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Urban Disamenities, Dark Satanic Mills, and the British Standard of Living Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Jeffrey G. Williamson
Jeffrey G. Williamson
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin—Madison, Madison, WI 53706
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Abstract

What were the economic costs of the disamenities that the British worker incurred when migrating to the city in the last century? How important were these costs in accounting for the higher nominal wages for unskilled work in the cities? How much of the rise in wages during the Industrial Revolution might therefore be spurious mismeasurement? This paper supplies some answers. Like the results on mid-twentieth-century growth by contemporary economists, the nineteenth-century estimates also suggest the disamenities' effects to be trivial.

Type
Papers Presented at the Fortieth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 75 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1981

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References

1 Nordhaus, William and Tobin, James, ‘Is Growth Obsolete?” in Economic Growth: Fifieth Anniversary Colloquioum V, National Bureau of Economic Research (New York, 1972), pp. 49–50.Google Scholar

2 A much longer version of this paper is available from the author upon request: Williamson, Jeffrey G., “Urban Disamenities, Dark Satanic Mills, and the British Standard of Living Debate,” Economic History Discussion Paper Series, University of Wisconsin, Madison (07 1980). All of this work is part of the British Inequality Since 1680 project in collaboration with Peter Lindert. The project has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (SOC76–80967 and SOC-7906869) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (RO-26772–78–19).Google Scholar

3 Board of Trade, “Cost of Living of the Working Class,” House of Commons, Accounts and Papers, vol. 107 (London, 1908).Google Scholar

4 As we shall see below, mortality rates appear to be excellent proxies for urban disamenities. Furthermore, the infant mortality rate is a far more effective index than the overall mortality rate, a point well appreciated long ago by the Registrar General (“Cost of Living of the Working Class,” p. lii). Farr, William, Buer, M.C., and other students of the problem thought that INFM was an excellent proxy for the quality of nineteenth-century urban life; INFM had far higher rural-urban variance than did death rates at other ages. In Health, Welfare and Population in the Early Days of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1926), p. 268, Buer tells us that from 1813 to 1830, INFM in the “six great towns” was 1.73 times the average for England and Wales. Over all ages, the figure was only 1.39 times that for England and Wales.Google Scholar

5 I cannot reconcile this evidence and that cited below for the 1815–1848 period with the following statement by Eric Hobsbawm: “General mortality rates…rose[from the 1810s] until the 1840s…[and the ] rise is said to have been due chiefly to higher infantile and youth mortality, especially in the towns …” See Hobsbawm, E. J., “The Standard of Living, 1790–1850,” in Taylor, A. J., ed., The Standard of Living in Britain in the Industrail Revolution (London 1975), pp. 67–68. Based on Rickman's old shaky data, nationwide mortality did drift upward over the period, but the rise was relatively minor, and in any case was fully consistent with improvements in urban mortality, given the very rapid rates of urbanization over the period.Google ScholarFarr, William, Vital Statistics (London, 1885), apparently understood the fallacy of composition a century ago far better than did Hobsbawm a couple of decades ago. Based on new analysis by the Cambridge Group, life expectancy rose from the mid-eighteenth century to 1831, stabilizing thereafter.Google Scholar See Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, forthcoming), ch. 6.Google Scholar

6 Buer, M.C., Health, Wealth and Population, pp. 3, 29–30, 31–34, 59–60, and the table on p. 267. Both Thomas Bateman and William Farr concur.Google Scholar

7 Farr, Vital Statistics, p. 195; Buer, Health, Wealth and Population, pp. 33–34.Google Scholar

8 As part of the British Inequality Since 1680 project, Peter Lindert and I have finished a paper that should shed new light (and fresh numbers) on this old chestnut. See Lindert, Peter H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., “English Workers' Living Standards During the Industrial Revolution: A New Look,” Economic History Discussion Paper Series, University of Wisconsin, Madison (09. 1980).Google Scholar