Standards Of Living Debate During The British Industrial Revolution

The standards of living debate during the period of the British Industrial Revolution between c.1770-1850 is one of the most controversial topics in economic history. The debate arose form the frequent economic question of how standards of living should be measured and brought about two view points. The pessimists’ view was that the standards of living of the laboring poor deteriorated during the Industrial Revolution whereas the optimists’ view was that there were improvements in the quality of life for most people. Although both groups agreed on using real wages as a way to determine standards of living, their differences came down to the price indices used and led to the preservation of pessimism (Allen, 2007). Nevertheless, certain people
Their results show an overall increase in nominal wages for all workers from c.1755-1851 with a slight downturn in 1810. As they mainly focused on the blue collar laborers since there is no question about the improvement in standards of living of the white collar workers during the Industrial revolution, they noticed a widening inequality gap between the rich and the poor. They were then required to produce a cost of living index where they offered their own “best guess” estimates of an average price index to represent actual working-class budgets which they calculated as a 72.5% price change from 1788-92 to 1809-15, a -27.3% change from 1809-15 to 1820-26 and a -26.0% change from 1820-26 to 1846-50. This was then combined with the nominal full-time wages series to build the striking real wage trends which showed a slow increase in real wages between 1781 and 1819 and almost a double in real wages between 1820 and 1850. Lindert and Williamson (1983) argue that this is a far greater increase than even past optimists had announced and that this should confirm their view on the Industrial revolution hence ending the
Charles Feinstein (1998) made some major revisions in order to eliminate these issues and constructed an alternative series of nominal and real wages. He found that the nominal wage trends he had constructed were very similar to Lindert and Williamson’s; however real wages actually increased at a much slower rate of 30% than was perceived. Nonetheless, the optimists were determined to prove their