> Mason wage was fairly representative of other “middle class” citizens (merchants, clerks, craftsmen, etc).
Very interesting analysis overall, but my biggest nitpick is that it's easy to call this group middle class, but it's so much smaller of a percentage of the population than we might be used to today. For roughly every 20 farmers, there may have been 1-2 people who were literally anything else. That's craftsmen, nobles, clergy, etc.
What does the proportion of the population have to do with whether it's truly middle-class? Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between poverty and truly rich?
> Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between poverty and truly rich?
No. Traditionally the middle class was at least as rich as the upper class. What made them a "middle class" was that they weren't highborn, like the upper classes, but they also weren't poor, like the lower classes.
This is what middle class has basically always referred to until people (mostly Americans) began using it to refer to people who are at like the 50%ile.
Yes, the word is used very differently in the UK vs. the US. In the UK "middle class" means wealthier than average, a professional (manager, doctor, lawyer, professor, etc), what we used to call a "yuppie", while your average laborer is "working class". In the US almost everyone but the poor and the very well off are called middle class.
20 people were farmers in that they farmed, but they also did a huge other number of things that we today wouldn't attribute to farmers. The built houses/bridges. They were woodcutters. And a good number of them were also part-time soldiers, at lease during fighting season. So while most people did farm, that doesnt mean than every other job was rare. Those other jobs were done by the farmers when they weren't farming.
"Middle class" historically did not mean middle income. Middle class was literally that, people who were of the class that sat between serfs/peasants and nobility. That is, guild master craftsmen (not the apprentices and worker bees), merchants, bankers, educated clerks and the like. That is, what we today would consider "professionals".
Even more importantly, these farmers were, for the most part, slaves. The article is describing a society where for every one "middle class person" just like us, there were 20 slaves working full time to support him. It is then comparing the living standard of that one person surviving off essentially 20 slaves to the living standard of the average person today in a society with no slaves.
Of course, as long as this is emphasized then the article really does do a good job of making it clear how much things have improved for everyone on Earth in the last 500 years.
It's hard to find much substantial or practical difference between a serf and a slave, but to add some nuance a serf definitely had some fairly substantial rights in England, at least theoretically that a slave in the modern sense does not.
And it might be a subtle distinction in practice, but a serf's labor was what was owned by their lord, not their persons.
There's a caveat to the rosy picture this article seems to paint of the past. In the 14th century, the black death and The Great Famine Killed a huge number of people but also is believed to have raised the standard of living for lower class survivors (I wonder if this was an inspiration for Thanos' plan).
The article briefly mentions the plague but doesn't really seem to address that this event strongly changed the economic conditions of Europe for 150 years. Coincidentally, that 150 years heavily overlaps with the period of analysis for this article.
It completely changed the balance of power between landholders and peasants. Peasants started being able to actually negotiate on wages (to a degree that was revolutionary at the time), which also drove a market for capital and artisan goods. The merchant class exploded.
Landlords also started dumping money into development of labor-saving tools, which happens when most of your supply of free bonded labor suddenly dies off.
Standards of living rose because the scarcity of labor rose relative to the scarcity of land.
Peasants had to pay dearly to aristocrats for the ability to use land to farm on, often somewhere close to 100% of their surplus production. Number of peasants going down while the amount of arable land stayed the same led to peasants being able to drive a better bargain and keep more of their surplus.
Remember that the farmers were tied to the land by medieval relationships.
After the labor disruption of the plague, and because the demand for their labor greatly increased, farmers were better able to negotiate the relationship for better personal outcomes, including wages.
Being able to leave their current landed relationship and seek better prospects elsewhere was probably the greatest of gains.
I think it's more that, if you need multiple inputs for your output, you'll pay more for the input that's in shortest supply.
I'm a noble. I own this land. I have peasants who work the land, who grow crops for me. The limiting factor on my wealth is how much land I have.
Now the plague comes, and a bunch of peasants die. I have the same land, but my income goes down because there are fewer peasants working it. The limiting factor on my wealth is now the number of peasants I have working my land. So, rationally, I'll pay more for peasants than I would before.
