Yeah, so now instead of barely getting by on subsistence farming, they barely get by working 16 hour shifts in dangerous conditions with no rights. While the workers may be mostly better off than they were before, they still have to spend almost all their time and energy on meeting the basic needs of survival. The people who benefitted by far the most from all that investment were the owners, executives, and shareholders of the companies that run the factories. So I would say that distribution of capital was still quite lacking in terms of where it could have the most leverage to increase opportunity.
The book Sapiens has a similar message. The children of farmers who move to textile manufacturing were worse off than their parents in the 1800s. But the great great grandchildren of those people have material wealth greater than upperclass people in the 1800s when comparing clothes, entertainment, transportation, health care. And none of them would prefer to live as an 1800s farmer today.
Keep in mind what the factories were producing - it was not luxury goods for the wealthy. It was textiles, clothing, pots, pans, all sorts of things that made life better for ordinary people.
This, in turn, is what made it possible for us today to enjoy a high standard of living unimaginable back then.
People aren't so stupid that they'd do something that completely against their best interests. If you're a subsidence farmer and get sick, you have no means of making enough money to see a doctor. Historically, people didn't care about leisure until they accomplished stability.
>People aren't so stupid that they'd do something that completely against their best interests.
The world is actually full of such examples. There's quite a bit of work done in psychology and sociology as to why this happens. Often, the move from, for example substinence farming to other jobs is a kind of throffer - and so it was, historically documented, in the 16th and 17th centuries in England, too with the move from rural cottage industry to wide-scale factory production.
> in the 16th and 17th centuries in England, too with the move from rural cottage industry to wide-scale factory production.
The industrial revolution started in the late 18th century. Keep in mind that the population was booming then, so there wasn't enough space on the cottage to support the same standard of living.
I feel like the concept of a idyllic peasant is the modern iteration of the "noble savage." For complex decisions, you indeed run into the paradox of choice and other strange psychological phenomena. However, choice between sacrificing time in order to accumulate capital is an easy one, as this has been done billions of times. You need extraordinary evidence to prove otherwise.
While the move to factories was only being completed by the end of the 18th century, the process had started much earlier, in laying the groundwork for the creation of industry, from the enclosures to the transformation of the peasantry to farmers who rent their land (rather than tithes to their lord). The market for land leases, necessary for the creation of the English capitalist class, flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries.
>However, choice between sacrificing time in order to accumulate capital is an easy one, as this has been done billions of times.
It's curious why so much land had to be expropriated forcefully if it were such an obvious choice to the modern-day noble savages - and even moreso when one considers modern union activity and intense revolts against the increasing duration and intensity of the working day in America, and to no lesser extent other countries which did not have the privilege of being so readily acquainted with capital. These are no edge cases either. The largest debate in the literature being the question of why the majority does not rise up against the unfair conditions implemented by a minority. Whether you subscribe to the false consciousness solution or the capability solution, both allow you to say that the "rational choice" of not rising up (or accumulating capital) is simply an element of playing the game. The only difference between the theories turns on the point of whether the players know it's a game or not.
