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3: Living Standards

The chapter begins with a contrast of accounts of primitive societies: Darwin's account of the natives of Tierra del Fuego documents a harsh and miserable existence, whereas Banks's account of the natives of Tahiti is a tropical idyll. Then he suggests the present chapter will consider whether the living standards of 1800 were significantly different to those of primitive pre-agricultural societies.

Real Wages Before 1800

The author suggests that the poorest half of any society lives on their wages and has no other property income, and it might serve as a basis for gauging livings standards, but historical records are either nonexistent or unreliable - though he does suggest that a history can be pieced together in England, back to the Norman conquest.

From these records, he's pieced together that the farm workers around 1800 spent about 75% of their income on food (mostly bread or starches) and the other 25% on shelter, heating, clothing, and other necessities. While wages in England were higher than those on the continent, so were the prices of goods. Moreover, real wages in England showed "remarkably little gain in six hundred years" with a few fluctuations over time.

The lack of increase in living standards does not necessarily mean that the standard of living was low - merely that it was not improving over time. If you compare the living standards of English workers around 1800, it is "high living standards" even by the measure of the modern third-world countries. For example, an English farm worker in 1800 received a daily wage equivalent to 3.2 kilos of wheat flour, whereas the 2001 wage of laborers in Malawi could purchase only 2.1 kilos of inferior maize flour. This does not necessarily mean that workers in one market purchase more food than those in another - in general once basic need for nourishment is satisfied, additional wages purchase other kinds of goods, which increase his standard of living.

The author suggests that technology advances that reduce the mortality rate in modern nations (vaccines, antibiotics, public health, etc.) and increase overall life expectancy has caused an increase in the overall population but, at the same time, it has created a surplus of labor that has resulted in many parts of the modern world in a reduction of real wages to a point that is below the level paid to workers in preindustrial England. As such, "health care improvements are not an unmitigated blessing, but exact a cost in terms of lower material incomes."

A data table is provided that contrasts the wages paid, expressed in pounds of wheat. A few examples:

Another table shows the wages between 1780-1800 in various countries:

As England is used as a standard, consider the contrast: there is very little difference between England in 1800 AD and Babylon in 1600 BC - and all societies in 1800 AD pale to the prosperity enjoyed in Greece in 450 BC.

(EN: It's probably a bit premature, but I was curious and did some calculations. In America in 2012, the figure is about 561 pounds per day - given a $7.25./hour minimum wage, a wheat price of $6.20 per bushel, and a standard weight of 60 pounds/bushel for wheat. Granted, there's some argument that farm subsidies make wheat cheap, and exportation of grain increases the price, but I don't' expect these adjustments would substantially lower the figure.)

Calories, Proteins, and Living Standards

The exploration is taken a step further, in that not all societies consume wheat, so a better basis of comparison would pertain to the amount of calories/proteins consumed per person per day, to which end he presents rather a mixed table of figures:

The author considers this as a basis of comparison for individuals in hunter-gatherer societies, whom anthropologists speculate to have persisted on a diet of 2,340 calories, suggesting that "primitive man ate well compared to one of the richest societies in the world in 1800."

Engel's Law and Living Standards

To clarify, this law is from a Prussian statistician Ernst Engel (rather than the better-known Friedrich Engels), who observed that poorer families spend a larger percentage of household income on food. This has been borne out by subsequent studies, and it's been found that the poorest households can spend more than 80% of their income on food, whereas the richest spend a mere 5% to 10%.

Even further, Engels observed that at the lowest end of society, the poor consume the cheapest form of calories available (grains) in the form of porridge, mush, or bread. As income increases, people shift to more expensive calories - milk, cheese, butter, eggs, meat, beer, etc. - and supplement their diet with items with no caloric value (spices, pepper, tea, coffee), which are considered to be luxury items rather than necessities. This can skew the futures when considering the percentage of budget spent on food, as wealthy people tend to pay more for their calories.

