Human progress is often incremental, but many positive trends have become clearly visible over time. One of these trends is the growing abundance of food. My recent series of articles looked at the affordability of food relative to wages in England between the 13th century and the present. It covered dairy (milk, butter, and cheese), meat (pork, mutton, and beef), baking (flour, sugar, and eggs), and grains (wheat, rice and oats).
Professor Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis, has conducted extensive research into the economic history of England. As part of his research into the condition of the working class in England, Clark has developed an extensive data set containing nominal prices of goods and nominal wages of skilled and unskilled workers in England between the 13th and 19th centuries. Note: Clark assumes a 10-hour workday before 1720.
Using the concept of time prices developed by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley, we calculated the number of hours that someone must work to earn enough money to buy a particular food item.
In this analysis, Clark’s nominal prices of food items served as the nominator, and nominal hourly wages, which come from Clark and from the UK Office of National Statistics’ Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, served as the denominator.
Figure 1: Compound annual growth rates for skilled and unskilled workers
For unskilled laborers, the compound annual growth rate of all the items analyzed increased from 0.19 percent on average before the 1860s (going back to 1200s for some commodities) to 1.38 percent since the 1860s.
Similarly, for skilled laborers, the compound annual growth rate increased from 0.17 percent on average before the 1860s (going back to 1200s for some commodities) to 1.37 percent since the 1860s.
Over the course of this series, we showed how workers have benefited hugely from the growth in wages since the Industrial Revolution. However, this growth has accelerated since the end of World War II. When basic food commodities became cheaper, all workers saw the benefits.
Many compare their circumstances in the present to others who are relatively better off. However, compared to almost any period in history, everyone has benefited as basic commodities became far more affordable.