This Fleeting World

64 This Fleeting World
men more control over reproduction, and new technologies, such as bottle
feeding, have allowed parents to share more easily in the task of caring
for infants. Reduced infant mortality and new forms of socialized old-age
support have reduced the pressure to have many children as a form of oldage
insurance. Finally, urbanization and commercialization have created
more varied forms of employment for women as well as men. Women are
less closely tied to their traditional role as child rearers, particularly in the
most industrialized regions of the world. Nevertheless, gender inequality
still survives even in those societies most deeply transformed by the modern
revolution. Even in the United States and western Europe the average wages
of women lag behind those of men. According to the U.S. Department of
Labor, “In 1992 for those receiving hourly rates, women’s median hourly
earnings were 79.4 percent of men’s; for full-time wage and salary workers,
women’s median weekly earnings were 75.4 percent of men’s; and median
annual earnings for women were 70.6 percent of men’s annual earnings in
1992, the most recent year for which data are available.”
Destruction of Premodern Lifeways
Finally, the modern revolution has destroyed premodern lifeways. Until
the twentieth century independent communities of foragers survived
in many parts of the world, but by the end of the twentieth century no
foragers lived outside a modern state, and their lifeways had been transformed
as they had been forcibly brought into the modern world. Peasant
farming—the lifeway of most women, men and children throughout the
agrarian era—declined as peasant households were unable to compete with
large, industrial agribusinesses or the commercial farmers of more industrialized
countries. By the end of the twentieth century peasant farming
had vanished in much of the world. Even where it survived—in much of
east Asia and Africa, for example, as well as in much of Latin America—it
was in decline. These changes marked the end of traditions, cultures, and
lifeways that had shaped the lives of most humans throughout the earlier
eras of human history.
Explaining the Modern Revolution
The key to these momentous changes was a sudden rise in the productivity
of human labor caused by increasing rates of innovation. So, to explain
modernity we must explain why rates of innovation have risen so fast