Poor nations aren't going to be thrilled about a new paper showing that even peasants under the feudal system had a better standard of living than they had. Dismal, indeed.
Not what you expect? The "bare bones subsistence" experience of people in many of today's poor countries is only made worse because a new calibration by economists claims that medieval England was more prosperous than previously believed - an average income double the average per capita income of the world's poorest nations today, they now contend.
$400 in annual income (using 1990 US dollars) is commonly considered the threshold of "bare bones subsistence" and is believed to be the average income in England in the middle ages but the economists now say English per capita incomes were actually $1,000 annually.
A better economy and we get to kill dragons? Where do I sign up to be medieval lord?? Oh wait, there weren't a lot of those.
The Black Death might be the blip ruining the average, right? In How The Bubonic Plague Made Europe Great I showed that it was a terrific boon for working people and was a spur in technology (agriculture, the engine of Europe) that made them world leaders for centuries.
Not so, they say. Even prior to 1348/49, they now say the per capita incomes in England was more than $800 in 1990 dollars - which means other European countries also had standards of living above $400.
Being a feudal peasant was actually pretty good then if their numbers are accurate, though if economists were around they likely said it was terrible.
Let's compare that to the average income of some poor nations today, in 1990 dollars:
Zaire $249
Sierra Leone $686
Haiti at $686
Chad $706
Zimbabwe $779
Afghanistan $869
Afghanistan will continue to go up due to American involvement - as economists like to note, Japan and Germany both have their economies today because of American occupation and rebuilding - but other countries that are run by warlords aren't going to be improving much. A heavy government, like feudal England or any other dictatorship with high tax rates and onerous social quality, is not an economic policy for modern prosperity.
University of Warwick economist Professor Stephen Broadberry, who led the research, said, "Our work sheds new light on England's economic past, revealing that per capita incomes in medieval England were substantially higher than the 'bare bones subsistence' levels experienced by people living in poor countries in our modern world. The majority of the British population in medieval times could afford to consume what we call a "respectability basket" of consumer goods that allowed for occasional luxuries. By the late Middle Ages, the English people were in a position to afford a varied diet including meat, dairy produce and ale, as well as the less highly processed grain products that comprised the bulk of the 'bare bones subsistence' diet."
And Broadberry recognizes taking a snapshot of today and comparing it to huge swaths of time is not really valid - there is no real way to know distribution of income then but we can at least model the distribution of income in some of the poorer countries run by murdering savages running some of the poorer countries today.
"Of course this paper focuses only on average per capita incomes. We also need to have a better understanding of the distribution of income in medieval England, as there will have been some people living at bare bones subsistence, and at times this proportion could have been quite substantial. We are now beginning research to construct social tables which will also reveal the distribution of income for some key benchmark years in that period.
"The research provides the first annual estimates of GDP for England between 1270 and 1700 and for Great Britain between 1700 and 1870. Far more data are available for the pre-1870 period than is widely realised. Britain after the Norman conquest was a literate and numerate society that generated substantial written records, many of which have survived. As a result, the research was aided by a wide variety of records – among them manorial records, tithes, farming records, and probate records."
He also echoes what I mentioned in How The Bubonic Plague Made Europe Great, that the Industrial Revolution can be traced to the prosperity resulting from the Bubonic Plague, including the wealth and culture that resulted from higher incomes, resulting in books and learning.
"Our research shows that the path to the Industrial Revolution began far earlier than commonly has been understood. A widely held view of economic history suggests that the Industrial Revolution of 1800 suddenly took off, in the wake of centuries without sustained economic growth or appreciable improvements in living standards in England from the days of the hunter-gatherer. By contrast, we find that the Industrial Revolution did not come out of the blue. Rather, it was the culmination of a long period of economic development stretching back as far as the late medieval period."
That's not to say we want to introduce Yersinia pestis into more poor nations. The solution is not fewer people, it is instead fewer dictatorships.
Paper: Stephen Broadberry, Bruce Campbell, Alexander Klein, Mark Overton, Bas van Leeuwen, 'British Economic Growth, 1270-1870', published by University of Warwick’s Centre on Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)
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