When a huge chunk of the productive people are dead the ones who aren't have much more leverage to push back on the usurious mill fee, market fee, ferry/bridge fee, etc. etc. etc. and suddenly your average peasant (farmer) suddenly has a lot smaller cut of their productivity being taken by the local lords and whatnot. That frees them to farm slightly less and do all sorts of other productive things (raise animals, barter labor with each other, etc, etc) more and increase their standard of living.
The lump of labor fallacy is actually valid in a Malthusian society like medieval England; adding people didn't grow the economy, it just meant about the same amount of work in the end because they had to feed themselves.
Because it was a zero-sum economy and they didn't have things like nursing homes. Back in premodern times mass death was the biggest thing that would always jolt the economy. What happened after the black death and the fall of Constantinople? The Renaissance.
As I understand it the the strength of medieval beer was quite weak (barely intoxicating) and was trusted to be from clean water while regular water from the well might not be.
Perhaps this is a little like the way that many people who have ancestry / family that come from places without clean water will routinely order a "coke with no ice".
This sin't really true. First, there was decent drinking water in most towns and villages in medieval Europe. Most towns had "masters of conduit" and water carriers dedicated to the task. Second, we have brewers journals dating back some 500 years in England and further back in Germany. Beer is made by mashing or steeping grain in hot water and rinsing it out to produce wort, fermentable sugary/protein rich water. Historically this rinsing (sparging) would be done in 2 - 3 runnings with successively less sugar content in each. The 3rd running might produce small beer 1-3% ABV, but the first runnings could produce beer as strong as 10%, or more. sometimes the first and second runnings were combined and diluted. Much like today, beers of various strengths were available. Small beers were popular as a calorie rich energy drink for laborers, but they also had access to stronger drinks. One reason for making beer is the stable storage of surplus grain, and small beer has a very short shelf life.
Before mechanization farm work was in many ways less dangerous, with a few notable exceptions. To list only one example, you can easily drive a horse cart with a fairly strong buzz as it's slow moving and the horse is largely self guided.
Also, farm work comes in bursts. It's not like farmers were toiling away all day, every day in the fields. They'd work their asses off during a few weeks of the year for prep, plant, and harvest. But the rest of the time they needed to tend to animals and do various chores.
Even drunk people shouldn't have too much trouble weaving a wattle fence.
This is one of those things that has been really exaggerated. Medieval people were concerned with water quality and protecting wells, rivers, and other water sources from pollution/poisoning. Beer isn't really an efficient way to purify water either, the alcohol isn't strong enough to ensure it won't make you sick. Much like us though, medieval people didn't really like drinking plain water much, as well as beer barley water and various herbal teas were very popular.
My understanding from many of those claiming that the beer was safer than the water at the time don't make the claim on the basis of beer being alcoholic, but rather that the wort production earlier in the beer making process which involves heating/boiling the water used is what kills off many pathogens that might otherwise be present in the water.
This isn't to say that your other points are wrong... I'm not studied enough on the subject to say... just that the beer making process is more the point of those that make the beer-safer-than-water claim than is the alcohol content.
I was surprised to find that they give you a free glass of water with ice in the US restaurants. However, it's very awfully tasting "Chlorine Springs" ;) No wonder people tend to avoid tap water there.
Slightly tangential but since it appears near the start of the article:
As an American I recall being very surprised the first time I traveled to England and realized that “pence” is literally the same as “pennies” - just a different way of pluralizing it. As a kid I just thought it was some obscure division of numbers like “fortnight” or “score.”
I imagined it worked something like “four farthings to a pence and twelve pence to a pound” or something. :)
No I agree that sums it up well - I can't think of a sentence that would sound natural (as in, sounds like a native BrE speaker said it) and have the same meaning with either one or the other.
Are there any economists out there? How is it possible that inflation was basically 0 for more than 100 years? Does this imply that productivity and the money supply grew at exactly the rate (Which could imply neither grew at all, which seems implausible to me, but I also have no idea what I'm talking about.)
Edit: I just remembered they also mentioned the textile industry grew so it seems that there must be some productivity gains to be had over the period.
There was probably some significant debasement and other funny tricks by the rulers of the day to intentionally inflate (state) purchasing power, and obviously there was some inflation via gold/silver mining and trade from the East. These combined with the above probably netted out of the long time-span.
It's not like they had bitcoin or central banking policy. The West didn't even have paper currency during this era; they didn't have access to inflationary levers to pull.
