Real wages once more: a response to Judy Stephenson

Abstract

This article examines Judy Stephenson's claim that institutional wage series such as those of Greenwich Hospital overstate the earnings of building workers by 20 to 30 per cent, and it is argued here that the conclusion is unpersuasive. Whatever adjustments to existing wage series are necessary in view of her new evidence would have no significant implications for real wages in England compared to the rest of the world. Consequently, Stephenson's findings do not call into question the high wage explanation for the industrial revolution. E conomists and historians have collected long time series of wages and prices forEngland, and these have been used to measure changes in the living standard of workers. The original approach was simply to compare an index of wages to an index of prices (roughly weighted to reflect spending) to see if the resulting real wage ratio went up or down. 1 More recent approaches have tried to extract more information from the data by estimating annual earnings and comparing them to the annual cost of subsistence. This method shows how far the standard of living was above or below subsistence, 2 and it also facilitates international comparisons of living standards, which can be measured as the number of subsistence baskets earned by workers in different countries. 3 Serious questions arise in this research: how should the subsistence basket be defined? How are daily wages or servants' premiums converted to annual earnings? 4 Judy Stephenson has added another issue to this list. 5 She claims that the wage series for English building workers at least from the seventeenth century onwards overstate the earnings of the workers in view of changes in the organization of the building industry. Most of our information about builders' wages comes from the records of large institutions. In the middle ages, they hired workers, bought materials, and project-managed themselves, so what they paid the workers was what the workers earned. After 1600, however, it was common for institutions to let contracts to builders who sometimes did the work themselves, sometimes hired tradesmen or labourers to do the job, and sometimes subcontracted work.

Height and health in late eighteenth-century England

“…229–48). Indeed the relatively tall stature of English labourers, demonstrated here, lends some support to proponents of the view that English diets were fairly generous by international standards in this period (Muldrew 2011 ; Kelly and Ó Gráda 2013 ; Harris et al 2015 ) and is consistent with arguments that England was a ‘high-wage’ economy (Allen 2015 , 2019 ; for contrasting views see Humphries 2013 ; Stephenson 2019 ).…”

Psychological origins of the Industrial Revolution

“…One way to falsify the theory presented here would be to show that northwestern Europe, and England in particular, were not so wealthy or not so slow (see, e.g., Allen 2017a; Stephenson 2017 about whether English wages were lower or higher than in other countries). Also, I have taken for granted that English industrial success reflected the greater innovativeness of the English population.…”

Mistaken wages: the cost of labour in the early modern English economy, a reply to Robert C. Allen

“…Allen, ‘Real wages once more’, p. 745. In fact, they are, again, highly likely to have overstated prices so that they did not disappoint the gentleman client.…”

“…Campbell, London tradesman , as cited by Allen, ‘Real wages once more’, p. 742. As discussed in my previous article, Campbell gives a full account of the system in ‘Finances of the carpenter’.…”