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T
he Dire
Absolute
Poverty of
the Globe
in
1870
J. Bradford DeLong
U.C. Berkeley
,
NBER
, and WCEG
March 18, 2019
OUTTAKE
7,354 words
<
https://www.icloud.com/pages/0-ZwSIf-
ES3dfIBtF_dW_DBmQ
>
John Ball (1381):
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our
bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men.
For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would
have appointed who should be bond, and who free.
And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come,
appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke
of bondage, and recover liberty…
1
You need to understand three things to grasp the state of the world
economy in 1870: that the drive to make love is one of the very strongest
of all human drives, that living standards were what we would regard as
very low for the bulk of humanity in the long trek between the invention
of agriculture
and
1870, and that the rate of technological progress back
before 1870 was glacial, at best.
1: Children
The fi rst thing you need to understand is that one of the strongest human
drives of all is the drive to make love. Before the coming of abundant and
relatively reliable means of artifi cial birth control at the end of the
nineteenth century, making love is followed almost invariably if not
immediately by children—over a lifetime, lots of children. And once
humans have children that they survive and flourish becomes the most
important thing for almost every parent.
In the pre-industrial agrarian-age
past, the
survival and flourishing of your children
was
the most important
thing for two reasons. The fi rst reason
was
that you love
d
them almost as
much as and in some cases more than yourself. Recall Hektor’s prayer for
his son Astyanax (a prayer that Hera and Athene made sure that Zeus did
not grant):
Zeus, grant that this my child may be, like me, fi rst among the Trojans.
Let him be not less excellent in strength. Let him rule Ilius with his
might. And may the people say of him as he comes home from battle:
“He is far better than his father!”
…
The second reason is that you
knew
that if you survive
d
into your old age
you
would
need someone around to help take care of you. The only people
likely to be willing to take care of you
would be
your descendants. And
with infant and child mortality rates of 50
%
or more
and life expectancies
of
30
years
or fewer
, lots of pregnancies
were
the only way to be
reasonably sure that you will have a still-living child when you go blind
and toothless.
2
Thus human populations—back before widespread female literacy
enlarged the options open to women, back before the fall in infant
mortality created the expectation that your children would survive to grow
up, back before widespread artifi cial birth control allowed women to have
the number of children they wanted and not more—tended to grow until
something stopped them.
2: Pre-Industrial Living Standards
The second thing you need to understand is that living standards were
what we would regard as very low for the bulk of humanity throughout the
long trek between the invention of agriculture around 8000 B.C. and 1870.
2.1: Hunting and Gathering
For a moment go back to ten thousand years ago, on the eve of the
invention of agriculture, back when hunter-gatherers inhabited the world.
Biomedically all of our hunter-gatherer ancestors appear to have been
about as healthy as we in the modern world are through early middle age
—if they survived to early middle age, that is, for life expectancy at birth
was twenty-fi ve on a generous estimate. The average adult height of
mesolithic—i.e., the period that ended 10,000 years ago—hunter-gatherers
appears to have been about 5’8” for men and 5’5” for women, perhaps a
hair less than average adult height in the rich postindustrial economies and
a hair more than average adult height in the world as a whole is today. Our
hunter-gatherer ancestors were, plausibly, better-nourished than we are
today: even in the richest countries today diets are tilted toward high-
caloric density carbohydrates—rice, wheat, corn, and potatoes—relative to
nutritional requirements.
Contemporary hunter-gatherers appear to work less than the rest of us do
today—spending, according to Marshall Sahlins’s survey of the
anthropological literature, about 15 hours per week gathering food and
about another fi fteen hours a week on everything we could call “work,”
3
including much of what in the postindustrial economies of today takes the
form of in-home production. They seem to have leisured societies. As
Jared Diamond quotes one of Botswana’s !Kung: “Why should we [work
harder at agriculture], when there are so many mongongo nuts in the
world?"
1
As a hunter-gatherer you lived a well-nourished, physically-strenuous life
that kept you fi t, and was at least moderately interesting in the day-to-day
puzzles that you had to solve. Hunter-gatherers avoided the mind-numbing
boredom of doing the same thing over and over again to the next row of
the same crop, what Karl Marx called the “idiocy of rural life.” But there
was a downside. Hunter-gatherer nutritional standards were adequate and
diets were varied in large part because population densities were low and
foraging territories relatively large. Population densities were low because
mortality was ferocious. You got to watch your friends die, your spouse
die, your comrades die, worst of all a large fraction of your children die,
and then you died at a relatively young age.
How ferocious was mortality? A pre-industrial nutritionally-unstressed
human population with access to the technologies of settlement—building
walls, roofs, and chimneys and weaving and sewing clothes—will roughly
double in population every twenty-fi ve years. That is what the British
settlers in America did in the generations after they hit the coast from
Georgia to Maine. But human hunter-gatherer populations before
agriculture grew from perhaps a hundred thousand people fi fty-thousand
years ago to perhaps 5 million people ten-thousand years ago. That is a
rate of increase of 0.01
%
per year: each generation sees not twice as many
people as its parent generation, but rather only a quarter of a percent more
—one extra person for each 400.
