Correlation with no regard for causation
Tenement housing and poverty in major cities around the turn of the 20th century gets the lion's share of attention in history because of the plethora of available images showing the cramped and inhuman conditions. Poverty in coal camps was probably just as or more intense but it's considerably less documented...
It’s a modern day luxury to not have your work define your life. From antiquity up through some point in the 20th century this was essentially the case for everyone. Many surnames exist as a shortening of how people used to be defined- Miller, Smith, Baker, Potter, Cooper, Farmer, Hunt, Page, Thatcher, Woodman, Turner- people’s names were tied to their occupations just as their very lives. It’s hard to imagine those ties in modernity...
