Workers versus nations
It is a simple point. As long as we continue to draw our living-standards data from the poor and from ordinary workers, we are unlikely to find any real-income advantage of living in western Europe before the 1820s.
The food consumption and clothing and availability of warmth will look no greater than in Poland or in China. Such an impression is reinforced by the apparent decline in real wagesin western Europe from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.7 There is the danger of thinking that the global divergence of real incomes dating from the 1820s8 was something new in world economic history, when it is more likely that western Europe began pulling away in the mid-eighteenth century or even earlier. What most international comparisons have missed is the unmistakable rise of property incomes from the mid-eighteenth century on, and in some cases from 1500 on. When prosperity in the upper part of society is combined with the stagnation or decline in real wages, the net result will be a greater apparent rise in real national income per person in western Europe than elsewhere before the nineteenth century. The possible magnitude of this adjustment will be sketched when we come to the real inequality trends within England, France, and Holland.
5.2