from industrialisation and public health reforms, not imperial dividends. Meanwhile the landed gentry who actually controlled the imperial trade were getting obscenely wealthy.
Life expectancy of 50 in 1900 still meant working-class Londoners in overcrowded tenements with open sewers, whilst their supposed countrymen lived in townhouses with servants. The Victorian poor saw industrial revolution gains, not imperial ones.
The Empire wasn't profitable.
I’ve done more digging now because even though its apples to oranges, the UK itself is now no longer an empire, and we have a 50 year window on when it wasn’t…
So just for additional context on how wage growth compares across different periods (I’ve average across decades):
Victorian Britain (with empire):
- 50% real wage growth over 50 years (1800-1850)
Modern Britain (post-empire):
- 1970s-1980s: 2.9% annual real wage growth
- 1990s: 1.5% annual growth
- 2000s: 1.2% annual growth
- 2010s-2020s: essentially zero growth
Real wages grew by roughly 33% per decade from 1970 to 2007, then completely stagnated. By 2020, median disposable income was only 1% higher than in 2007; less than 1% growth over 13 years.
The really depressing bit? Workers actually did far better in the post-imperial period (1970-2005) than they ever did during the height of empire.
Which tells you everything you need to know about who was actually pocketing the imperial profits.
And the post-2008 wage stagnation shows the same pattern's still alive and well, just without colonies to extract from. Capital finds new ways to capture the gains; financialisation, asset inflation, whatever: whilst labour still gets the scraps.
Different methods, same fucking result.
The Victorian poor weren't sharing in empire's spoils, and modern workers aren't sharing in productivity gains either. I guess mechanisms change, but the outcome doesn't.
Asset inflation going into non-productive assets like land or monopoly privileges. Tech monopolies are famous example of this, which is why they're large percentage of the SP500.
Most loans are for land, which mean your banking system isn't directing loans toward productive assets which increase economic activity.
So, no, the mechanism didn't change FMPOV.
> Which tells you everything you need to know about who was actually pocketing the imperial profits
No, not really. Britain did not exist in isolation. Economic growth was generally very slow in the 1800s.
So you need to compare Britain with its peers like France or Germany in both periods.
> US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever
Yes, having infinite farmland in a still mostly agrarian economy gives you a massive head start.
Before the 20th century the link between the population and the amount of productive land was very direct.
Everyone bringing this up is missing the point entirely.
I thought people would be able to “get” it on their own so I didn’t bother replying but you’re the fourth person, so let me help you understand.
Britain had 1/3rd of the fucking planet, including an active workforce and their accumulated generational assets.
The US had: barely arable farmland, the trials and tribulations of european settlers are well documented.
Yet wages went up more in one of these, and not the one that was controlling 1/3rd of the planet.
Wages were higher in the North American colonies even before their insubordination.
Did something happen after 1860 in the USA that suddenly caused a large proportion of the working population to start receiving wages, thus boosting "average wage growth" artificially?
I'm fairly sure statisticians know about history and account for it.
> The US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever
I understand what you mean. But also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
You are right that common people in Britain didn't get as much out of Pax Brittanica as America's did during its own period of expansion.
Quite a different situation. An empire is when you go to a populated place and extract wealth from the people who live there. That’s not what manifest destiny was. America expanded into land that was sparsely populated by natives americans and mexico who had no wealth to extract.
> expanded into land that was sparsely populated
Yes, that’s exactly the situation that results in highest income/wealth per capita. As long as that land can be utilized productively.
The wealth was in and on the land.
"America expanded into land that was sparsely populated"
What does this remind you of?
You’re absolutely correct. The UK built an empire because it industrialized early and had the money and technology to do so. But the empire isn’t what made it rich in the first place.
> The US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever.
Um. Weren't they carving one out of the American West? I mean, there were people there beforehand... it feels like a not-dissimilar situation.
Was that due to the british empire, or was that broadly happening across the western world during that same time period?
Britain was much richer per capita than every other major European country and almost all smaller ones. Whether that was because of its much bigger industrial sector or its enpire is debatable.
It's instructive to compare the wealthiest nations in Europe, with the largest colonial-era European empires. There is not much overlap.
Wealthiest countries in Europe: Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, San Marino, Sweden...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
Largest European colonial empires: Britain, Russia, Spain, France, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires#Empire...
Some historians believe that once you account for the costs of subjugation and development, empire is not usually net profitable for the sovereign. Basically just a gigantic monument to the ruler's ego.
As Carl Sagan put it: Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
How is that instructive? The British empire was mostly gone by the 1950s and a hell of a lot happened after that. It would be more instructive to look at Britain just before WW1 compared to the other countries.