And even though life was not that of boring routinized repetitive labor it
was not what we would call comfortable: you spent a not-small part of
your life hungry, cold (or too hot), or wet.
4
1
Jared Diamond (1987), “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”,
Discover
Now jump forward again to 1870. How did living standards in 1870
compare to those ten thousand years ago?
2
.2: From 10000 B.C. to 1870
A reasonable view of what we think of as “material well-being” would
start out by classifying basic human needs and desires as sixfold: to watch
your grandchildren (or your great-nieces and nephews or your protégés)
grow up, to have enough food that you are not too hungry, to have enough
clothing that you are not too cold, to have enough shelter that you are not
too wet, to have enough conceptual puzzles and diversions that you are not
too bored, and to have enough status that you can gloat at the envy of
others (at least in private). By that yardstick we in the world economy’s
core today rank ahead of our hunter-gatherer ancestors on fi ve of these six
dimensions. (The sixth—relative status—is, alas!, conserved: you cannot
generate it from some without taking it away from others, and so there we
are stuck at an equal average level.) But back in 1870 people (with the
exception once again of the literate upper classes) by and large did not do
so. The upper classes of 1870 were certainly more comfortable and
probably led richer and more interesting lives than the Clan of the Cave
Bear did. But the illiterate peasants of the world in 1870 probably did not
do so
First of all, people in 1870 had no greater life expectancy than people in
8000 BC. Life was nasty—perhaps even nastier in terms of mortality risk
than among hunter-gatherers. Infant and adult mortality in agricultural and
commercial societies is no lower than in hunter-gatherer ones. Mortality
may well be higher for adults, because plagues and famines like dense
human populations and bacteria do not care if their rapid growth kills their
hosts as long as that happens only after they have found a new host to
jump to. Denser human populations are much more vulnerable to plagues
than scattered hunter-gatherer populations. And denser populations are
denser because they are exploiting the staple grain crops on a large scale.
Thus such populations are terribly vulnerable to famine, either through
5
blight or through weather—too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry—
adverse to the growth of whatever the staple happens to be
Second, in agricultural and commercial societies people’s lives were
brutish. An agricultural cereal-heavy diet does not contain enough iron to
avoid anemia. It does not contain enough calcium to avoid tooth loss and
bone weakness. Even in Berkeley, California, we today eat many, many
cheap calories from staple carbohydrates. We suffer nutritional defi cits and
imbalances as a result. This was much more the case in the long valley
between 8000 BC and 1870. Rome’s legions were paid in bread and a little
salt—that’s what “salary” means. Add to this whatever meat they could
fi nd and whatever greens and seasonings they could gather, and you had
the diet of the legionaries, collectively at least the most powerful group of
men of their age. They were highly-skilled practitioners of violence. They
were mean. They were also short. And they were, by what we would
regard as early middle age, largely toothless.
Have we mentioned endemic hookworm, tapeworm, and other parasites
yet? Or that agricultural and commercial labor likely involves heavy
lifting-and-carrying labor that damages your spine? Or that the relatively
high population densities create greater vulnerability to infectious diseases
that debilitate even when they do not kill?
Third, in 1870 agricultural and commercial societies people were short.
Average adult male heights of 5’2” (and adult female heights averaging
4’10”) appear to have been the rule for humanity once we started to farm.
This indicates extraordinary malnutrition by our standards. If my wife and
I had fed our boy and girl a diet to produce adult heights of 5’2” and 4’10”
respectively, Contra Costa Child and Protective Services would have long
since came and taken my children away, and I would never have seen
them again.
2.3: Real Wages to 1870
Robert Allen and his coauthors have compiled the scanty information we
have on the wages of unskilled laborers across the big cities of Eurasia
6
from 1350 to 1900, and plotted their resulting fi ndings in Figure 7.1. The
wages are real wages: a value of one means that an adult male laborer
employed full time, full year could earn just enough to keep his family of
six or so at biological subsistence—1940 calories per adult male per day,
most of it on the cheapest carbohydrate sold in that city, with only tiny
amounts spent on “luxuries” (rent, wood for burning, oil, and meat). The
workers of London and Amsterdam on these budgets are eating oatmeal
two meals a day, the workers of Vienna are eating rye, the workers of
Delhi are eating millet, the workers of Beijing are eating sorghum, and the
workers of Florence are eating polenta over and over again.
Figure 1: Subsistence Ratios for Unskilled Urban Eurasian
Laborers, 1350-1900
Source:
Robert Allen
et al.
(2009).
There are three subtleties of interpretation involved in looking at this
graph. The fi rst is that biological subsistence is not sociological
7
subsistence. The workers of London in 1600 did not spend 1/3 of their
income on “necessities” and have two-thirds left over for luxuries, for they
did not want to eat oatmeal two meals a day and in fact did not eat oatmeal
two meals a day. Oats were, as famously defi ned by Samuel Johnson, “a
grain that in England is fed to horses and in Scotland is fed to men.” The
Scots had a reply—“That is the reason that England breeds such fi ne
horses, and Scotland breeds such fi ne men.” But an English laborer of
1600 would have been as humiliated to be forced by penury to eat like a
Scotsman—oatmeal—as a Republican member of the U.S. House of
Representatives in 2003 would have been humiliated to be forced to eat
French fries.
