I'm pretty sure there were way more children back then who had practical skills, now everyone is pushed into "college prep" and discouraged from having practical skills, as they are associated with the lower class workers.
The people who keep us all alive are viewed as less worthy... that's our problem in a nutshell.
Is that true? I feel like the drumbeat I constantly have heard for the last 10 years is that the trades pay really well and are easier to get into. Most of the electricians I know are definitely not "lower class". That said, they're harder jobs physically. They're not particularly good for your body a lot of the time.
There are more levels to class than 'aristocracy'. A lot of it is just perception and known rules, and so the fact you know to compare a clerk and a workman means you already know there's a perceived or known difference in status.
Two days ago we returned home from a short trip and when we turned on the tap for the first time the water pressure seemed unusually high for 5-10 seconds before returning to normal. I would have thought nothing of it except that about fifteen years ago I had experienced the same phenomenon after installing a water pressure booster pump in our house and so I learned the hard way about the need for thermal expansion tanks in modern domestic plumbing [1] and so I knew right away that our tank had failed and needed to be replaced. It's a pretty trivial DIY project, but only if you do it before your pipes burst. I suspect most people have never even heard of a thermal expansion tank.
> I suspect most people have never even heard of a thermal expansion tank.
I suspect that if you did surveys every year going back to the 19th century, in every single one of them the majority of people would have never heard of a thermal expansion tank.
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