| “ | Not very long ago it was fashionable for economic historians to dwell on the evils of the industrial revolution and the poverty-ridden condition of the masses in the disease-producing cities. In point of fact no Dickens novel ever did justice to the conditions of child labor, length of the working day, and conditions of safety and sanitation in early nineteenth-century factories. A work week of 84 hours was the prevailing rule, with time out for breakfast and sometimes supper, as well as lunch. A good deal of work could be got out of a six-year-old boy or girl, so long as one didn't care about his health or existence beyond the age of twelve. If a man lost two fingers in a machine, he still had eight left.
However true their lurid picture of industrial factory towns, the earlier historians erred in thinking that conditions were worse than it the preindustrial era. The earlier "putting-out" or domestic system in which wool or yarn was provided to workers for them to spin or weave in their homes brought the worst conditions of the sweatshop into the home. Sleep and need battled for the week's 168 hours. The whole family, not just the breadwinner, was figuratively forced to run on the treadmill to keep alive. For these reasons labor unions have always opposed this system of production, even more than the factory with all its evils. Furthermore, poverty is never so obvious in the country as in the industrial cities where it forces itself on the observer. The idyllic picture of the healthful happy countryside peopled by stout yeoman and happy peasantry is a mirage in most parts of the world. Even today, nothing in New York's Hell's Kitchen or east side, nothing in Boston's south or north end, nothing "behind the Yards" in Chicago or in its black belt can overshadow the poverty and squalor of our rural problem areas: the Tobacco Road of the deep South, the hillbilly regions of the Appalachian Plateau, the two dust bowls, the ghost mining towns of Pennsylvania, and the cutover region of the upper Michigan peninsula. |
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| — Paul Samuelson (1915 – 2009) Economics: The Original 1948 Edition |
