A hundred years ago people depended on family.

Which is how my grandfather, at 6, managed to find himself at work in a factory supporting a ton of siblings.

A hundred years ago people depended on their children in their old age.

Which is why people pre Roosevelt looked forward to old age with dread. For many it was a time of extreme poverty as everyone you had known and depended on went away. And furthermore since you depended on children, you made sure you had a lot of them. My grandparents all came from families of a dozen or more. That wasn't unusual.

A hundred years ago people depended on their church.

Which meant that people who disagreed with the churches were SoL.

A hundred years ago people depended on local networks.

So when those local networks frayed, people could and did slip between the cracks and starved. It doesn't happen any more.

Now if you want to talk about 10,000 years of human action, well 200 years ago people believed that slavery was the inevitable way of the world. In fact selling yourself or your family into slavery was a time-honored way to handle personal debt. And of course any time prior to 300 years ago, in Europe at any given time, a substantial fraction of the population didn't have homes and had real reasons to fear death.

You may idealize a world where people would add water to the soup and boil again and again and again until they could find something to put into it. I don't. Frankly, all told, this isn't such a bad world to be born into. Slavery isn't even a memory in this country. The bankruptcy laws are unbelievably generous (by the standards of past eras). Great fears of the past like "consumption" and "pressgang" are trivia questions, words which some adults don't know. Has there been a keelhauling in living memory? Not that I have heard of! (And darned few even know what it is. BTW the [link|http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=keelhaul|dictionary version] doesn't mention that people generally didn't survive the experience...)

Cheers,
Ben