There are ways of reducing energy usage that do not harm quality of life. Low-flow faucets and low-water toilets (assuming the toilet technologies work, which they do now!), switching from incandescent lighting to fluorescent and/or LED, increasing insulation of houses, increasing the efficiency of cars and appliances–all of these things have a very minimal step-wise cost and can produce far-reaching benefits. In addition, there is every reason to research alternative fuels and to eventually bring them into play in our larger energy equation.

What is not good for the economy or society, though, is a broad effort to turn back the clock an to live, as much as possible, a pre-industrial life. Industrialization is the process of moving from man- and animal-power to (fossil) fuels, and its contribution to the worth of a human being can scarcely be overestimated.

Why is this?

1. When people are the primary source of power, most people MUST be used as physical labor.

2. The economic worth of a human being is equivalent to what that person can produce.

3. Direct physical labor produces very little.

4. The worth of most people becomes very small. Meanwhile, the worth of goods rises sharply relative to the worth of each person.

5. As most people’s worth is degraded, it becomes easier for the remaining elite to own and/or control them.

6. When human being become a unit of capital, it becomes very desirable to own and/or control them.

We are used to the middle class consisting of about 83% of the population, the lower class consisting of about 15%, and the upper class consisting of about 2%.

In pre-industrial countries *that are doing well*, the LOWER class is about 90% of the population, the middle class about 9.5%, and the upper class about .5%. And the lower class isn’t comparable to our lower class, either–it is far poorer than most people in the United States can even imagine. Almost all our “just plain poor” (that is, removing crippled addicts and the crippled mentally ill) have TVs, stoves, running hot and cold water, heat that’s on most of the winter, electric lights, phones, bikes if not cars, microwaves, refrigerators, and they don’t suffer from food shortages, even if they can’t buy everything they want–all these things would place them in the middle class of a pre-industrial society living at the fringes of industrial societies. Of that list, my husband didn’t have, as a child: TV, hot water, heat, microwave, or a refrigerator. Food was also very rationed. And my husband was the son of a MS mechanical engineer!

I found an estimate that in a modern factory, eight T-shirts are produced per hour for each worker there. Now, the cotton must be planted, harvested, cleaned, combed, woven, etc. first, so I’m going to more than half that–which is certainly excessive–and say that from planting to harvesting, it takes 0:15 man-hours to make a T-shirt. In a year of (Western) fulltime employment, that works out to a worth of 5,000 T-shirts per worker. Let’s say the average consumer, in terms of total clothes per year, consumes an average of the equivalent in labor of 50 T-shirts. (That’s an insanely high number, but bear with me here….) This means that one garment worker clothes 1,000 people per year at the very least. His economic worth, then, is equivalent to all the clothes that more than 1,000 people get in a year.

In preindustrial times, about 10% of the population was directly employed in the fabric industry. This doesn’t include much of the spinning, which was done by farmwives in their spare time for spare money–it mostly means the weavers, dyers, fullers, tailors, etc. But let’s ignore these women. I am also ignoring the many people employed as shepherds and shearers and wool transporters–pretending they just don’t exist. That’s probably at least another 5% of the population. But ignoring all these people and pretending that wool magically appeared, already spun into thread for the use of the weavers, etc., it took one person to supply the clothing needs for about 10 people. His economic worth, then, is at most equivalent to all the clothes that 10 people got in a year.

AND THAT’S NOT THE END OF IT. Not only is the preindustrial worker worth less in terms of how many clothed-people he produces, but the total number of finished pieces of clothing that is produced is far, far fewer. Most people in preindustrial times could not afford a whole new-to-them outfit every year. Many never saw NEW clothes in their lives. So his production may work out to maybe 6 changes of clothes and a few linens, all of which is consumed by the middle classes and the rich. Meanwhile, the industrial worker produces a veritable mountain of goods, which are, understandably, much, much less expensive so that people of all ranks of life can afford them. The industrial worker is worth MORE, and his goods (and the goods of all other industrial workers) are worth LESS, allowing him to leverage his greater worth to get more goods than any preindustrial worker in the same circumstances can imagine.

It is popular to call up the image of a sweat-shop in China or India where T-shirts are being produced by laborers–many underage–working 10-12-hour shifts under conditions Westerners wouldn’t accept. This is true. There are even some places where, because of the low worth of certain segments of society, it is possible to buy people (particularly children) or to exploit outcasts (such as illegal immigrants) and make them into slave labor. But what isn’t covered is the flip side. Most of the workers in most factories are working in better conditions and at far better wages than those which their largely preindustrial origins have to offer. Yes, 12-hour shifts are hard. But they have an apartment of their own, plenty of food, likely even a TV–because their work, even at $.35-1.25 an hour (India/China) is worth much much more than that of their neighbors. They choose the life because it offers the best standard of living–and, often enough, the safest working conditions!–of all the options available to them. And this begins a process that drives the value of humans up as a whole in the region.