This considered, another data table follows that contrasts the percentage of food consumption of various types:

It also follows that the percentage of income spent on food is echoed by the percentage of the population engaged in specific pursuits. For example, a society that spends 80% of its income on food would, absent import/export imbalances, also have 80% of its population engaged in the production of food (agriculture, herding, hunting, fishing, etc.) and the remainder would be engaged in other forms of production (clothing, furnishings, paintings, buildings, spectacles, etc.)

Human Stature and Material Living Standards

Another indirect measurement of healthiness and nutrition is physical stature: the most obvious physical effect of better living standards is height. While some argument can be made for genetic variations in the height of persons of different ethnic groups, comparisons within a society tend to bear out that the poorer a person is, the shorter they are.

Even Malthus observed a different in the physical stature of individuals living in carious parts of England, and felt there was no doubt that nutrition and growth were connected. The author makes specific mention of more recent changes in the Japanese, whose average height has increased by around 12 centimeters in the years since the second World War.

In terms of ethnicity, it's found that Caucasians average about 180 centimeters (EN: about 5'11"), Africans average whereas Africans average 165 (5'3") - but it's interesting to note that African-American males, genetically similar but living in a wealthier society have an average height of 177 (5'8").

Again, a random sampling of history:

Thus far, it is seen that there is relatively little variation in height among people, even in various nations and of varying ethnicities, in the preindustrial era.

A second table is presented of "subsistence societies" including American plains Indians, Alaskan Inuit, Pacific Islanders, African and South American tribesman, and others in 1900 and beyond - and all hover in the same range as those of agrarian societies above.

Finally, the author presents some anthropologic evidence of the height of humans in past eras, some of which fall in the same range, others of which are slightly larger, which can perhaps be better explained by the diet of the subjects (hunting/fishing tribes were taller than those living in areas with more vegetation and less game) than ethnicity or time.

The Industrious Revolution

The author suggests that the switch from foraging society to an agrarian society also entailed greater toil on its citizens. That is, a forager society is required to work intermittently to obtain food, and the nature of the work would be varied, whereas the agrarian worker toils constantly with little variation in the nature of his work. As such, agrarian occupations were more tedious and time-consuming.

Jan Devries coined the term "industrious revolution" in an argument that the increased productivity of England corresponded not only with the progress of technology, but in a significant increase in the amount of time workers were devoted to labor on a year-round basis, based on the notion that farm work was seasonal - with much toil to be done when plowing the fields and reaping the harvest, but long periods of idleness in-between.

(EN: the author obliquely acknowledges that the lives of hunter-gatherers, early farmers, and even industrial laborers are heavily speculative, and that there are accounts that portray them as being leisurely or hard-scrabble in comparison to one another - but yet he persists in making comparisons based on these assumptions and allegations.)

The Industrious Revolution and Welfare

it is posited that before the industrial revolution, people worked about 2000 hours per year and devoted the rest to leisure pursuits, whereas afterward people worked about 3000 hours per year - which is often overlooked or at least undervalued in consideration of the causes of increased production at that time.

To better assess productivity, the author seeks to adjust his comparison to consider not the raw amount of product (food measured in calories) but the amount of product that is produced per hour of labor. Then, we can assess whether the industrious revolution (more produced by more effort) had a greater impact that the industrial one (more produced with the same effort).

However, this calculation is impacted by "wild variation" across societies which may have to do with environmental factors (weather and geography) or the kind of products produced. Even so, some data is presented on various societies in 1800:

Some of the primitive groups showed more significant productivity simply because of low-effort approaches to raising crops. For example, the high level of productivity in Madagascar results from the ease of growing maize: natives burn the vegetation off the land, scatter seeds, and wait. Very little effort is required by this process, and the land is fecund and productive.

Even so, when comparing England to certain societies that remained primitive in 1800, it's evident that the suggestion that hunter-gatherer societies had great wealth is reasonable, given that wealth may be measured in leisure time rather than the production of luxury goods.

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