reverse ordered resume
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/margin…
So if the typical person today couldn’t hack it in 1000 AD (I agree that we probably can’t) What is the furthest back someone from today could go and have a fighting chance to make ends meet?
I like the idea of walking into an LSE seminar in 1932 and making some nice points.
If we try going back further, I don’t think 1700 would be so much easier for me than 1000. Even if I fell into London, patronage would be hard to come by and I would expect that I would end up earning the subsistence wage. Sorry guys, but I just don’t know much useful: blogging starts around 2001. In most eras I would expect the subsistence wage, but after the late 1800s I could teach and write for greater pay and better working conditions. As for the start date for effective insider trading, maybe that is the late 19th century as well. You need some start-up capital: does anyone know the minimum market investment circa 1815 and could you sell short?
In most eras my best bet is to be a shyster of some kind.
I could re-learn assembly language or Fortran quickly that I could probably earn a living programming as far back as 1970 or so … but I think that the limitations of the technology would make me want to scream.
Between 1900 and 1970 probably the best employment I could get with in a week or two of stepping out of the time machine is draftsman or assistant editor or copy editor at a newspaper, or try to become a high school science teacher.
Between 1800 and 1899 I might try to apprentice myself to a machinist…with uncertain results.
At 1799 and earlier I think I’d be unemployable for anything other than brute labor.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:03 am
best comment from the thread:
If you’ve been transported to 1830 or thereabouts, even an American high-school education gives you one incredible, timely, easy-to-exploit bit of insider data: ever heard of a sawmill in central California, built by a Mr. John Sutter? Go there.
…although it does ignore the point that transportation, food, and basic tools were much more expensive then than now.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:40 am
There’s always Seaman, and if you stick it out long enough, you could be rated Able…
June 12th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Dude, forget FORTRAN et al. If you went back to the 70′s you could “invent” C/C++, Java, etc. and live off your subsequent reputation and book sales (q.v. Kerigan, Ritchie).
June 13th, 2008 at 1:49 am
I’d wind up owning a healthy portion of Europe.
I know some (seat of the pants)Mech E, metallurgy, a bit about siegecraft(I <3 Trebuchets), manufacturing, military tactics.
Hell, knowing the ideal formula for blackpowder would make you rich beyond belief(75/15/10) before 1700. Even barring all that, you can read and write? Congratulations, you’re now in the top 5% of all people of the middle ages.
June 13th, 2008 at 8:24 am
Even barring all that, you can read and write? Congratulations, you’re now in the top 5% of all people of the middle ages.
And we’ll give you this yellow star to prove it. Don’t be caught outside the ghetto after dark, though. Or in England, at all.
June 13th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Heh.
June 13th, 2008 at 11:31 am
Let’s see– technical skills useless without tools, medical knowledge good for getting burnt at the stake and little else…
I might be able to swing it as a physician if I pretended to be a man… I don’t think I could swing it as an MD until the 60′s or 70′s otherwise (my aunt has a story about when she was in medical school and was accused of cheating after she got a high score on an exam… she took it over again right in front of the guy and aced it).
June 13th, 2008 at 11:49 am
You could potentially get hired at Stanford or MIT with your Emacs Lisp knowledge (and avoid Fortran), but that wouldn’t change much about your usefulness in a pre-computers world.
I would hate it, but I hope I could swing a gig as a farmer far enough back. Otherwise I’d need to exercise some and try to go dungeon diving.
June 13th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Actually, the Jews were fairly illiterate as well, although nowhere near the percentages of gentiles at the time.
What makes you think that you’d automatically be branded a Jew and corraled to the ghettos? The Dark ages may have been a time with a few people at the top keeping alot of people on the bottom, but it didn’t mean they were stupid. Show up with a functioning intellect, and you aren’t someone to be oppressed, but a resource to be used.
To give you an idea of just what introducing somebody to the middle ages can do, go read Leo Frankowski’s “Lord Conrad” series, about a engineer who winds up in 13th century poland, a mere decade before the Golden Horde sweeps through.
June 15th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Actually, the Jews were fairly illiterate as well, although nowhere near the percentages of gentiles at the time.
Citation? Benjamin of Tudela traveled widely in the 12c, and he emphasizes several times that he didn’t meet any (male) illiterate Jews at all. It’s not permissible to recite the shmona esrei of the three daily prayers from memory, so literacy by age 13 is an unconditional religious requirement for male Jews since the time of the Mishna, 2nd century CE, and probably from the time of Ezra, 5th BCE.
Famous recent paper analyzing the historical economics of Jewish literacy here. (Note that I disagree, on textual grounds including Jewish, Christian and pagan sources, with Botticini and Eckstein’s view that the Jewish literacy rate was much lower outside Iraq in the late classical period, but we are in agreement from the 7c forward, your period of interest in Europe.)