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Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014)
- burlesona 5y agoSlightly tangential but since it appears near the start of the article: As an American I recall being very surprised the first time I traveled to England and realized that “pence” is literally the same as “pennies” - just a different way of pluralizing it. As a kid I just thought it was some obscure division of numbers like “fortnight” or “score.” I imagined it worked something like “four farthings to a pence and twelve pence to a pound” or something. :)
- sealjam 5y agoI always think of pence as 1/100 of a £, but pennies as multiple penny (1p) coins. I’m not sure whether it’s just me.
- OJFord 5y agoNo I agree that sums it up well - I can't think of a sentence that would sound natural (as in, sounds like a native BrE speaker said it) and have the same meaning with either one or the other.
- PebblesRox 5y agoSounds like cents would be the American equivalent in that case.
- ThePadawan 5y agoBoth are correct! Before the pound was decimalized, 12 pence were indeed a shilling, and 20 shillings a pound.
- dbcurtis 5y agoOf you go back far enough, I think it is true that at one time they were three currencies that floated against each other.
- siltpotato 5y agoHuh? How does that work?
- Symbiote 5y agoPence is the usual plural for an amount of money, although it's often replaced with "p" ("pee") when speaking informally. Pennies means 1p coins, sometimes 2p coins too: "Mum, I need sixty pence for the train, I've only got pennies and the machine doesn't take them." "Pennies" without an amount means a small amount of money. "It's only pennies with the amount we use it." (JK Rowling missed a trick. It should have been one bronze knut, two bronze knuts, and a price of four knets or something.)
- HDMI_Cable 5y agoI don’t know why, but this makes me feel a bit optimistic about the future, at least in western societies. Our current worries about inflation, the degradation of the middle class, and stagnant wages seems to be more a product of moving to the Information Age, rather than inherently pet of our society; with long term reforms, these can be fixed. But, it also suggests that problems like wealth inequality are here to stay, or least somewhat natural.
- CapitalistCartr 5y agoI think wealth inequality is fine; it's a sign of economic growth, which is naturally uneven. I object to wealth inequality on the order of ten billion times. That's not growth; that's strip mining.
- brnaftr300 5y agoI don't think it wise to presume that at all. It's little to do with wealth inequality. Especially not in the current mode. Money and wealth can both fairly readily be converted into substantial power. This is without mentioning the power laws that seem to be in place which tend towards winner take all scenarios, meaning there is a gross aggregation of power in fairly singular institutions. And when you resolve to look at the people running the institutions they're also the wealthy - this aspect is obvious, but the reality is that it yields individuals even more leverage over the system. And it's fair to assume they're working in concert, a la the invisible hand. I reckon this situates them several hundreds of orders of magnitude above their fellows. What's worse is, by my divination at least: as a general rule, I don't find these people to be exceptional or necessarily well suited to wield such power. And I would also conjecture that the centralization of power in aspects of individual occurrence and institutions creates a behavioral uniformity, which I hypothesize necessarily leads to considerable instability ultimately creating more "too big to fail" situations which ultimately compromises the health of our polite society. And because of the immense leverage, I don't find it to be stepping out of bounds to say that it's entirely probable that our body politic is owned and operated through backroom auction of policy. I'd also append that, from my experience, I've never seen debts factored into arguments regarding wealth disparities, but I do suppose it should be. Historically debt peonage was a considerable force. I think it would be interesting to look at the wealth distribution charts and seeing how it plays out when they traipse into the negative.
- 123pie123 5y agointeresting that a laborer is paid approx 50% what master mason is paid, for some reason I thought a Mason would have been paid much more
- etothepii 5y agoAs I understand it the the strength of medieval beer was quite weak (barely intoxicating) and was trusted to be from clean water while regular water from the well might not be. Perhaps this is a little like the way that many people who have ancestry / family that come from places without clean water will routinely order a "coke with no ice".
- duxup 5y agoPost Cold War after Eastern Europe started opening I traveled there a bit. I was careful what I drank until one night I was foolish and drank something with ice in it. It got me the next day.
- RicoElectrico 5y agoI was surprised to find that they give you a free glass of water with ice in the US restaurants. However, it's very awfully tasting "Chlorine Springs" ;) No wonder people tend to avoid tap water there.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoWater quality massively varies by location. It's generally all safe (spare me the low effort comment about Flint or some watershed in WV poisoned by coal, the exception proves the rule) and most of it doesn't taste like chlorine.
- tharkun__ 5y agoThe chlorine taste or smell is something that is very subjective and can change for other reasons as well. I.e. if you are a tourist that is not used to chlorinated water at all, even mildly chlorinated water can smell distinctly. And disgusting. Get used to it and it's like many things you get used to: you don't notice or mind it much any longer. But even then you might go take a shower and out comes a huge chlorine stink that subsides after a bit. For all you care water with chlorine smell would probably be the safest (from a microbial perspective - same caveats as you are mentioning about general guideline vs specific edge cases)
- tynpeddler 5y agoThere's a caveat to the rosy picture this article seems to paint of the past. In the 14th century, the black death and The Great Famine Killed a huge number of people but also is believed to have raised the standard of living for lower class survivors (I wonder if this was an inspiration for Thanos' plan). The article briefly mentions the plague but doesn't really seem to address that this event strongly changed the economic conditions of Europe for 150 years. Coincidentally, that 150 years heavily overlaps with the period of analysis for this article.
- missedthecue 5y agoCan you explain how killing people would raise the standard of living? That seems like the lump of labor fallacy.
