Future Research

The various quantitative measures demonstrated above do not, in a convincing way, refute the traditional idea of a substantial improvement in the standard of living for most inhabitants after 1775, but neither can they be used to confirm this assertion, since several of the measures are either ill-suited for the purpose or are taken from imperfect sources.

If further quantitative research is to be made, it will be necessary to include other variables and to use more direct measures of the harvest result than the rye prices provided.

Only preliminary results of such analyses are at present available, but they indicate that the years with serious undernourishment of large parts of the population, which were frequent among the years with high mortality rates early in the eighteenth century, gradually became more rare. After 1775, it was only in 1786 and to some extent in 1787 that, for the last time in Danish history, there seems to be a clear connection between two consecutive bad harvests in 1785 and 1786 and a corresponding peak on the mortality curve (Johansen 2002).

If further and more penetrating research can confirm these results, then the traditional understanding of the development of the Danish standard of living seems to be the right one. Living standards were improving from 1775 onwards, and to such an extent that the frequently occurring crises of the previous centuries no longer prevailed.