alt Hacker News> But there was a lot of pain. Living conditions got worse [...]
No, living conditions did not get worse. Yes, livings conditions were pretty bad during the early industrial revolution. But they hadn't exactly been rosy before.
> [...] they got better because the world went to war and incinerated most of its capital, literally and metaphorically, and the regrowth happened under conditions of scarce labor rather than abundant labor, allowing the people on the bottom to strike a decent deal the second time around.
Which war are you talking about? There's been more than one, you know. And the decades after the second world war were probably the nadir for humanity: we never had as many dirt poor people as then and will hopefully never have as many. Remember, that's the time when there were genuine fears of global starvation. Things have been looking up a lot since perhaps around the 1980s and even more so in the following decades. Mostly thanks to PR China and India and South East Asia graduating from dirt poor to merely poor or even middle class.
You also seem confused. You seem to say that a relative capital scarcity is good for labour ('incinerated most of its capital') but also that relative labour scarcity is good for labour? Which way is it?
Conditions did get worse in the industrial revolution. People didn't go to the city because they thought it was brilliant, they went to the city because their livelihood in the rural economy was disrupted. They were pushed (shoved), not pulled.
> the decades after the second world war were probably the nadir
People compare themselves to their parents and grandparents, you can only hustle so far in the face of lived experience.
> You seem to say that a relative capital scarcity is good for labour ('incinerated most of its capital') but also that relative labour scarcity is good for labour? Which way is it?
In an extreme downturn (Europe bombing its cities), the poor undergo more real suffering but the rich undergo more nominal suffering so inequality is reset. Bombed out factories and apartments create an enormous demand for labor -- the broken window fallacy is only a fallacy if you studiously ignore distribution. This is why we should eagerly seek to fix r>g in peacetime -- it's guaranteed to be mathematically possible and it's clearly better for everyone.