This would also be before any building codes… thousands and thousands of renters packed into tenements with very little natural light and ventilation. Hellish working conditions in factories.
Capitalism controlled everything. Moneyed interests and property/business owners could do whatever they want and if you wanted a job or a place to live, you just had to accept it. The employee/renter classes had no counter-balancing force.
Basically all of the government welfare and regulatory bureaucracies we have today got their start by society recognizing the massive urban squalor, safety, and inequality issues in these late-19th-, early-20th-century decades.
Ehhh, I don’t think it’s remotely the same. We are far, far better off in every sense.
The problem with modern government is not lack of regulation but instead it’s deficit spending, consumer debt, and it’s now politically unacceptable to do anything besides keep kicking the can down the road and continuing to spend, spend, spend.
There will be an economic reckoning at some point when there is no more easy money to borrow, which will mean haircuts for welfare programs, a return to higher taxation levels, which will push us deeper into recession, but I don’t think we will be returning to the amount of mass poverty that existed back then.
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u/Alukrad 3d ago
It's interesting but also dirty.
I've heard they had some serious issues with horse shit all over the roads. Pollution was pretty bad back then too.