The second is that these wage level calculations assume that you could
have found work all the time, which seasonal labor requirement patterns
and commercial and political disruptions made chancy at best.
The third is that these are the wages that were paid to urban workers hired
for the day. These are the wages of those whose connections with their
employers were overwhelmingly short-term cash-nexus connections. Such
people are not in general representative of society as a whole even today,
and were defi nitely not in general representative back in the past. In
rapidly-growing cities like fourteenth-century Florence, fi fteenth-century
Vienna, sixteenth-century Amsterdam, seventeenth-century Delhi, or
eighteenth-century London, the day laborers were people from the
countryside pulled into the city by the chance to make extra bucks who
sell their labor-power to employers who see opportunity and don’t have
enough in the way of serfs or apprentices or liegemen to handle the
workload. In cities like nineteenth-century Delhi, Beijing, or Florence, the
urban day laborers were people who have been pushed out of the
countryside by the lack of land or a place to live and have washed up on
the shores of the city to live by their wits or starve. Italy in 1850 was not a
country in which the average person subsisted on 1600 calories of polenta
per adult male equivalent per day.
That said, the pattern that Allen
et al.
paint is clear and convincing. They
pick up the story in the aftermath of the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth
8
century—the bubonic plague. With the population of Europe down by
between a quarter and a half from its early fourteenth-century medieval
high, larger farm sizes produced an agricultural bonanza for peasants who
could (a) produce more and (b) bargain for lower feudal rents from an Earl
of Pembroke desperate to have somebody working the land to pay
something. Urban plague mortality had been highest. City employers were
thus desperate to pay through the nose, and urban unskilled day laborers
typically earned three times the biological “subsistence” family wage.
By 1600, however, Allen
et al.
fi nd that urban unskilled day-laborer real
wages are much lower. Italy and Austria have fi lled up with people, farm
sizes are smaller, and the shift of trade from the Mediterranean to the
Atlantic has advantaged Amsterdam and London at the expense of
Florence. Neither Florence nor Vienna was anymore a good place to be an
unskilled day laborer and try to raise a family. Allen
et al.
do, however,
pick up early-Moghul Delhi, which then looked a lot like London: a
rapidly-growing capital city in a rich agricultural region that benefi ted
from the global trade-war-and-conquest boom set off by the invention of
the sea-going caravel and the voyages of Christopher Colombus and Vasco
da Gama. And by the eighteenth century Delhi has joined Florence,
Vienna—and mid-Qing Beijing—as places where the lot of a masterless
man trying to raise a family was very bad indeed. And we think that this
roughly tracks what was going on in the countryside as well: people were
still on net moving from the countryside to Florence, Vienna, Delhi, and
Beijing, which means that the lot of a youngest son or of someone whose
lineage had lost out in a dispute over land ownership out in the
countryside was even worse.
London and Amsterdam are the only cities in Allen
et al.
’s dataset that
managed to avoid the dismal Malthusian fate of near-starvation and
escaped into mere dire poverty in the long post-Black Death Malthusian
global population expansion from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century.
Their workers did not have to subsist on oatmeal year-in year-out (or
millet, or sorghum, or polenta) but due to the commercial-revolution
expansion of the world trading economy plus a little successful
imperialism could eat bread instead of oatmeal, buy beef and beer on a
9
regular basis, wear better clothes, purchase stimulants like sugar and tea,
and even—after the Protestant Reformation which made literacy a duty
because reading the Bible was storing up treasure in heaven—books.
3: Why then the Transition to Agriculture?
Comparing the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers ten thousand years ago to that
of illiterate peasant farmers a hundred and fi fty years ago raises an obvious
question: why would people ever become farmers? Jared Diamond has
called the invention of agriculture “The Worst Mistake in the History of
the Human Race.” He claims that we should—even in the United States,
even today— envy our hunter-gatherer ancestors. I don’t buy this
hyperbole: I do not, or at least I think we should not, envy them. (He does
not either: Full Professors of Physiology at UCLA and of Economics at
U.C. Berkeley have chosen a life far, far removed from that of our
ancestors.) gathering miner’s lettuce by t (?). But there is an important
kernel of truth here that we should crack the shell to expose. Almost all of
our agricultural and commercial-era ancestors between 8000 BC and 1870
or later did have good reason to envy our common pre-industrial
ancestors. They had descended into a deep valley of dearth.
We understand why the transition from hunting and gathering to pre-
industrial agriculture is good for those at the top of the pyramid. But why
do those not at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid go along?
3.1: The First Generations to Farm
Most important, of course, is that the fi rst generation to farm—or to adopt
any of the many subsequent agricultural productivity-multiplying
innovations—lives the life of Reilly, off the fat of the land. If you can
fi gure out how to do it, it is good for you and your children and your
chldren’s children to farm. But a well-fed and well-nourished population
multiplies. So farming population densities explode far beyond hunter-
gatherer densities.
10
