Originally Posted by
FiftySix
Poverty precedes the era of the train and the era of the automobile and bus.
In the old days, people in poverty walked. Move up from walking and you might have a donkey or mule. Usually it took more money to have a horse over a donkey or mule.
Infrastructure back then would be wooden bridges and dirt paths. Many towns only had dirt streets.
TP, it sounds like you're a proponent of the Degrowth Movement. Degrowth would have to happen naturally with collapse of society as we know it. Most people in developed countries aren't about to give up their current way of life willingly.
You are introducing proofs into the fantasy that success is a bad thing. Your example of walking to donkeys to horses proves itself out all over this world. Some just need to get out of their living room and see how humans are. I have been to Africa, Asia and South America and viewed transportation development in the exact order you described. The really poor walk. Poor with a job or business gets a donkey cart and if they are successful maybe a horse.
In Africa the next move is often a mini van that they get a permit to haul people with. They then use that van to pick up and charge walkers a fee to ride into town. In Asia the get a small three wheeled scooter and charge people that don’t want to walk. In South America it is small cars they use as a taxi. But the transition is always the same.
No no where is the concept that people are willing to take less for their labor a workable idea.
If if some people would spend some time socializing with others in real time they would know that their fellow citizens are working as hard as they can to move up rather that digress to what people made in the pre- Industrial Age.
If we are talking such fantasies maybe people gave up mass transit because the are waiting for transporters to be invented. That way they could simply be zapped anywhere in the world as fast as light.