What will eventually happen in the current havens of cheap labor, barring gross government corruption, is that industrialization will catch up across the economy, and labor will grow more expensive–and things like environmental protections and safety regulations will creep in out of sheer economic common sense. As those economies make the inevitable service-industry revolution, they and we will look elsewhere for cheaper labor. (This is, I’ve believed for a long time, Africa’s best hope at the moment.) If and when cheap labor runs out globally, then automatization will slowly take over, to keep down the price of good and to keep up the worth of labor in the post-industrial country. (Many Americans believe that they are competing for manufacturing jobs with cheap labor from China and India. That’s only partly true. They are completing for manufacturing jobs with cheap labor plus excise tax plus shipping plus the cost of doing business across the ocean in China and India AND with the cost of mechanization. Right now, China and India are cheaper than mechanization and unskilled American labor. This won’t necessarily stay true. Once further mechanization becomes the most attractive choice, it will only grow cheaper–something often overlooked–from which there really isn’t–and shouldn’t be–a return.)

Another way of looking at it is that humans can have value because of the force their muscles can exert or because of what is in their brains. Muscles have a low, finite, non-improvable strength. We’re not going to be worth more as laborers 200 years from now than we are now because we aren’t going to be able to lift more, haul more, etc. Our brains, however, are very malleable in the kinds of information they can hold and the kinds of tasks that they can do. So we can do things with our minds that are worth many times what our lifting ability would make us worth compared to, say, a horse.

In a preindustrial society, most people are reduced to the worth of their bodies, and the economy contracts accordingly. When we rely on other sources of power, we’re worth what’s in our heads. We want the second. All of us do.

We must have either cheap energy or cheap people. I vote for keeping energy cheap–and plentiful.

“Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make our choice; we cannot have both.” — Abraham Flexner

I’ve recently run across this quote at several blogs, and from a historical perspective, I find it more than a little incoherent.

There are lots of reasons to dislike war. Obviously, of course, it kill people–not just soldiers but civilians. There’s no war that’s ever been conducted without *significant* civilian deaths. Our modern ideal of fights being only between fighters is all very nice, but it’s never happened and never will happen. It can be a tool of oppression (as well as of resistance and of liberty!). It is expensive. It causes long-term economic damage.

But the quote above? None of it hangs together for an instant.

First, it starts with a weird parallel–comparing a short-term emergency measure to longterm growth measures. It makes as much sense for a nation to borrow for education as it does for a nation to borrow for building roads. War has often historically been financed by short-term measures–taxes, “making” more money, and borrowing have been the favorites since recorded history. This has been successful as a strategy for over 2,500 years because of what war is and what it means.

The best part of the quote, though, is the second part, which is a brilliant display of throwing away some 5,000 years of evidence. I cannot come up with a single great civilization that was not also preeminent militarily. Rather than civilization an war being mutually exclusive, I’d argue, instead, that without supremacy in war, civilization cannot exist. Ancient civilizations were boosted by influxes of gold and slaves from their conquests–many could not, in fact, be maintained without such injections of wealth. In more recent times, a strong military is necessary to ensure the security of trade, respect for borders and self-rule, and maintain an equal footing with other nations in the international market and in diplomacy.

If someone declared that this state of things is unfortunate, I wouldn’t disagree. But the quote above is purely ludicrous.

There was coverage on FOX that I saw online recently about a peanut-butter-based nutritional supplement that is highly successful in outpatient treatment of severely malnourished children in Africa. There is a food gap of a number of months during which the only available food is too nutrient-poor to support small children, though it is adequate for adults. This results in thousands of deaths per year.

This problem is particularly bad in countries in which marriage is common as early as 12 and women typically have their first baby by 16. The average number of live births per woman in places like this can be as high as eight. With seasonal food insecurity being the norm in average times, the appalling infant and child mortality rate isn’t surprising. The reactions of many of the viewers was mixed–hooray for saving the lives of children…but what kind of reckless, irresponsible person would have so many babies, knowing that they didn’t have enough food for them?

