[JambalayaJimbo]

By "self-employed" - are you referring to subsistence farming? Everything I know about subsistence farming makes it appear much more precarious than corporate work; where hard work is especially disconnected from your rewards; governed by soil conditions, weather, etc.

[9rx]

> are you referring to subsistence farming?

It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

Remember, subsistence farming first had to end before people could start working off the farm. Someone has to feed them too. For 50% of the workforce to be working a job off the farm, the other 50% being subsistence farmers would be impossible.

[danans]

> Look at the farms that still have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

Those are usually large plantations, and the people who owned them weren't just farmers but vast landholders with very low paid labor working the farm (at one time usually enslaved). I doubt they were representative of the typical turn of the 20th century farm.

If we're speaking from vibes rather than statistics, I'd argue most 19th century farmhouses I've seen are pretty modest. Not shacks, but nothing gigantic or luxurious.

[bpt3]

> farming was insanely lucrative during that time

That is wildly inaccurate. Do you think people were flocking to cities to flee the "insanely lucrative" jobs they already had?

Farm labor paid significantly less than industrialized labor at the time. I suspect in addition to just making things up, you're looking at a few landowners who were quite wealthy due to their land holdings (and other assets) and what they have left behind while completely ignoring the lives led by the vast majority of farmers at the time.

[NegativeLatency]

I think it’s pretty dependent on where you farmed. Orchards in California being vastly more profitable than like North Dakota.

Also hard to ignore the survivorship bias there. The small/bad/ugly/whatever houses are gone.

[psunavy03]

> It says early 1900s, so no. It does largely refer to farming, but farming was insanely lucrative during that time. Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

[toast0]

> Look at the farms that have the houses of that era standing on them and you'll soon notice that they are all mansions.

TLDR: survivorship

The typically large farms with nice houses were making reasonable money, and in a lot of places, only the house remains of the farm. My old neighborhood was a large farm, subdived into about 1000 postage stamp lots around 1900; the owner's house got a slightly larger lot and stuck around as your mansion.

The small farms that were within the means of more people tended to have shanty houses and those have not persisted. If the farm is still a farm, it's likely been subsumed into a larger plot.

[thomasdeleeuw]

Farming, with its many related jobs, but also making sails, brewing beer, assisting in house work, distributing coal, blacksmithing, pottery, woodworking, the list goes on. Smaller communities, with the majority of the population, in the early 1900s really were a lot of small (family) businesses.

[venturecruelty]

I was about to say, it's not like the early 1900s were particularly great for a lot of people... especially people whose ancestors were, uh, not in the country of their own volition.