At their peak, virtually all of the aforementioned empires brought enormous wealth to the homeland. It might not be profitable in the long run, but the long run can mean centuries before it becomes a net negative.
Also, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were part of a Danish empire at one point.
Empire was always a net negative financially. The British empire was big because Great Britain was rich enough to fund it.
The Empire was self-financing. Taxes on trade paid for the ships and sailors to protect the trade routes (with a fair bit left over).
The British East India Company didn't create "billionaires" with vast estates?
The Dutch East Indies weren't returning home with spices of greater value than gold?
Spain didn't plunder so much gold and silver it devalued to the floor?
Belgium went broke under the crushing cost of exploiting the Congo?
I'll go with all empires eventually fall - but many grow on the inflow of wealth from their colonies.
Perhaps you mean "true" accounting - no resources are created, they just move from those that have them to the seat of Empire which wanted them - no net gain, just added costs of transport and military forces.
Historically, though, that's never been how wealth was counted by those that ran ledgers on everything they wanted.
> Wealthiest countries in Europe: Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Ireland, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, San Marino, Sweden.
Microstates and tax havens account for half that list, which grossly distorts wealth measurements. Such as Apple Europe being accounted for in Ireland.
The rest: (Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden); former kingdom of Denmark, also Hanseatic League? Apart from the brief period around 1700 at the height of the Swedish Empire, none of these count as imperial powers and did not have overseas empires.
Netherlands: had a substantial navy and overseas trading empire, although not as big area-wise as the UK. Probably more cost-effective as a result.
> Britain, Russia, Spain, France, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium
What happened here is that all the great empires spent all their money and a vast quantity of human lives fighting each other to the death. Twice. I suppose Spain and Portugal collapsed on their own to ineffective dictators.
(special "fuck Belgium" entry here for just how brutal the small Belgian empire was; Belgian occupation of the Congo cost more lives than the Holocaust)
Wasn't the literacy rate in New England substantially higher than the literacy rate in Old England, both in 1800 and in the years prior to its declaration of independence?
New England had a male literacy rate of around 70% compared to Britain's 60% in 1800. But New England was one of the most literate regions in America around the time of the founding, including the other American regions into the literacy rate would bring the literacy rate down (even more so when if one includes the enslaved population). Comparing the literacy rate one specific region of one country, to the national average of another country is comparing apples to oranges.
But the important thing is, the 1900 Britain's male literacy rate was 97%. Illiteracy went from something that was fairly common to exceptionally rare.
The dire urban poverty was so much better than the pre-industrial rural poverty that nearly half of Great Britain moved from the countryside to a city during that period.
You see the exact same patterns in India and China today.
Not quite. There was more work in the cities, but living conditions were more cramped and pollution was rife.
You can second-guess their decision all you want but they voted with their feet
Sounds pretty much like today
A poor person today has a better standard of living than a rich person in the 1700s
That seems improbable unless they, say, own hundreds of slaves, travel extensively in Europe, never want for food or alcohol, own multiple houses, etc.
Eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Manigault
No they don't. I don't live in a mansion with dozens of rooms, servants and footmen.
Everybody now has antibiotics, oral contraception, machines to preserve and cook food, clean, heat your home, pass messages and put on music and plays in your living room.
Who now needs dozens of personal physicians (practicing 19thC medicine!), prostitutes, cooks, maids, messenger boys and musicians?
Poor people have hundreds of servants, they're just robotic: a dishwasher, a laundry washer, a water heater, a door announcer, a courier who can travel at the speed of light, etc.
>You’re hitting a crucial paradox
AI?
Just curious
No, just trying to open friendly.
I sweated over the opening for 5 minutes because I didn’t want to go in really hard with “don’t you know most brits had it bad ackshulee!”- because I’m one of those generationally poverty-stricken brits and it hits a bit too close to home to sound neutral.
Removed it; I’m getting flagged regardless, I might as well own it.
I'd give the dramas a miss mate and stick to boring old history or efforts to try and describe what happened in the past, with evidence. This article is in the second camp.
The article is describing an "early" veteran's struggle to deal with being disabled in a war and how society treats them. London isn't mentioned at all.
Luckily in the US there is no poverty, as their GDP is so enormous
Imperialism is expensive, so it's generally only profitable once exploitation of the local population has been maximised.
I've never heard anyone suggest that Britain should have focused on improving conditions at home before engaging in empire building. I always assumed the two were not mutually dependent. The expenses in running an empire probably paid for itself and no doubt returned a lot on the initial investment (after all the whole point of having an empire is to secure better trading). Meanwhile the conditions in the cities were a separate problem, and one which was hard to fix quickly given the population explosion and the Industrial Revolution.
