Comment by JambalayaJimbo
6 hours ago
By "self-employed" - are you referring to subsistence farming? Everything I know about subsistence farming makes it appear much more precarious than corporate work; where hard work is especially disconnected from your rewards; governed by soil conditions, weather, etc.
> are you referring to subsistence farming?
It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.
Remember, subsistence farming first had to end before people could start working off the farm. Someone has to feed them too. For 50% of the workforce to be working a job off the farm, the other 50% being subsistence farmers would be impossible.
> Look at the farms that still have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.
Those are usually large plantations, and the people who owned them weren't just farmers but vast landholders with very low paid labor working the farm (at one time usually enslaved). I doubt they were representative of the typical turn of the 20th century farm.
If we're speaking from vibes rather than statistics, I'd argue most 19th century farmhouses I've seen are pretty modest. Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.
> Those are usually large plantations
There are no plantations around here. This was cattle and grain country in that time. Farmers got rich because all of sudden their manual labour capacity was multiplied by machines. The story is quite similar to those who used software to multiply their output in our time, and similarly many tech fortunes have built mansions just the same.
> Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.
Well, they weren't palaces. You're absolutely right that they don't look like mansions by today's standards, but they were considered as such at the time. Many were coming from tiny, one room log cabins (stuffed to the brim with their eight children). They were gigantic, luxurious upgrades at the time. But progress marches forward, as always.
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I think it’s pretty dependent on where you farmed. Orchards in California being vastly more profitable than like North Dakota.
Also hard to ignore the survivorship bias there. The small/bad/ugly/whatever houses are gone.
> Also hard to ignore the survivorship bias there.
It's not ignored. It is already encoded into the original comment. No need to repeat what is already said.
> Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.
TLDR: survivorship
The typically large farms with nice houses were making reasonable money, and in a lot of places, only the house remains of the farm. My old neighborhood was a large farm, subdived into about 1000 postage stamp lots around 1900; the owner's house got a slightly larger lot and stuck around as your mansion.
The small farms that were within the means of more people tended to have shanty houses and those have not persisted. If the farm is still a farm, it's likely been subsumed into a larger plot.
> It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Already in the original comment. Already in other replies as well. How, exactly, does one end up not ready anything in the thread before replying?
> farming was insanely lucrative during that time
That is wildly inaccurate. Do you think people were flocking to cities to flee the "insanely lucrative" jobs they already had?
Farm labor paid significantly less than industrialized labor at the time. I suspect in addition to just making things up, you're looking at a few landowners who were quite wealthy due to their land holdings (and other assets) and what they have left behind while completely ignoring the lives led by the vast majority of farmers at the time.
> Do you think people were flocking to cities to flee the "insanely lucrative" jobs they already had?
The non-farmers were already accounted for. Did you, uh, forget to read the thread?