Was there an ‘Industrious Revolution' before the Industrial Revolution? An Empirical Exercise for England, c. 1300-1830
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Was there an ‘Industrious Revolution' before the Industrial Revolution? An Empirical Exercise for England, c. 1300-1830. / Allen, Robert C.; Weisdorf, Jacob Louis.
Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, 2010.Research output: Working paper › Research
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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 -
ID: 19571609