Was there an ‘Industrious Revolution' before the Industrial Revolution? An Empirical Exercise for England, c. 1300-1830

TY - UNPB

T1 - Was there an ‘Industrious Revolution' before the Industrial Revolution?

T2 - An Empirical Exercise for England, c. 1300-1830

AU - Allen, Robert C.

AU - Weisdorf, Jacob Louis

N1 - JEL classification: J22, J43, N30

PY - 2010

Y1 - 2010

N2 - It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious' revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket of basic consumption goods and compute the working year of rural and urban day labourers required to achieve that. By comparing with independent estimates of the actual working year, we find two ‘industrious' revolutions among rural workers; both, however, are attributable to economic hardship, and we detect no signs of a consumer revolution. For urban labourers, by contrast, a growing gap between their actual working year and the work  required to buy the basket provides great scope for a consumer revolution.

AB - It is conventionally assumed that the pre-modern working year was fixed and that consumption varied with changes in wages and prices. This is challenged by the twin theories of the ‘industrious' revolution and the consumer revolution, positing a longer working year as people earned surplus money to buy novel goods. In this study, we turn the conventional view on its head, fixing consumption rather than labour input. Specifically, we use a basket of basic consumption goods and compute the working year of rural and urban day labourers required to achieve that. By comparing with independent estimates of the actual working year, we find two ‘industrious' revolutions among rural workers; both, however, are attributable to economic hardship, and we detect no signs of a consumer revolution. For urban labourers, by contrast, a growing gap between their actual working year and the work  required to buy the basket provides great scope for a consumer revolution.

KW - Faculty of Social Sciences

KW - arbejdsudbud

KW - consumer Revolution

KW - cost-of-living index

KW - day wages

KW - labor supply

KW - labour supply

KW - standard of living

M3 - Working paper

BT - Was there an ‘Industrious Revolution' before the Industrial Revolution?

PB - Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

ER -