Not an economist either, but lately I've been enjoying Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century", and he describes how England and France saw very little inflation for most of the 18th and 19th centuries. This monetary regime allowed a "society of rentiers" to prosper – wealthy individuals could live off the income from assets like government bonds indefinitely without needing to really work (lack of inflation meant that income wouldn't devalue over time).
The story changes in the 20th century of course – governments racked up huge debts from world wars and related crises but instead of paying them down gradually over a long time (as England did after the Napoleonic wars in the previous century), they inflated their way out ("euthanizing" much of the idle rentier class in the process).
Historical economics is pretty fascinating – studying the past in this way really makes it clear how exceptional of a time we are living in now.
Multiple reasons. Along with reasons given by other replies...
During that era, they did not have a monetary economy. It's hard for us to imagine, but most of the things produced by the economy were simply traded (bought/sold). Most food was produced and consumed by the farmers. Most buildings were erected/maintained by the inhabitants. Etc.
Most people were peasants and lived near subsistence level and a large fraction of their surplus was confiscated as rent (i.e. taxes) by the nobility. Most rent was "in-kind". That is, paid for in grain, pigs, and labor. Not to say that peasants didn't buy/sell things for coin, they most certainly did. But that was a minority of their economic activity.
Only the nobility and towns/cities had a monetary economy. But those were a small fraction of the total economy.
Second, there was very little per-capita economic growth during these eras. Barring notable exceptions like the plague and its aftermath. But what you do see is high volatility in prices. How is this possible in conjunction with the fact that most production was not even traded? Simple: prices are set at the margins.
Inflation as a concept didn't really mean much to most people of that era since most people were peasant farmers who didn't participate much in the monetary economy. And even in the cities, monetary wages were only a fraction of total compensation. For example, most servants got room & board as well. Apprentices too.
Long story short, the european middle ages was a very very different economy and many modern economic concepts are only very roughly analogous. Even legal concepts of ownership was sort of different back then.
> Does this imply that productivity and the money supply grew at exactly the rate
Yes, and that rate of growth was probably 0.
England wasn't yet a massive trading empire. And being a small island pretty far removed from the rest of Europe, it probably didn't have a lot of wealth flowing in or out of it. And there was a functional limit to the amount of land a contingent of people could work by hand. Being a small island, all of the workable land was already being worked, so there isn't going to be a long term growth in crop yield without mechanization.
It seems the economy reached an equilibrium and remained there for a century.
I don’t know why, but this makes me feel a bit optimistic about the future, at least in western societies. Our current worries about inflation, the degradation of the middle class, and stagnant wages seems to be more a product of moving to the Information Age, rather than inherently pet of our society; with long term reforms, these can be fixed.
But, it also suggests that problems like wealth inequality are here to stay, or least somewhat natural.
I think wealth inequality is fine; it's a sign of economic growth, which is naturally uneven. I object to wealth inequality on the order of ten billion times. That's not growth; that's strip mining.
I don't think it wise to presume that at all. It's little to do with wealth inequality. Especially not in the current mode. Money and wealth can both fairly readily be converted into substantial power. This is without mentioning the power laws that seem to be in place which tend towards winner take all scenarios, meaning there is a gross aggregation of power in fairly singular institutions. And when you resolve to look at the people running the institutions they're also the wealthy - this aspect is obvious, but the reality is that it yields individuals even more leverage over the system. And it's fair to assume they're working in concert, a la the invisible hand. I reckon this situates them several hundreds of orders of magnitude above their fellows.
What's worse is, by my divination at least: as a general rule, I don't find these people to be exceptional or necessarily well suited to wield such power. And I would also conjecture that the centralization of power in aspects of individual occurrence and institutions creates a behavioral uniformity, which I hypothesize necessarily leads to considerable instability ultimately creating more "too big to fail" situations which ultimately compromises the health of our polite society. And because of the immense leverage, I don't find it to be stepping out of bounds to say that it's entirely probable that our body politic is owned and operated through backroom auction of policy.
I'd also append that, from my experience, I've never seen debts factored into arguments regarding wealth disparities, but I do suppose it should be. Historically debt peonage was a considerable force. I think it would be interesting to look at the wealth distribution charts and seeing how it plays out when they traipse into the negative.
