How Was Life?

Abstract

This work is published on the responsibility of the Secretary-General of the oecD. The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of the organisation or of the governments of its member countries This document and any map included herein are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory, city or area. The statistical data for israel are supplied by and under the responsibility of the relevant israeli authorities. The use of such data by the oecD is without prejudice to the status of the Golan Heights, east Jerusalem and israeli settlements in the West bank under the terms of international law. corrigenda to oecD publications may be found on line at: www.oecd.org/about/publishing/corrigenda.htm. © oecD, iiSH 2014You can copy, download or print oecD content for your own use, and you can include excerpts from oecD publications, databases and multimedia products in your own documents, presentations, blogs, websites and teaching materials, provided that suitable acknowledgment of the source and copyright owner is given. all requests for public or commercial use and translation rights should be submitted to rights@oecd.org. Requests for permission to photocopy portions of this material for public or commercial use shall be addressed directly to the copyright clearance center (ccc) at info@copyright.com or the centre français d'exploitation du droit de copie (cFc) at contact@cfcopies.com. We are very pleased today, more than a decade after the release of Maddison's seminal work, to renew our association with his legacy. We do so through a report that both connects with and departs from his contributions to economic history. It connects, due to the report's long-term, global perspective, covering the period 1820-2010. It departs by going beyond GDP to encompass a broader set of dimensions that shape people's living conditions, such as their wages, longevity, education, height and personal security, among others.The present volume represents the culmination of the efforts undertaken by a group of economic historians as part of an international, inter-disciplinary effort, the Clio-Infra project. We are releasing it in the context of the better life initiative, which was launched by the OECD Secretary-General, Angel Gurría, in 2011 (and multi-disciplinary) as angus Maddison has demonstrated in the past, such global datasets can be produced only after major efforts in peer-reviewed research and standardisation of the underlying national data. Therefore a collaborative effort is needed to deal with the complexities involved in gathering, systematising and analysing data from a wide variety of disparate sources. This requires teamwork, in which experts on various topics, regions and periods work together to create standardised datasets of key historical variables. This is the approach adopted by both The Maddison Project, which focuses on h...

Literacy among Cracow inhabitants in the first half of the 19th century. Demographic and socio-economic determinants

“…Piśmienność wpływa na poziom życia również w sposób pośredni, a to przez pozytywną korelację z produktywnością i wydajnością pracy, zdrowiem i higieną czy stabilnością polityczną, a także negatywną -ze zjawiskami takimi jak przemoc, przestępczość i nierówności społeczne 17 .…”

2. Core Ideas and the Framework

“…Several of these dimensions can be conceptualized through a capability lens and others (such as per capita GDP or real wages) are needed for a comparison between capability dimensions and income dimensions, or can be seen as core capability determinants or capability inputs. In a recent report, which reconstructed the outcomes on those dimensions between 1820 and 2000, it was found that some dimensions, such as education and health outcomes, are strongly correlated with per capita GDP, but others are not -such as the quality of political institutions, homicide rates and exposure to conflicts (Van Zanden et al 2014). Another example that illustrates the difference the capability approach can make is the analysis of gender inequality, for which it is clear that we are missing out the most important dimensions if we only focus on how income is distributed.…”

“…For example, one may simply want to describe how a country has developed over time in terms of a number of important functionings, as a way of giving information about the evolution of the quality of life that may give different insights than the evolution of GDP (e.g. Van Zanden et al 2014). Weighing dimensions is therefore not required for each capability theory or capability application, in contrast to the selection of dimensions, which is inevitable.…”

Cultural Evolution of Genetic Heritability

“…For most of human history, what we now call "deprived" conditions were the norm. Two hundred years ago, 89% of humanity lived in extreme poverty (Ravallion 2016), 88% were illiterate (van Zanden et al 2014), and 43% of children died before they were five years old (Gapminder 2020).…”