Well, that's not fair! I want to live now because I'm unlikely to die in childbirth, my kids are all likely to survive, I can vote, own property, control my own movements, have human rights, be free of lice & parasites, be atheist, have antibiotics, dentistry, survive plaguehttps://twitter.com/derryborndo/status/961043032505307136 …
Fewer hands? You think a larger proportion of society owned property in medieval times than now?
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Not at all. Ferguson refers to the incentive 4 indentured immigrants to America to do their time & then be guaranteed a piece of land after x years. Petty estates lead to competition & tech innovation then ind. rev - good argument. Yet it also leads to concentration of ownership.
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Well more people might have owned their own land in America in medieval times because there was so much of it but I don't know Native American history? Did individuals own land then?
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Dunno. I am referring to the European immigrants. Ferguson says that was the deal for the European settlers in the 16 and 1700s. 5 or 10 years of being an indentured servant, then you get your own amount of acres to do with as you please. + proto-democracy of the land-owners.
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That's the modern period. Did things get better or not?
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Of course. Ferguson ascribes progress to many having smallish shareholdings. My point is that the ownership has conglomerated into bigger holdings in fewer hands. So you have to ascribe progress since, say, the late C19th, to other variables - e.g. culture of science & tech.
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Which is a product of modernity. I don't know where you're going here. Do you think you are better off now than you would have been in the medieval period or not?
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Of course I do. I am positing that the Lockean idea of petty bourgeois property rights as a take-off to economic growth worked: N America, in contrast to S America and its latifundia, was built on small estates. But they are no longer the dominant form of land ownership.
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This doesn't appear to have any relation to anything I'm saying. America happened in the modern period.
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