When the average person says "inflation" they mean gas prices have gone up, which is not caused by the money supply.
The last time people cared about inflation in the 70s it was caused by an oil crisis; this time in housing inflation it's a lack of supply.
Austrians constantly predict there will be extra bad hyperinflation in the US from the national debt; not only are they wrong but they caused the 2008 recession by being wrong.
A word used - by others, if not the parent - to argue for doing nothing. Currency isn't 'natural', nor literacy, nor the Information Age nor modern healthcare. E.coli is natural, however. We should not be satisfied with natural.
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Very interesting analysis overall, but my biggest nitpick is that it's easy to call this group middle class, but it's so much smaller of a percentage of the population than we might be used to today. For roughly every 20 farmers, there may have been 1-2 people who were literally anything else. That's craftsmen, nobles, clergy, etc.
No. Traditionally the middle class was at least as rich as the upper class. What made them a "middle class" was that they weren't highborn, like the upper classes, but they also weren't poor, like the lower classes.
Of course, as long as this is emphasized then the article really does do a good job of making it clear how much things have improved for everyone on Earth in the last 500 years.
And it might be a subtle distinction in practice, but a serf's labor was what was owned by their lord, not their persons.
The article briefly mentions the plague but doesn't really seem to address that this event strongly changed the economic conditions of Europe for 150 years. Coincidentally, that 150 years heavily overlaps with the period of analysis for this article.
Landlords also started dumping money into development of labor-saving tools, which happens when most of your supply of free bonded labor suddenly dies off.
Pretty huge multi-faceted impacts.
Standards of living rose because the scarcity of labor rose relative to the scarcity of land.
Peasants had to pay dearly to aristocrats for the ability to use land to farm on, often somewhere close to 100% of their surplus production. Number of peasants going down while the amount of arable land stayed the same led to peasants being able to drive a better bargain and keep more of their surplus.
Being able to leave their current landed relationship and seek better prospects elsewhere was probably the greatest of gains.
Also, amount of capital per capita increases.
I'm a noble. I own this land. I have peasants who work the land, who grow crops for me. The limiting factor on my wealth is how much land I have.
Now the plague comes, and a bunch of peasants die. I have the same land, but my income goes down because there are fewer peasants working it. The limiting factor on my wealth is now the number of peasants I have working my land. So, rationally, I'll pay more for peasants than I would before.
When a huge chunk of the productive people are dead the ones who aren't have much more leverage to push back on the usurious mill fee, market fee, ferry/bridge fee, etc. etc. etc. and suddenly your average peasant (farmer) suddenly has a lot smaller cut of their productivity being taken by the local lords and whatnot. That frees them to farm slightly less and do all sorts of other productive things (raise animals, barter labor with each other, etc, etc) more and increase their standard of living.
Deleted Comment
Perhaps this is a little like the way that many people who have ancestry / family that come from places without clean water will routinely order a "coke with no ice".
Before mechanization farm work was in many ways less dangerous, with a few notable exceptions. To list only one example, you can easily drive a horse cart with a fairly strong buzz as it's slow moving and the horse is largely self guided.
Even drunk people shouldn't have too much trouble weaving a wattle fence.
This isn't to say that your other points are wrong... I'm not studied enough on the subject to say... just that the beer making process is more the point of those that make the beer-safer-than-water claim than is the alcohol content.
Beer was first and foremost a way of preserving calories and only secondarily for recreation.
I was careful what I drank until one night I was foolish and drank something with ice in it.
It got me the next day.
As an American I recall being very surprised the first time I traveled to England and realized that “pence” is literally the same as “pennies” - just a different way of pluralizing it. As a kid I just thought it was some obscure division of numbers like “fortnight” or “score.”
I imagined it worked something like “four farthings to a pence and twelve pence to a pound” or something. :)
Before the pound was decimalized, 12 pence were indeed a shilling, and 20 shillings a pound.
I’m not sure whether it’s just me.
Pennies means 1p coins, sometimes 2p coins too:
"Mum, I need sixty pence for the train, I've only got pennies and the machine doesn't take them."
"Pennies" without an amount means a small amount of money. "It's only pennies with the amount we use it."
(JK Rowling missed a trick. It should have been one bronze knut, two bronze knuts, and a price of four knets or something.)
