Human Capital as an Article of Consumption

A Mincerian approach (Mincer 1974) thus appears to provide quite a satisfactory way of analysing the growth and distribution of human capital in early modern Europe. To a great extent, human capital gave individuals a positive return on the resources expended to achieve it and they responded by acquiring it when the conditions warranted it.

A second implication of the situation depicted in the preceding section is that if this had been the whole story, then human capital would have no place in an enquiry into the standard of living, particularly one that was based on examining the stock of wealth of individuals over time. If it were found to be essentially like a producer good, such as tools, animals, or land, from which a stream of future earnings could be derived, and nothing else, it would no longer be an end in itself and therefore not an object of consumption, whether durable or not. In this case, it would be unsuitable as an indicator of consumption standards since the reason for which it was acquired was to produce more efficiently and/or to produce more. The question this poses is whether human capital could indeed have had any other functions besides. In other words, could it be considered in fact as an article of consumption to be included in the basket of standard of living goods? In this part of the chapter, we try to make a case for this possibility.

In fact, there is every reason to accept that reading and writing skills, for our purposes, can also be likened to a consumer durable that would be appropriate for inclusion in this basket.

a market-related activity—education—that had a cost, and in order to enjoy a stream of gratification over a more or less prolonged period. Their acquisition was practically free of non-market restrictions and was therefore part of the standard mechanism whereby consumers allocate scarce resources to different ends in order to maximize their utility, an essential premise of the standard of living discussion. Although in itself not a form of direct satisfaction, except insofar as it could have had some kind of social symbolism that could be enjoyable in itself, human capital gave access to other forms of gratification which could be enjoyed as long as this asset was present and usable.²⁸ These forms belonged to ‘the non-material side of life, such as reading, religion, family life, friends, gossip, and games [which] were deeply valued and thus, in some sense, necessary' (Weatherill 1993). Reading, either for amusement or edification and spiritual uplift, was probably the most common way of using literacy in this way.²⁹ For a smaller number, literacy was also the indispensable vehicle whereby personal correspondence could take place and thus the barrier of distance, to which all oral communication is subject, could be overcome. According to Jacques-Louis Menetra, a Parisian artisan of the late eighteenth century, writing was ‘a way of keeping up contacts, giving news of himself, receiving money, and announcing his return when he was away from home' (Roche 1982). A third and still more restricted, but also more sophisticated field of application was the composition of autobiographic registers. This exercise became widespread in higher circles mostly from the seventeenth century but was not unknown to the humbler strata of society (Spufford 1979; Foisil 1986; Markussen 1990).

Potentially, the same literary skills could serve these ‘consumption' ends as much as they could have ‘functional' uses, and thus to analyse their respective importance it is necessary to find a way of separating them in their effects.³⁰ Obviously, it is extremely difficult to say what part of an individual's human capital was a consumer durable and what part was a producer good.

A great deal has been written on the history of the book in early modern Europe, and as a result a lot is known about its production, sale, possession, and diffusion, not to mention the types of literature encompassed by this activity. Estimates of the output of such a dispersed and complex industry are naturally less than reliable but all sources concur in that the number of copies produced reached remarkably high figures early on and expanded at a notable pace throughout the period considered. For the entire sixteenth century, a total of some 150 to 200 million copies is

likely and for the eighteenth century, it may have reached ten times that amount (Chartier 1987; Houston 1988).³¹ Since the population rose in the meantime by 80%, this affords an unmistakable sign of a strong upward movement in individual book-ownership during these centuries. This was naturally accompanied by a tremendous intensification in the respective trade, both fixed and itinerant. Not only a strong specialization developed but also a myriad of networks of a regional, national, and international scope which, by the eighteenth century, spread from Geneva, Troyes, Venice, Avignon, and Amsterdam into the deepest recesses of the countryside (Dooley 1996; Mellot 2000).

Books were never cheap during these centuries and it should come as no surprise that their possession could not have been distributed at all evenly throughout society. Here we encounter again patterns that resemble those we considered while discussing literacy in conjunction with income and occupation. During the sixteenth century, libraries were mainly owned by the upper strata and the clergy, while in the popular classes book-owning families would not have exceeded 10% of the total and the number of items belonging to each one was tiny. But like the ‘consumption revolution', there was a ‘book revolution' in Europe too, which translated into a ‘trickle down effect' through society that is reminiscent of what happened during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with respect to other consumer durables. In Paris, for example, the percentage of artisans and trades people possessing books rose to 16.5% in 1700 and to 35% in 1780, and a similar movement is reported for the nine cities of western France where post-mortem inventories have been analysed (Chartier 1987; Fairchilds 1993). Although a desire to emulate one's betters and rise above one's equals may have been at the root of such a trend, as has been claimed for material consumption in general, there is evidence that increases in real income were also responsible.

determine the extent to which human capital served as a vehicle for immaterial consumption, independently of the other uses it might have. Unfortunately, there are several reasons why this link cannot be established.

The first point to make in this connection is that little solid evidence has been adduced to show what the direct correspondence between literacy and book ownership may have been in the early modern period. On the other hand, it is clear that not all who read books owned them, and not all books were read at all or were read for mere gratification. Many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century library inventories reveal the presence of ‘technical books', on law, pharmacy, medicine, agronomy, and other practical subjects which would hardly qualify them for the ‘spiritual' uses that we are looking for here (Chartier 1985—7). Indeed, it has been claimed that ‘the private ownership of books was clearly oriented towards the practical needs of men, their profession, and the interests to which the latter gave rise' (Bodeker 1995). Books of this kind were really like producer goods, acquired to enhance their owners' productivity or gain, and generally not for reading for pleasure. They should not form part of any standard of living assessment exercise. Another aspect is that having a library for many also had a token value that contributed to status, this being as true for the humble as it was for the great.