All of which to say, is while you raise an excellent point all the evidence i've seen suggests the two are entirely unrelated projects. If anything increasing globalisation in the long term increased prosperity for everyone involved (just not necessarily by equal amounts) and vastly improved conditions.
If anyone has a counterpoint, by which i mean historical complaints or serious academic analysis, i'm happy to hear. None of this is a moral judgement on the relative evils and merits of empires and Victorian England, which is not the topic, just my opinion of why from a practical standpoint one has very little to do with the other.
It’s not at all clear the costs of running the empire were outweighed by the benefits: https://iea.org.uk/media/empire-and-slavery-did-not-make-bri...
“The book highlights that most of Britain’s economic growth in the imperial period did not come from its colonies. Trade only accounted for about a quarter of economic output, and most of that trade was with Western Europe and North America — not the Empire. For that reason alone, the Empire cannot have been the decisive factor explaining domestic investment and later wealth.”
I think this misses something fundamental. Most of the colonies Britain created until the race for Africa were to support the Navy. During the 16th century they were efforts to create colonies to support trade (i.e. North America, India). Britain then needed a strong navy to support its merchant vessels who sold English goods all over the world, and bought goods from all over the world to Britain. Which is why colonies like the cape were created. It is this growth in merchants that brought riches. Those riches would not have lasted without a Navy to protect the merchants from piracy or privateers.
Colonies were not originally intended to be profitable, they were way points for ships to stock up on goods, water, men, etc. Leaders in those colonies on their own initiatives then looked to expand the colonies to make themselves a big name.
I mean you can only judge squalor if you also talk about how other people in capitals that were not London lived. Relative squalor might have been nice comparatively, or not, I have no idea.
Plenty of poor people in the US yet people still go there.
That's because any "Empire" is the extension of the ruler's ego.
They weren't being imperial for their people.
It was so they could brag to other royals and rulers that their kingdom was bigger.
The people were resources and toys for the rulers' entertainment.
That isnt how international relations works. Lesson based on contemporary IR Systems Realism:
>Great powers are forced to manage the international system, or become a client of a great power. There are benefits to being a great power.
>When 1 great power builds weapons, everyone else is forced to too. This is called the Arms Race.
>Colonialism is one example of the Arms Race. If you didn't join the party, you were going to lose.
>Great powers put international politics above domestic politics. Its why we see the US do things like spend heavily on the military and get involved in unpopular wars.
Colonialism arguably ruined the Spanish economy.
IR Systems Realism is bullshit.
Yeah? Whats a better model?
The discussion was about redcoat era Britain.
The physics of anarchy hasnt changed.
This sounds like a bunch of lazy stereotypes, especially the bits about bragging and entertainment. (I would agree with the line about not being imperial for their people.)
The British empire was an aftereffect of a long power struggle of several European countries, which was, for its participants, way more existential than you admit it to be. Look at the Seven Year War, the first truly global war in history. France, England, Prussia, Russia, Austria etc. stood to lose a lot if they lost decisively, and were strongly incentivized to improve their militaries and navies to prevent precisely that.
The same scenario was replayed during the Napoleonic wars. One power eventually emerged victorious, it now had the best navy in the world and no peer competitor left. (It was also gripped by dangerous internal struggles, google "Peterloo".) That is a situation with a single person having a lot of hammers and the rest of the world looking like a nail park.
And the conditions for their vaunted military (both army and navy) was as bad or worse. A trip to the Fusilier Museum in the Tower of London really drove that home. Being a soldier absolutely sucked until pretty much the 20th century.
You might like to note that Florence Nightingale largely invented the concept of effective treatment of broken soldiers and she was from these parts.
You might like to ask this chap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Weston about being burned on a ship as a soldier many 1000 miles away from home.
The thing about history is that it is remote until it is personal.
My dad was a soldier (so was mum but she left to marry dad, because that was an "option" in the '60s). We lived in West Germany quite a lot and the LSLs (Landing Ship Logistic): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFA_Sir_Galahad_(1966) were an option for travel to and fro' the UK. Me and my brother were teenagers at the time. The cooks on the LSLs were Chinese (Honkers - Hong Kong) and inveterate gamblers. I don't recall all the crew being Chinese as the wiki article says.
After dinner, "pud" (sweet/pudding) was often apple fritters with syrup. Me and my brother had quite an appetite and my mum told me later that the cooks would bet on how many bowls of apple fritters we would demolish.
Another thing I remember from the LSLs is that the tables had a ring around the edge about 1" high and very sticky table mats. They were flat bottomed, being designed to run up a beach, which had no chance because they were pretty old by the '80s. In any sort of a sea they pitched and yawed and made you wish you were a better person!
Despite all that, one made it to the Falklands and died horribly along with a fair few soldiers. Galahad was actually one of the later ones. Lancelot was an old one and would never have managed the journey.
