According to my Grandmother Florence Richardson Usher Lord, my Great-Great Uncle Abbott Payson Usher back in The Day used to teach—very boringly, she said—(1) Middle Ages, (2) Commercial Revolution, (3) Industrial Revolution, (4) Age of Modern Science, with growth accelerations in each of the four: Dietz Vollrath: Sustained growth and the increase in work hours: "Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf... labor contract terms in England over several centuries... annual labor contracts starting seeing sustained growth in their value around 1650 or so, far sooner than the day wages indicated...
...This pushes back the origin of economic growth to well before the actual technological IR, and this also matches the data on GDP per capita developed by Broadberry, Campbell, Klein, Overton, and van Leeuwen in British Economic Growth, 1270-1870. One thing that I didn’t address... was whether the data on annual contracts (and on GDP per capita) indicate a rise in living standards.... What little evidence we do have on actual hours worked does seem to indicate that they increased a lot in the period around the actual Industrial Revolution.... We might assume that those workers on annual contracts, if they were part of the same labor market, would also have seen their hours rise, and hence their annual income growth was due to more work time as well.... The... reason for the rise in work hours. If they were physically coerced, then for sure you’d say that the growth in per worker annual contracts or GDP didn’t represent a rise in living standards. But on the assumption that the extra hours were not coerced, then we need to think hard about the labor supply decision.... Mark Koyama... work[s] through various ways in which work hours might rise, the implication for living standards, and how these relate to different stories about economic growth. We can see which might make sense in the English case....
Jan de Vries['s] “Industrious Revolution”.... Some consumption is time-intense (e.g. Netflix) in that it requires a little of your money, but a lot of your time to consume it. Some consumption is good-intense (e.g. clothes) which requires a lot of your money, but very little of your time.... If time-intense consumption is cheap, then you’ll tend to buy lots of it, and that means you’ll work very little.... England prior to 1650 was a world in which time-intense consumption was cheap. Workers had little need to work more hours, because why bother? What were you going to purchase with that extra income?... But around the middle of the 17th century, in line with de Vries’ argument, new good-intense consumption goods became available, like sugar and tea. So people shifted their consumption towards these things, which did not require much time to enjoy, but did require you to purchase something. So putting more labor into the market made sense. Similarly, the price of textiles was falling at this time (yes, prior to the IR). People shifted from the time-intense activity of making ones own clothes, towards the good-intense purchase of ready-made clothing....
Let’s say that we buy the story of the Industrious Revolution, and buy that the onset of growth in annual labor contracts and GDP per capita starting in 1650 represented a real gain in living standards. One interesting implication of this is that the origin of sustained growth was associated, in large part, with the expansion of trade.... What is a fascinating question is how important trade was in sustaining sustained growth.... You could argue that the technological Industrial Revolution of the late 1700’s and early 1800’s was necessary to keep sustained growth going after trade got things started, and that technological innovation is still necessary for growth to continue indefinitely. But you could also argue that without trade creating growth to begin with, there never would have been an incentive to make those technological changes in the first place.... Did the Industrious Revolution trigger the Industrial Revolution?...
#noted #economichistory #berkeley
