Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 1260–1850

Abstract

Estimates of historical workers’ annual incomes suffer from the fundamental problem that they are inferred from day wage rates without knowing how many days of work day-labourers undertook per year. We circumvent the problem by building an income series based on the payments made to workers employed by the year rather than by the day. Our data suggest that earlier annual income estimates based on day wages overestimate medieval labour incomes but underestimate labour incomes during the Industrial Revolution. Our revised estimates indicate that modern economic growth began more than two centuries earlier than commonly thought and was driven by an ‘Industrious Revolution’. They also suggest that the current global downturn in labour's share is not exceptional but fits within the range of historical fluctuations.

From Convergence to Divergence: Portuguese Economic Growth, 1527–1850

“…In the well-studied English case, for instance, real day wages conform to such a picture of stagnation during the entire early modern period (Allen 2001;Clark 2007Clark , 2010), yet this is not confirmed by output-side GDP estimates, which show substantial intensive growth (Broadberry et al 2015a). When real wages are annual, rather than daily, they confirm the per capita GDP picture (Humphries and Weisdorf 2017).…”

Men at work. Wages and industriousness in southern Sweden 1500–1850

“…This indicates at least some degree of equilibrium or exchange between the two labour markets, as well as highlights the tradeoffs between guranteed employment and relying on a 'gig' style of waged labour. The concurrent decline in (and possible convergence of) both annual and daily paid wages in the seventeenth and eighteenth century is strongly counter to the trend in England, where wages for both types are increasing, while annually paid wages increase faster and outpace income from day wages (assuming 250 days of work) by nearly a factor of four by the middle of the nineteenth century (Humphries & Weisdorf, 2017). Apart from mere levels, the different developments indicate very different labour market settings entering into the modern period.…”

Economic History: ‘An Isthmus Joining Two Great Continents’?

“…Changes over time in their respective shares cannot be determined with precision. Annual contracts seem to have accounted for almost half of the farm labour force in the Middle Ages, but their share had dwindled markedly by the early nineteenth century (Snell, 1985;Humphries and Weisdorf, 2019).…”