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Sadly, i dare say in the US, except for advancements in Medical, disabled vets have a somewhat rough time these days :(
Probably not as bad as Byfield, but compared to the standard of living now to back then, probably not that different when matched against the general population.
100% disabled vets in America get a tax free allowance of $4,000 a month, plus free medical care, plus a great deal of support including full free college to pursue the possibility of employment, which won’t reduce the disability pay at all.
I’d say America is taking care of them pretty well compared to Dickensian conditions.
Experiences with VA can be wildly different.
Disability can be easy or hard to get, depending on which generation you got injured in and whether or not they think you're playing it up. I've heard both people saying that they were pushed to claim disability when they didn't actually need it, as well as men who definitely needed it getting turned down.
Actual health care at the VA can be really uneven too. A friend of mine got a knee injury and was basically given a three month supply of an addictive painkiller and told to go sit at home and take however much he wanted.
What do you think happens to a young man in his prime who is stuck glued to a couch other than sit around playing video games drunk all day addicted to painkillers?
Well, in his case at least, he managed to get off of them and turn himself around before it became too destructive, but the lack of care he was shown by the doctors put him at significant risk for permanent harm.
I've heard other horror stories, and stories of nothing but praise as well. YMMV.
I know a guy who retired from the Air Force and got 100% disability that included tinnitus, ptsd, and something about his joints. This person was an aircraft maintainer and never saw combat, although he was deployed a few times. The lady evaluating his case really hooked him up, he brags bout it all the time. He gets retirement and disability.
There are reddits, discords, and even companies that assist vets in working the system. many of whom never got close to deployment and were never combat arms. If you're persistent you'll get paid. As a combat vet it makes me sick.
Good friend and former colleague has 100% disability and coarsely brags about it.
He has no combat deployments. He has a home gym, rolls BJJ 6 days a week. Has a government (tax payer) paid Bachelor’s and Master’s in Comp. Sci. and makes 6-figures working as a civilian DOD employee.
So I’m not sure in what meaningful sense of the term he’s “100% disabled” but he’s enjoying his salary so good for him?
Both this and the earlier post emphasize the lack of combat deployments in the examples. I should think disability would cover any service-related injury.
It does, I’m just emphasizing the lack of material injury. Spending 25 years in the military in an administrative office role and going “my hearing is less good, I have carpal tunnel, I have sleep problems” now give me $4,000 seems rather off when you’re otherwise a completely healthy normal human being.
After all, it’s not as if normal people in normal society lack these conditions as they age. Connecting them to the service is spurious and often fraudulent. By all means, let’s take care of the folks with serious physical and mental injury that cannot provide for themselves, but let’s be real our system is heavily gamed and abused.
Then there are those veterans who live under a tarp on the sidewalk along the VA campus in West LA. Not everyone is doing alright.
I’m a 100% P&T veteran from the Iraq war and you have no idea what you’re talking about so stop
Even this bullshit response is exactly what the author discussed
Disdain and contempt for servicemembers who fought, were hurt or maimed in wars
Could you provide a material rebuttal instead of insulting the author? The USG provides a generous disability package for disabled veterans that are in no real sense disabled, even.
I mean you demonstrate exactly why that is a disingenuous question directly.
So again, ironic, given the topic context
i watch Caleb Hammers financial audit show on youtube and while I'm sure it's not all accurate, every single veteran they have on that show (keep in mind these are people with money iasues) who without exception get a package that would qualify as a part time salary, many get more than a full salary and often work other jobs. The system is healthy
What leads you to dare say that?
> It had been assumed that Byfield died around 1850, but O'Keeffe's discovery of the veteran's 1851 memoir, along with additional evidence from newspapers and archives, adds new chapters to his astonishing life story.
I hate to be obnoxious, but what O'Keeffe did was happen upon a rare book in a small library the he recognized had been written by a semi-famous author. Instead of scanning it (or having it scanned) and putting it on archive.org, then writing his article, he's actively concealing these "new chapters" from the world. My assumption is that he's planning to put it into print in order to make a few bucks.
According to the Google Books entry (which I don't quite trust, because why would there be a Google Books entry?), it's 80 pages, so he'll either have to write a hefty introduction of what seems to be a story about a disabled vet talking about Jesus, or he'll combine the war narrative and the post-war narrative (both obviously long out of copyright) into a single volume and hawk that, and the article he's written will be the introduction.
I guess I advise him to self-publish and to make sure to also target Christian bookstores rather than just academic libraries? Survey a brick and mortar Christian bookstore of possible and get an idea about what covers sell?
Isn't this the book?
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/61f15583-612e-4ea5-aa...