
The history of economic growth is a tale of cleanliness - prostoalex
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/08/01/how-hand-washing-explains-economic-expansion
======
andrewl
This sounds familiar:

 _So too did stubborn citizens grow weary of the lecturing of muckraking do-
gooders. By 1854, outbreaks of infectious disease had killed thousands of
Londoners of all classes, and yet an editorial in The Times huffed, “We prefer
to take our chance of cholera and the rest rather than be bullied into
health.”_

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eli_gottlieb
I mean, yes, you would expect basically any harm to public health to be a
significant drag on the economy.

 _Kinda like this pandemic we 're going through right now._

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ur-whale
[http://archive.is/EEOX4](http://archive.is/EEOX4)

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smileypete
For a far more nuanced and detailed look at life in London in the 1840s, read
'London Labour and the London Poor' by Henry Mayhew

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Labour_and_the_London_P...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Labour_and_the_London_Poor)

[https://archive.org/details/londonlabourand00mayhgoog](https://archive.org/details/londonlabourand00mayhgoog)

[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55998](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55998)

The economist article is OK but a little onesided and cheerleading from their
typical angle.

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new2628
Yet sidewalks in cities around most of the developed world drown in dog/cat
poop and pee, something that would have seemed strange a generation ago, and
still seems if you travel from a less pet-crazy place.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
I highly doubt this is true. I've never lived in a place outside of the
developed world, but I also have never lived or visited a place where the
sidewalks drowned in dog/cat poop and pee. In fact, I've never actually
watched a cat pee on the sidewalk in places where it cannot be covered up,
simply because that's not how cats tend to act.

Where are you getting your information from? How much have you traveled? What
is your definition of city? Do you have some proof?

~~~
superhuzza
I lived in France for 10 years, virtually nobody picked up waste from their
pets. Just wasn't a cultural norm. Not necessarily that different in Italy or
Spain as well.

Maybe the attitude is changing now, I don't know.

[https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/12/why-cant-
fren...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/12/why-cant-french-
cities-clean-up-after-their-dogs-montpellier)

~~~
Tobias42
I remember noticing the same in Marseille about 10 years ago, but Paris for
example was already quite different back then. Now I live in Madrid and not
picking up after your dog is very much frowned upon, and you see very little
pet waste in the streets.

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1vuio0pswjnm7
What's up with the misspelling of cleanliness in the title? How could that
slip by an editor? Maybe it is some kind of experiment to see if they get more
clicks with a deliberate error.

~~~
llarsson
A few years ago, I would notice more misspellings in headers and captions than
in the main body of text. This was especially true back when the textarea
widget got spell-checking, but input fields did not. Could something like that
be at fault here, as well? Do input fields have spell-checking across browsers
these days?

~~~
sp332
By default, single-line input fields in Firefox (including textareas) don't
have spellcheck enabled.
[http://kb.mozillazine.org/Layout.spellcheckDefault](http://kb.mozillazine.org/Layout.spellcheckDefault)
So spellcheck might be enabled for the body text but not for the field where
the headline goes.

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enkid
Anyone know how to get around the paywall? Private tab doesn't work.

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ur-whale
[http://archive.is/EEOX4](http://archive.is/EEOX4)

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nutshell89
This another case that seems intuitive to me (I can't read the rest of
article) since:

* Cities basically serve as a multiplier for economic output, enabling economies of scale (because of lots of people live near one another).

* That increase in population also leads to increased risk from pathogens which can spread with unsanitary conditions or over-crowding and work to reduce urban population (Corona, Queens - one of the harder hit areas of NYC during the pandemic has lower share of 1-2 person households and a higher share of 3-7 person households than the city overall).

* It's only been since the 20th century when most of the world's population has lived in cities, so their growth has likely been encouraged by practices and technologies like better sanitation and wastewater treatment, hand-washing, vaccines, and modern epidemiology.

What I'm curious about is this: could computing and the internet recreate the
broad multiplicative benefit on economic output that cities create? Or will
the internet in the 21st century continue to serve only the winners in a
winner-take-all market?

~~~
jrott
I'm optimistic that computing and the internet could recreate the economic
benefits of cities. At this point though collaboration tools still have a ways
to go.

The other part that really needs to improve is the random discovery that comes
from being packed in with so many other people. Places like HN provide a large
part of that but there needs to be more of them.

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vwat
What a great article. It points out that the horrifying diseases of that time
were rationalized as being bad luck or divine retribution. People didn’t have
any particular desire to get to the bottom of it. Germ theory earned its
advocates public lampooning. The things is that it’s exactly the same today. I
was reading about how Botox injections have been observed to reduce
depression. Doctors claimed that it was because of a feedback loop between
frowning muscles and mood. Modern, certified doctors grasped onto this theory
with white knuckles, that “frowny face bad.” It’s unbelievable. Obviously
follow up studies showed the the location of the injection makes no difference
in the anti-depressive effect. It just blows my mind. They always create a
theory that does one thing: terminates the line of inquiry. Yes, it’s frowning
so there’s nothing more to be seen or done with this. I think subconsciously,
it is too emotionally upsetting for them to have to basically go back to the
drawing board, rewrite a bunch of basic biology and medicine. There is some
kind of mental block there. And just think that thousands and thousands of
things like this are around — clues being ignored that could literally save
people’s lives and prevent unimaginable suffering. I had psychosis and keto
cured it. My doctors literally ignored me when I told them. I asked, should
this be looked into? Shouldn’t you be raising the alarm about this weird
thing? Shouldn’t we see if it works in other people? No no no... always
talking in circles without ever addressing what I’ve said. Science will
vindicate me eventually... but in the meantime a whole lot of people will
suffer needlessly.