In these cultures, birth control is shunned because husbands believe that their wives will be unfaithful unless the threat of unwanted pregnancy is hanging over their heads. The less women want sex, then, and the more dire the possible consequences, the better. Fathers have little to nothing to do with small children and really, honestly, don’t give a care how many die. In these polygamous societies, they often aren’t particularly concerned if one of their wives is crippled or killed in childbirth–in fact, childbirth injuries (very common in extremely young mothers) are a common cause of men throwing their wives out. A woman who is caught on birth control would likely be beaten for threatening the “honor” of her husband through a behavior that is suggestive of lewdness. As a result, women are trapped in a cycle of frequent pregnancies and many infant and childhood deaths.

A good, though imperfect, solution to this is to make IUDs widely and easily available through all clinics. Women take their children–and themselves–in to get immunized and for nutritional supplements. Husbands do not care what happens to their children, so they take no interest or involvement in the matter. It is an easy step, then, to offer an IUD at the same time, which can be removed when the mother is ready–physically, emotionally, and economically–for another child. The husband has no way of telling that the wife has gotten one, and any clinic can have the public stance that though they offer this birth control, women in the local community aren’t interested in it. In this way, it can remain a secret between the woman and her healthcare provider.

Additionally, mothers can bring their 12-year-old daughters in to be fitted for an IUD before their marriage. There is little that can be done, at this point, to discourage early marriage, but insuring that a girl doesn’t get pregnant too young can dramatically reduce the numbers of women maimed and killed in childbirth every year. If a child were to have an IUD at 12 and removed at 17, she’d probably not have her first child until she is 18–which is a much, much safer age. If she continued to use IUDs to space her births three years to five years apart, her children would have the best chance at a healthy life while she would be protected from the ravages of too many births, too close together.

The drawback to an IUD is that it does raise the risk of AIDS–a not inconsiderable factor in Africa. However, a woman had little chance of *not* contracting it anyway if her husband has HIV, and so it only raises the risk if she involves herself outside of her marriage. Since it isn’t common for married women to do this in such societies (prostitution is rampant, but neither prostitution nor promiscuity is at all common among currently *married* women), the additional risk should be much smaller than that of death in childbirth in the region.

Hair washing is something that almost every historical writer, romance or not, gets wrong. How many times have you read a story in which a heroine sinks gratefully into a sudsy tub of water and scrubs her hair–or, even worse, piles it up on her head to wash it? Or have you watched the BBC’s Manor House and other “historical reenactment” series, in which modern people invariably destroy their hair by washing using historical recipes?

Historical women kept their hair clean, but that doesn’t mean their hair was often directly washed. Those who had incredibly difficult to manage hair might employ a hairdresser to help them wash, cut, and singe (yes, singe!) their hair as often as once a month, but for most women, hair-washing was, at most, a seasonal activity.

“Why?” you might ask. “Wasn’t their hair lank, smelly, and nasty?”

And the writers who embrace ignorance as a badge of honor will say, “Well, that just goes to show that people used to be gross and dirty, and that’s why I never bother with that historical accuracy stuff!”

And then I have to restrain myself from hitting them…

The reason that hair was rarely washed has to do with the nature of soaps versus modern shampoos. Soaps are made from a lye base and are alkaline. Hair and shampoo are acidic. Washing hair in soap makes it very dry, brittle, and tangly. Men’s hair was shirt enough and cut often enough that using soap didn’t harm it too much and the natural oils from the scalp could re-moisturize it fairly easily after even the harshest treatment, but in an age when the average woman’s hair was down to her waist, soap could literally destroy a woman’s head of hair in fairly short order.

Instead, indirect methods of hair-cleaning were used. Women washed their hair brushes daily, and the proverbial “100 strokes” were used to spread conditioning oils from roots to tips and to remove older or excess oil and dirt. This was more time-consuming than modern washing, and this is one of the reasons that “good hair” was a class marker. The fact that only women of the upper classes could afford all the various rats, rolls, and other fake additions to bulk out their real hair was another. (An average Victorian woman of the upper middle or upper class had more apparent “hair” in her hairstyle than women I know whose unbound hair falls well below their knees.) Women rarely wore their hair lose unless it was in the process of being put up or taken down–or unless they were having a picture specifically taken of it! At night, most women braided their hair for bed. Now that my hair is well below my waist, I understand why!

The first modern shampoo was introduced in the late 1920s. Shampoos clean hair quickly and also remove modern styling products, like hairspray and gel, but the frequent hair-washing that has become common leaves longer hair brittle even with the best modern formulations. (From the 1940s to the 1960s, many if not most middle-class women had their hair washed only once a week, at their hairdresser’s, where it was restyled for the next week. The professional hairdresser stepped into the void that the maid left when domestic service became rare. Washing one’s hair daily or every other day is a very recent development.) That’s where conditioners came into play. Many people have wondered how on earth women could have nice hair by modern standards before conditioners, but conditioners are made necessary by shampoos. Well-maintained hair of the 19th century didn’t need conditioners because the oils weren’t regularly stripped from it.