"The crop price spike around 1320" is probably the Great Famine of 1315-1317, which killed approximately ten per cent of the population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%931...
But it could also be the famine of 1321.
Edit: I just remembered they also mentioned the textile industry grew so it seems that there must be some productivity gains to be had over the period.
- gold/silver standards of the time (disinflationary)
- currency in bullion or coinage of a relatively fixed qty (disinflationary)
- low credit supply & banking industry (not inflationary) - labor supply growth (deflationary)
- productivity growth (deflationary)
- war/crises (often deflationary)
There was probably some significant debasement and other funny tricks by the rulers of the day to intentionally inflate (state) purchasing power, and obviously there was some inflation via gold/silver mining and trade from the East. These combined with the above probably netted out of the long time-span.
It's not like they had bitcoin or central banking policy. The West didn't even have paper currency during this era; they didn't have access to inflationary levers to pull.
The story changes in the 20th century of course – governments racked up huge debts from world wars and related crises but instead of paying them down gradually over a long time (as England did after the Napoleonic wars in the previous century), they inflated their way out ("euthanizing" much of the idle rentier class in the process).
Historical economics is pretty fascinating – studying the past in this way really makes it clear how exceptional of a time we are living in now.
During that era, they did not have a monetary economy. It's hard for us to imagine, but most of the things produced by the economy were simply traded (bought/sold). Most food was produced and consumed by the farmers. Most buildings were erected/maintained by the inhabitants. Etc.
Most people were peasants and lived near subsistence level and a large fraction of their surplus was confiscated as rent (i.e. taxes) by the nobility. Most rent was "in-kind". That is, paid for in grain, pigs, and labor. Not to say that peasants didn't buy/sell things for coin, they most certainly did. But that was a minority of their economic activity.
Only the nobility and towns/cities had a monetary economy. But those were a small fraction of the total economy.
Second, there was very little per-capita economic growth during these eras. Barring notable exceptions like the plague and its aftermath. But what you do see is high volatility in prices. How is this possible in conjunction with the fact that most production was not even traded? Simple: prices are set at the margins.
Inflation as a concept didn't really mean much to most people of that era since most people were peasant farmers who didn't participate much in the monetary economy. And even in the cities, monetary wages were only a fraction of total compensation. For example, most servants got room & board as well. Apprentices too.
Long story short, the european middle ages was a very very different economy and many modern economic concepts are only very roughly analogous. Even legal concepts of ownership was sort of different back then.
Yes, and that rate of growth was probably 0.
England wasn't yet a massive trading empire. And being a small island pretty far removed from the rest of Europe, it probably didn't have a lot of wealth flowing in or out of it. And there was a functional limit to the amount of land a contingent of people could work by hand. Being a small island, all of the workable land was already being worked, so there isn't going to be a long term growth in crop yield without mechanization.
It seems the economy reached an equilibrium and remained there for a century.
Dead Comment
That they lived much better or more fulfilling lives than us.
"Having a “beer break” was a Medieval version of contemporary lunch."
But, it also suggests that problems like wealth inequality are here to stay, or least somewhat natural.
What's worse is, by my divination at least: as a general rule, I don't find these people to be exceptional or necessarily well suited to wield such power. And I would also conjecture that the centralization of power in aspects of individual occurrence and institutions creates a behavioral uniformity, which I hypothesize necessarily leads to considerable instability ultimately creating more "too big to fail" situations which ultimately compromises the health of our polite society. And because of the immense leverage, I don't find it to be stepping out of bounds to say that it's entirely probable that our body politic is owned and operated through backroom auction of policy.
I'd also append that, from my experience, I've never seen debts factored into arguments regarding wealth disparities, but I do suppose it should be. Historically debt peonage was a considerable force. I think it would be interesting to look at the wealth distribution charts and seeing how it plays out when they traipse into the negative.
The last time people cared about inflation in the 70s it was caused by an oil crisis; this time in housing inflation it's a lack of supply.
Austrians constantly predict there will be extra bad hyperinflation in the US from the national debt; not only are they wrong but they caused the 2008 recession by being wrong.
A word used - by others, if not the parent - to argue for doing nothing. Currency isn't 'natural', nor literacy, nor the Information Age nor modern healthcare. E.coli is natural, however. We should not be satisfied with natural.