Nation of Shopkeepers
From the Stone Age to 1800, there was no gain in average living conditions. Now incomes rise steadily.
The average Briton in 1788 ate only as many calories a day as hunter-gatherers (2,300). And the British diet was more monotonous. Life expectancy was only slightly above that of hunter-gatherers (38 years). Height is a good guide to nutrition and health: men in England averaged 5ft 6in, the same as males in the Stone Age. Men then worked 60 hours a week. Compared to hunter-gatherers’ 35 hours.
Englishmen who were economically successful, from the Middle Ages to 1800, left 4 or 5 surviving children at their deaths. In contrast, landless labourers left fewer than 2 children.
Preindustrial England was thus a world of constant downward mobility. Given the static nature of the preindustrial economy, the superabundant children of the rich had to, on average, move down the social hierarchy to find work. Attributes that ensured later economic dynamism – hard work, ingenuity, innovativeness, education – were thus spread throughout the population.
From 1200 to 1800 interest rates fell, murder rates declined, work hours increased, the taste for violence declined, and numeracy and literacy spread to even the lower reaches of society.
In both preindustrial Japan and China the rich had more children than the poor, but in a more modest way. The samurai in Japan in the Tokugawa era (1603-1868), for example, produced on average little more than one son per father.
In modern affluent societies, the higher income a person has, on average, the less leisure he has. The source of our compulsion to work may lie in our ancestors’ passage through a preindustrial world that rewarded a compulsion to work and accumulate with reproductive success.
November 12th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
“The source of our compulsion to work may lie in our ancestors’ passage through a preindustrial world that rewarded a compulsion to work and accumulate with reproductive success.”
Compulsion to work per se was not rewarded by more descendants being left alive (a higher frequency of the genes in the gene pool), but compulsion to achieve higher social status. Individuals of high social status, especially men, left behind far more children than low status people. This drive for status is (still) hardwired into our brains.
Nowadays, the most common way to gain social status is to work hard. Or, of course, you can just be a rock star.
November 15th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Meaning that musicians don’t work hard to become rock stars?