A more serious preoccupation arises out of the fact that reading was not confined to books alone. An enormous amount of it and a steadily growing one too, focused on ‘chap books', ‘street literature', ‘romances de cordel', or ‘livres bleus', as they were variously designated across Europe, as well as newspapers, fly sheets, and other ephemeral publications. The first of these categories is particularly important for the present context given their abundance and widespread dissemination throughout society. They were unbound, poorly printed volumes, made out of the cheapest paper and varying in length from a few to as many as 200 pages. Although often ‘sensational, scurrilous and pornographic' (Stephens 1990), the majority were serious and often devoted to religious, technical, and educational themes (Mandrou 1974; Hebrard 1996). Theywere traded over vast distances and handled through complex networks of wholesalers and chapmen. Their numbers cannot be assessed with any precision given that they were distributed to a large extent by peddlers and that they were rarely if ever mentioned in post-mortem inventories.³² Being very cheap, they were probably deemed to be worthless second hand and therefore not to be registered, but their frailty also ensured that they left little trace amongst the possessions of the deceased.³³ Nonetheless, historians agree that they were a major source of reading satisfaction. In early eighteenth-century London, for example, just one of the fourteen London dealers who dealt in them had 400,000 copies in

stock on the occasion of his death (Chartier 1987). In Turin, the print run in almanacks alone for one year came to 230,000, at a time (1783) when the population of the city and its territory was slightly over 300,000 (Braida 1995). In Lisbon, meanwhile, it was commented that the circulation of ‘cordel’ literature was ‘abundant’ (Lisboa 1998).

While we may assume that for the many who had books, literacy was important because it was an indispensable means to deriving enjoyment through their consumption for its own sake, an even greater number were going to the trouble and expense of acquiring the means to read and yet owned none. What makes this even more of a paradox, however, is the fact this second group also lacked any clear functional reason, of the kind we examined in the preceding section, for making an investment in this capacity. Indeed, as literacy rates rose in Europe, particularly during the eighteenth century, a growing share of this seems to have been unrelated to any practical purpose for those involved. Many who did not need it for their productive activities came to participate in the process. This is particularly obvious with unskilled labourers but also applies to a lesser degree to the ‘lower crafts’, to artisans who engaged in a very limited amount of direct commercialization, and even to small traders and shopkeepers some of whom would not have been literate before. This evolution is particularly striking as regards the first of these categories given that they could not have required this acquisition for any practical use at all. Yet in England, for example, the literacy rate in this stratum rose from about 10%, at the end of the sixteenth century, to 20—30%, one hundred years later (Cressy 1980) and to 41% by the middle of the eighteenth century (Schofield 1973). During the same period, in Amsterdam, it went from 40% to 66% (in the case of ‘proletarians’) (Kuijpers 1997) and, in Lyon, it rose from 20% to 37% for day workers and from 20% to 41% for gardeners during the eighteenth century, while in Provence the share of the literate among unskilled rural labour rose from 4% to 8% in the course of the eighteenth century (Vovelle 1975; Chartier et al.1976).³ Interestingly, in Paris, among arrested petty criminals—who mainly stole food—60% were illiterate in 1730 but by 1785 this was down, impressively, to 40% (Roche 1987).

The issue this raises is whether this expanded willingness to invest in human capital on the part of the poorer layers of society can be taken as a part of the consumer revolution and therefore reinforces the message of the latter as regards the pre-industrial standard of living debate. Since human capital was necessarily formed at the expense of material consumption, such a conclusion seems unavoidable. The question which remains is to grasp what can have motivated the shift in the allocation of resources towards more widespread literacy among the many who stood to gain so little or even nothing from it in purely practical terms. Several factors may have shaped this situation. Furet and Ozouf (1977) have argued that emulation of the higher orders provided some of the motivation, just as it did with the consumption revolution in general, and that the lower strata pushed their offspring towards literacy as part of an imitative process. Houston (1988) has added that ‘higher wages for labourers might encourage investment not only in consumer durables but also in education’, suggesting a high income-elasticity of demand for

this group. At the same time, it is tempting to think that the growing availability and increasing penetration of rural markets, during the 1700s, by the ‘blue book' business, the only reading matter that was affordable to such people, had something to do with this ‘downward percolation' effect. From originally having had an urban and more affluent readership in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the eighteenth century blue books became rural, ‘plebeian', and truly popular, thanks to the thrust of ‘colportage' and rising literacy (Botrel 1996). By 1730, they were said to have invaded the provinces in France and were known by heart throughout the countryside. By the first half of the nineteenth century, their readership in this country had become entirely rural (Lyons 1997), a spread that strengthens our argument that the poorer classes were using their new-found literacy to read, even though their inventories show far fewer families with books than families where literacy was present.

All in all, it seems difficult to go against the notion that the analysis of the standard of living must be incomplete if proper attention is not paid to the place of human capital in it. This does not mean that the level of human capital can simply serve, by retropolation, as an indicator of the level of real income, although the latter clearly influenced the rate at which the former was formed.³⁵ Indeed, the relationship between them is too complex to be modelled in such a manner. On the other hand, in the case of the unskilled and the barely skilled, human capital as an end in itself can be clearly distinguished, since it had no other purpose. This allows us to take an important step towards rendering it measurable so that it can meaningfully be included among the stock of durables used in order to evaluate how well-off people were in early modern Europe. The following section presents an exploratory effort in this direction.

5.