- yobbo 5y agoBecause of labour shortage, labour retains bigger share of value vs. aristocracy. Also, amount of capital per capita increases.
- missedthecue 5y agoBut with fewer laborers, there are fewer consumers. There isn't a fixed amount of work and a variable number of workers, they scale up and down together. Again, this is the lump of labor fallacy.
- theplague42 5y agoIIRC these concepts are more relevant in a service-based economy. In the Middle Ages, _land_ was the primary source of economic value. Fewer people means more land per person, therefore more wealth per person.
- missedthecue 5y agoLand is still the primary source of economic value. And I don't think land was getting fairly allocated between all the peasants during the late 1300s.
- legitster 5y ago> Mason wage was fairly representative of other “middle class” citizens (merchants, clerks, craftsmen, etc). Very interesting analysis overall, but my biggest nitpick is that it's easy to call this group middle class, but it's so much smaller of a percentage of the population than we might be used to today. For roughly every 20 farmers, there may have been 1-2 people who were literally anything else. That's craftsmen, nobles, clergy, etc.
- ZoomerCretin 5y agoWhat does the proportion of the population have to do with whether it's truly middle-class? Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between poverty and truly rich?
- kentrado 5y agoHalfway along a logarithmic scale what a beautiful way to describe it. I am surprised at accurate that image is. Where did you hear this expression?
- trylfthsk 5y agoThe earliest usage of the idea of "log utility of wealth" I'm aware of is in Daniel Bernoulli's work on the St. Petersburg lottery [0], but it pops up all over mathematical finance stuff. [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-stpetersburg/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-stpetersburg/
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Is it not (along a logarithmic scale) a halfway point between poverty and truly rich? No. Traditionally the middle class was at least as rich as the upper class. What made them a "middle class" was that they weren't highborn, like the upper classes, but they also weren't poor, like the lower classes.
- legitster 5y agoWe often use "middle class" as an analogue to a "normal" experience. But in earlier periods it was clearly the exception.
- giantg2 5y ago"What we can learn by looking at prices and wages in Medieval England" That they lived much better or more fulfilling lives than us. "Having a “beer break” was a Medieval version of contemporary lunch."
- astrange 5y agoIs that before or after having 10 children because the first 9 died of cholera?
- FooBarBizBazz 5y agoThe Church also gave them a lot of days off. Tons of feast days.
- qsmi 5y agoAre there any economists out there? How is it possible that inflation was basically 0 for more than 100 years? Does this imply that productivity and the money supply grew at exactly the rate (Which could imply neither grew at all, which seems implausible to me, but I also have no idea what I'm talking about.) Edit: I just remembered they also mentioned the textile industry grew so it seems that there must be some productivity gains to be had over the period.
- bserge 5y ago
- second--shift 5y agoI'm not an economist, but I think that the net zero inflation figure came from: - gold/silver standards of the time (disinflationary) - currency in bullion or coinage of a relatively fixed qty (disinflationary) - low credit supply & banking industry (not inflationary) - labor supply growth (deflationary) - productivity growth (deflationary) - war/crises (often deflationary) There was probably some significant debasement and other funny tricks by the rulers of the day to intentionally inflate (state) purchasing power, and obviously there was some inflation via gold/silver mining and trade from the East. These combined with the above probably netted out of the long time-span. It's not like they had bitcoin or central banking policy. The West didn't even have paper currency during this era; they didn't have access to inflationary levers to pull.
- katabasis 5y agoNot an economist either, but lately I've been enjoying Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century", and he describes how England and France saw very little inflation for most of the 18th and 19th centuries. This monetary regime allowed a "society of rentiers" to prosper – wealthy individuals could live off the income from assets like government bonds indefinitely without needing to really work (lack of inflation meant that income wouldn't devalue over time). The story changes in the 20th century of course – governments racked up huge debts from world wars and related crises but instead of paying them down gradually over a long time (as England did after the Napoleonic wars in the previous century), they inflated their way out ("euthanizing" much of the idle rentier class in the process). Historical economics is pretty fascinating – studying the past in this way really makes it clear how exceptional of a time we are living in now.
- inglor_cz 5y ago"People were far from starving." is an incorrect conclusion, because famines were far from rare. "The crop price spike around 1320" is probably the Great Famine of 1315-1317, which killed approximately ten per cent of the population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%931317 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%931... But it could also be the famine of 1321.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoAlcohol was consumed more often because: - Water was impure - Juice could not be refrigerated
- ceras 5y agoAlso, the alcohol people consumed most freely back then had very low ABV. "Small beers" were 0.5% - 2.8% ABV, and "table beers" drank by all ages were were typically under 1% ABV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer Kinda niche, but the closest modern analog I know to table beer that's commonly purchased is some Kombucha brands. Most Kombucha in the US aims for under 0.5% ABV so that it can be sold to people under 21, but some lines, e.g. GT's Classic, are more lax and go up to about 1% ABV. In all but legal classification, these are basically non-alcoholic: you wouldn't substitute a light beer, or even an "extra light" beer, for this. You can't feel the alcohol at such low ABV.
- Thorentis 5y agoAlmost no inflation, and yet wages were growing? Sounds great. It's amazing what a lack of cheap credit can do. Cheap credit does allow upward social class mobility, but at the expense of a rat race economy, inflation, stifling wage growth, and arguably many other negative effects.
- gruez 5y ago>Almost no inflation, and yet wages were growing and all it took was a global pandemic that killed "30 percent to 60 percent of the European population"[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death