Additionally, the oils made hair much more manageable than most people’s is today, which made it possible for women to obtain elaborate hairstyles using combs and pins–without modern clips or sprays–to keep their hair in place. This is why hair dressers still like to work with “day-old” hair when making elaborate hairstyles.

There were hair products like oils for women to add shine and powders meant to help brush dirt out of hair, but they weren’t in very wide use at the time. Hair “tonics”–mean to be put on the hair or taken orally to make hair shinier, thicker, or stronger–were ineffective but were readily available and widely marketed.

If you have a heroine go through something particularly nasty–such as a fall into a pond or the like–then she should wash her hair, by all means. This would be done in a tub prepared for the purpose–not in the bath–and would involve dissolving soap shavings into a water and combine them with whatever other products were desired. Then a maid would wash the woman’s hair as she leaned either forward or backward to thoroughly wet and wash her hair. Rinsing would be another stage. The hair would NEVER be piled on the head. If you have greater than waist-length hair and have ever tried to wash it in a modern-sized bathtub, you understand why no one attempted to wash her hair in a hip bath or an old, short claw foot tub! It would be almost impossible.

A quick rundown of other hair facts:

Hydrogen peroxide was used to bleach hair from 1867. Before that, trying to bleach it with soda ash and sunlight was the most a girl could do. Henna was extremely popular from the 1870s through the 1890s, especially for covering gray hair, to such an extent that gray hair became almost unseen in certain circles in England in this time. Red hair was considered ugly up until the 1860s, when the public embracing of the feminine images as presented by the aesthetic movement (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) gained ground, culminating in a positive rage for red hair in the 1870s to 1880s. Some truly scary metallic salt compounds were used to color hair with henna formulations by the late 19th century, often with unfortunate results.

Hair curling was popular in the 19th century and could either by achieved with rag rolls or hot tongs. Loose “sausage” rolls were the result of rag rolling. Hot tongs were used for making the “frizzled” bangs of the 1970s to 1880s–and “frizzled” they certainly were. The damage caused by the poor control of heating a curler over a gas jet or candle flame was substantial, and most women suffered burnt hair at one time or another. For this reason, a number of women chose to eschew the popular style and preserve their hair from such dangers! Permanents were first in use in the 1930s.

Converting money between historical times and the present is notoriously difficult. It’s not that prices change; that’s a given. It’s that prices change relative to one another.

So, what does that actually mean in practical terms? Versus today, in the 19th century:

-housing was much less expensive, being no more than 10% of a middle class family’s income

-servants were much less expensive–again, taking perhaps 10-20% of a middle class family’s income

-laundry was hugely more expensive, taking up to 10% of a middle class family’s income

-lighting and heat were much more expensive, even though each new technology lowered the price. Paraffin (kerosene in the US) was cheaper than oil or candles at its introduction. Gas was cheaper than paraffin at its introduction. Electricity was cheaper than gas at its introduction–and electricity was relatively much more expensive than it is today. Coal was much cheaper than wood, but only the very rich had fires in every room they spent time in. Bedrooms, particularly, would only be heated during times of sickness in most middle class houses because of the expense. The English stubbornly clung to inefficient fireplaces despite far superior iron stove heating technology as far back as the 1700s. Masonry heaters, which were essentially closed fireplaces that provided heat to large areas through their thermal mass, were widely used in northeastern Europe but were unknown in England. The change from fireplaces to steam heat made heating the entire house affordable for the first time, and it also greatly lowered the level of dirt in English homes.

-food was much more expensive, taking perhaps 30% of a middle class family’s income
–wine was much more expensive and could be considered an investment!
–gin was cheaper than today
–but meat was less expensive relative to vegetables and fruits most of the time than it is now

-clothing was a bit more expensive except that the family had fewer garments requiring a lot more work on the part of the wife, taking perhaps 5-10% of a middle class family’s income

-most consumer goods were quite a bit more expensive

If you go back before the industrial era, prices for everything except housing and servants generally rise relative to the others quite a bit. The prices for servants fall. Clothing rises the most, to the point where an average middle class family would consider itself well off to have one new set of outerwear and a couple of sets of body linens per year. Servants in the middle ages, in fact, might get little more than food and one change of clothing per year as their entire pay–the rest could be so small that it would be properly considered pocket money.

Here’s a great link.