Did Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels misrepresent the slums of Manchester?

Was it intentional or a human mistake?

"Work, shopping, church and the pub kept different classes apart far more than ‘residential segregation’ in 1850s Manchester, undermining key assumptions about the Industrial Revolution.

By mapping digitized census data, new research shows that many middle-class Mancunians including doctors and engineers lived in the same buildings and streets as working-class residents including weavers and spinners. ...

But even in Ancoats, the main working-class slum which so appalled Engels, around 10% of the population belonged to the wealthier employed classes. ...

Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of Marxism, visited Manchester in 1842 and began recording examples of rampant inequality in the rapidly industrialising city.

He described a commercial core encircled by ‘unmixed working-peoples’ quarters, then the ‘middle bourgeoisie’ and further beyond, the upper classes. Many historians have relied on Engels’ account – preserved in The Condition of the Working-Class in England ..."

Mixed-up in Manchester "The ‘slums’ of Victorian Manchester actually housed doctors and engineers, a new study reveals, but daily life still kept rich and poor neighbours apart."

Life above and below street level in Manchester around 1838

Debunking The Lasting Myth Of Poverty In The Early Industrial Revolution

Posted: 9/18/2019

I have had serious doubts for many years regarding the still predominant narrative about the severe poverty and worker exploitation during the early phase of the Industrial Revolution as it happened in Great Britain. Charles Dickens famous stories and Karl Marx and his sugar daddy Friedrich Engels stoked the narrative early on.

“Were there no poor people before that? (There were, obviously.) There are a number of possible answers – an increase in the concentration of poverty with growing urbanization and industrialization, which made poverty more visible; the rising standard of living, which made poverty seem less “normal”; or ... a more visible contrast between wealthy owners and poorer workers” (S1; emphasis added)

I may add:

1. Yes, perhaps the contrast between wealthy owners and poor workers became more visible. Perhaps, there were suddenly many more affluent and wealthy citizens around, while in previous centuries wealth was more invisible and highly concentrated with the nobility and upper echelons of clergy. 
2. Many of the nouveau rich were self made and came from humble beginnings
3. I would bet there were relatively fewer poor people during this time than in the centuries before if you adjust e.g. for population growth
4. Above all, poverty is such a strong relative phenomenon depending on time, location, culture and much more. E.g. a person in Western countries, who is in our time considered to be poor, would have been seen as a well off person just a few decades ago. Like beauty, poverty is to some extent more in the eye of the beholder. Greed and envy do the rest!

Sources (S):

1. Charles Dickens, poverty, and emotional arguments (Acton Institute, 9/13/19)

The Guardian Uncovers Google Sweatshops

Posted: 5/31/2019

The hot off the press story: Google Assistant 'A white-collar sweatshop': Google Assistant contractors allege wage theft Interpreting a spoken request isn’t magic, rather it has taken a team of underpaid, subcontracted linguists to make the technology possible

When a leftist media outlet uncovers such a story, then you know immediately take it with a big grain of salt.

Not to be outdone, the MIT Technology Review immediately jumped on this story by disseminating and commenting on it in their daily email blast (5/31/2019) “The Algorithm”. Their story was titled “Invisible labor”. Plus, it added an interview with anthropologist Mary Gray, who co-authored a book with the title “Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass”

Wonderful these ideological and deeply flawed perspective on labor exploitation by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels is living on! Like superstition, this myth does not die!

The Guardian & MIT Technology Review are also strongly implying that AI (here specifically machine translation and natural language processing is all smoke & mirrors. What a bad joke especially coming from MIT Technology Review!

Reassessing Silent Spring After 50 Years

A New Book By The Cato Institute

Judging by its introduction, excerpts, and table of contents available, the new book titled “Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson” appears to be well worth reading.

This reassessment should already have happened 20 or more years ago.

A Pseudoscientific Scaremonger

I believe, this sums up the book, I never read, but which I only know through what others have said or wrote about it. This is the impression I had for a long time.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter of the above Cato book (Emphasis added):

“Perhaps Rachel Carson’s greatest sin of omission in Silent Spring was that she focused almost entirely on pesticide use in agriculture and essentially ignored pesticides’ public health role, particularly that of DDT in controlling malaria and other diseases transmitted by insects. This gap is all the more puzzling because DDT’s popularity in the 1950s stemmed from its use in public health campaigns during World War II—which many soldiers personally witnessed. Saving many lives and greatly reducing human misery was the reason Dr. Paul Müller received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 for his role in the discovery of DDT’s insecticidal properties. In Chapter 8, Donald Roberts and Richard Tren, who have devoted decades to malaria control, review the evidence about DDT’s use for public health purposes—including significant benefits for the poor in the South in the United States—that was known at the time Carson wrote and explore the legacy of its fall from grace.”

Just One Book In A Line Of Similar Biased Publications

Friedrich Engels “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844” first published in German in 1845 and in English in 1887.

“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair published in 1906.

I am sure there are more publications to be listed here, but you get the idea that there were a number of such publications that had a significant, long lasting influence despite their bias and incorrectness.

Hopefully, in the future we will be able to debunk such publications much earlier before their negative influence spreads.