Econ 210a: The industrial revolution in the Dover Circle; the fraught concept of "the West"; Allen on coal, wages, steam, & machinery; Nicholas & Steckel on the shortening of England's poor after 1785
Brad: Do you take a view on the contention by Humphries, Stephenson and others that Bob Allen's high wage hypothesis fails because because the data it's based on were marked up payments to contractors and not net payments to the workers themselves?
I wouldn't say "fails"—wages were high, but not as high as Allen's numbers say, I think. And energy prices were low. And four centuries of social learning had created a coal-handling early engineering expertise...
Also, I hope you'll tell your students that there is no a priori reason for life expectancy to be on the vertical axis and per capita income on the horizontal one. Indoctrination has its uses. This is not one of them. Likewise for demand curves.
John Komlos has more on the Oliver Twists of the time in "On English Pygmies and giants: the physical stature of English youth in the late 18th and early 19th centuries."
Brad: Do you take a view on the contention by Humphries, Stephenson and others that Bob Allen's high wage hypothesis fails because because the data it's based on were marked up payments to contractors and not net payments to the workers themselves?
I wouldn't say "fails"—wages were high, but not as high as Allen's numbers say, I think. And energy prices were low. And four centuries of social learning had created a coal-handling early engineering expertise...
Also, I hope you'll tell your students that there is no a priori reason for life expectancy to be on the vertical axis and per capita income on the horizontal one. Indoctrination has its uses. This is not one of them. Likewise for demand curves.
John Komlos has more on the Oliver Twists of the time in "On English Pygmies and giants: the physical stature of English youth in the late 18th and early 19th centuries."