Would you rather live in medieval England or modern day Afghanistan? Before you answer, you might want to consider that you’d likely have a better standard of living under Henry VIII than of Hamid Karzai:
New research led by economists at the University of Warwick reveals that medieval England was not only far more prosperous than previously believed, it also actually boasted an average income that would be more than double the average per capita income of the world’s poorest nations today.
The figure of $400 annually (as expressed in 1990 international dollars) is commonly is used as a measure of “bare bones subsistence” and was previously believed to be the average income in England in the middle ages.
However the University of Warwick led researchers found that English per capita incomes in the late Middle Ages were actually of the order of $1,000 (again as expressed in 1990 dollars). Even on the eve of the Black Death, which first struck in 1348/49, the researchers found per capita incomes in England of more than $800 using the same 1990 dollar measure. Their estimates for other European countries also suggest late medieval living standards well above $400.
Compare that to the average annual income of many modern countries:
Zaire $249
Burundi $479
Niger $514
Central African Republic $536
Comoro Islands $549
Togo $606
Guinea Bissau $617
Guinea $628
Sierra Leone $686
Haiti at $686
Chad $706
Zimbabwe $779
Afghanistan $869
Read more about the study here.
(Via: Outside the Beltway)
December 13th, 2010 | 9:14 am
And the worst places on Earth in medieval times? How do they compare?
December 13th, 2010 | 12:02 pm
And what were the medians?
December 13th, 2010 | 12:20 pm
I’m sure their standard of living was a great comfort to them when the plague struck.
December 13th, 2010 | 1:31 pm
Why the dismissive comments?
December 13th, 2010 | 3:57 pm
This is a sort of absurd comparison that only Joe Carter would take seriously.
December 13th, 2010 | 4:17 pm
Because it’s not every year that one reads anything positive about Tudor England at “First Things”. Usually it’s gloating along the lines of “Thus perish all the heirs of Korah” about the “Catholic Tsunami” that devastated Elizabeth’s realm shortly after she had Mary executed, or “post hoc ergo propter hoc” arguments that England only became a great world power after Anglicanism began its decline in the 1930s.
December 14th, 2010 | 3:24 am
If people would actually read the paper rather than commenting with their first gut reaction, they might find some of their comments already answered by the paper itself. The paper is actually an argument for two things:
(1) That England is an unusual case in that its records going back well into the Middle Ages are extraordinarily detailed, and that therefore in the case of England much more precise assessment of the medieval economy can be made than can be made elsewhere;
(2) That the evidence provided supports the hypothesis, which some have suggested, that the economic build-up to the Industrial Revolution began at least as early as the thirteenth century, and doesn’t support the hypothesis, which is more often held, that it began much later.
The average per capita numbers are estimates based on a diverse batch of information and are primarily to provide a useful way of summing up much of that information.
All this can be seen on no more than a rough glance at the paper, and thus requires no more than minimal critical reading skills, so I don’t know what anyone’s excuse could possibly be.
December 14th, 2010 | 7:12 am
[...] Wealth and not-wealth. [...]
December 14th, 2010 | 7:15 am
[...] Wealth and not-wealth. [...]
December 14th, 2010 | 9:06 am
Matt, Brandon – The paper’s interesting for what it is, but the point Joe takes from it is either misleading (out of context) or not particularly interesting (in context).
The problem isn’t in the paper, it’s in what Joe’s highlighting about it.
December 14th, 2010 | 10:20 am
Ray The problem isn’t in the paper, it’s in what Joe’s highlighting about it.
You don’t find it interesting that the standard of living of people 400 years ago was higher than of people who live in the modern age?
December 14th, 2010 | 11:48 am
Rod, which First Things do YOU read? Where is this anti-Catholic, low church rag of which you speak that uses that as its name?
There is Protestant sensibility and Catholic sensibility here. While it may be disappointing to some that it is not unilaterally Trad-Catholic, I hardly think it is the bastion of Cromwellism that you paint it as.
And who on earth has ever argued that England’s ASCENT started after the 1930′s? Those “losing all the colonies and being devastated in WWII” things really helped out the prestige of the Empire, didn’t they?
December 14th, 2010 | 1:01 pm
Joe –
I’m not surprised that the standard of living of some people, in a relatively good place 400 years ago was higher than of people who live in the modern age in some of the worst places on Earth, no.
Now, if you had evidence that most people 400 years ago were better off than most today, or something like that – that would be surprising. By a lot of measures – especially violence – that’s not the case, though: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
December 14th, 2010 | 2:13 pm
“You don’t find it interesting that the standard of living of people 400 years ago was higher than of people who live in the modern age?”
Well, Joe, I do! So maybe I’m the only one who found this post worthwhile, but it does seem interesting to me to note that pre-industrial life in well-off places could still be better than life in parts of our word after industrialization has rendered so many of us fabulously wealthy.
It’s an indication of how poorly-distributed the benefits of technological advancement have been over the past 400 years. So we can speak of the “industrial age” or the “information age,” but we should realize that only some parts of the world are actually in these ages. Other parts are even worse off than our ancestors were back on the eve of the plague.
December 14th, 2010 | 6:10 pm
Ethan C. –
A gas at a particular temperature doesn’t have all the molecules at that temperature. Some are bouncing around slowly, some much faster. (See: Maxwell’s Demon.) If you look at the energy distribution, it forms a bell curve. The peak of the bell curve, the average, is (more or less) what we call the ‘temperature’. (The area under the curve, more or less, measures the total energy. More gas at the same temperature has more energy – same shape, sort of, but bigger.)
Heat it up, the peak shifts. The high end of the curve moves further up. But there are still molecules of gas moving slowly in there.
Perhaps it would be better to model progress in terms of total area under the curve, and where the peak has made it to. We have more people alive these days – directly thanks to technology providing more food and better distribution, with some contributions from sanitation and such – and a much higher average peak and an absurdly high “high-end”.
The wealth could and should be distributed far more equitably, of course, and there’s plenty of progress to be made there. Of course, even Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you…”
December 17th, 2010 | 4:33 am
[...] HT:Joe Carter [...]
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