Ada Palmer: prediction

Transcript context

…But isn’t living in the countryside really boring? And urbanization was occurring because people preferred, or many people preferred, a Renaissance kind of lifestyle with all its risks to a more medieval kind of existence that they could have had if they had stayed in the countryside? Yeah, and there were huge reasons for people to flood into the cities. We see cities that get emptied by plague repopulated with enormous speed. When Naples was emptied by a resurgence of the Black Death, Yersinia pestis, in 1494 through 1496 — this was a city of nearly 200,000 — it became completely empty, and within 20 years, it was over 250,000 again. So, people were flooding in for opportunities for economic advancement. You traded shorter life expectancies for all sorts of other things, including better pay and different types of work. One of the things that’s fun to remember in the Renaissance is that the actual pay for a day laborer was pretty high. In Renaissance Florence, which is my specialty, one of the things people never expect is that most sorts of day laborers — which is the bottom of the economic totem pole in the city — earned enough to live on working three days a week and spent the other several days of the week enjoying themselves and looking at art. This is not what we expect, but it was actually true. But isn’t that a sign that living in the Renaissance — at least some parts of it — was better than living in the Middle Ages because it’s what people chose?…

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