It had never happened before—a world in which many people, from Belgium to Botswana, have pretty good food and housing and education. We’ve not yet achieved, God knows, an earthly paradise. A little over seven billion people inhabit the planet. One billion of them live still in nations of economic hell: a loaf of moldy bread, some curdled milk, bad schools, bad shelter, bad clothing, bad sanitation. Most people in Haiti or Afghanistan live so, as do, in richer countries, many of the very poor. God knows that too.
Until 1800, though, such a hell was what everybody except a handful of nobles and priests and merchants expected, year after terrible year. We have achieved over the past two centuries for ordinary people worldwide, materially speaking, unevenly, for the first time, a pretty good purgatory.[1] The whole world’s average income, for example, now approaches that of present-day Brazil, or of the United States in 1941. Since 1800, in other words, and especially since 1900, the goods and services available to the average human being, and the scope for a full human life, have startlingly expanded.[2] The event justifies its label, “the Great Enrichment.”
Never in material terms had anything so Great as the Enrichment occurred—never to the mass of a population, not in the glory of Greece or the grandeur of Rome, not in ancient Egypt or medieval China. Startlingly, Brazil is now better off, on average, than the metropolises of the mightiest world empires before 1939. In the many and burgeoning very rich countries, such as Sweden or the United States, the value of goods and services made, earned, and consumed per person, without allowing for the radically improved quality of most goods and many services (cleaner food, better medicine), is three or four times higher even than the historically unprecedented world average.
Some Swedes and some Americans are still poor. But most aren’t. The extremely high average has overwhelmed inequality so far as the standard of genuine comfort is concerned. It gives to the rich, the middling, and the poor alike a roof over their heads, plentiful food and clothing, long life expectancy, reasonable hours of work, literacy, dignity—all of which were prospects and satisfactions denied to most humans until well after 1800. The signs are good that if we keep our wits about us we can, within a few generations, achieve for everyone on earth the riches of Sweden and America. All the formerly poor can enjoy bourgeois incomes and can pursue, if they wish, the spiritual enrichment that such an income permits. We’re on the way to a pretty good material paradise.
Look at the numbers.[3] Average daily expenditures by Haitians and Afghans, expressed in present-day U.S. prices at “purchasing power parity”—and so allowing for inflation and the relevant exchange rates among currencies—are well below $3 a day, which before 1800 was what the average human more or less everywhere expected to make, earn, and consume.[4] So it had been, always, back to the caves. Imagine living each day on the cost, spread over all your activities, of a half gallon of milk. If you’ve been to Liberia or Afghanistan it’s not hard to imagine. Today, after two centuries of increase, recently accelerating, the world figure, an average that includes even the extraordinarily poor Liberians and Afghans, has arrived at an unprecedented $33 a day—roughly, I say, the Brazilian level.[5]
Like all the figures, the $3 and the $33 are corrected, I emphasize, for exchange rates and inflation. They are expressed, as the economists put it, in “real” terms, and therefore are comparable—or comparable enough for the scientific point being made here. The figures are supposed to include (however imperfectly when applied to earlier economies) not only what you buy in the marketplace but whatever goods and services you make or grow for yourself.[6] No one should put faith in the second or third digits of such an estimate, which may variously under- and overestimate the value of homework, care work, the environment, better health, and better quality of goods. But for the economic and historical science attempted here the great alteration of the first digit suffices. It is stunning.
Since 1800 the ability of humans to feed and clothe and educate themselves, even as the number of humans increased by an astonishing factor of seven, has risen, per human, by an even more astonishing factor of ten. Do the math, then, of total production. We humans now produce and consume seventy—7 × 10—times more goods and services worldwide than in 1800. Some people view this figure with alarm and speak of environmental degradation. But the news is mainly good. With seventy times more production, no wonder we can cultivate new economies of scale and reap their benefits through free trade. And no wonder we can harness the ingenuity of the larger population to get better antibiotics and better automobiles. No wonder we can clean up the air and the water, and turn forests into nature preserves.
In the best-run countries, such as France or Japan or Finland, all of which not so long ago were $3-a-day poor, real income per person, conventionally measured, has by now increased to roughly $100 a day. Income has risen, that is, not by 30 percent but by a factor of thirty (I will repeat the point until you feel it on your pulse), which is to say many hundreds of percent. It is not a doubling or a tripling of the material scope of a human life. Such routine increases, desirable as they are, have occurred many times before in world history, only to fall back again to $3 a day when the good times passed. Income now is thirty to one hundred times more than our ancestors could manage, and no falling back about it. The OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of reasonably well-off free-trade democracies with average earnings of about $100 a day per person, has now thirty-four members, containing nearly one-sixth of the world’s population.[7] To be overprecise about the fifth-grade arithmetic involved, a factor of thirty for income growth in the OECD countries from 1800 to the present means a rise of 2,900 percent. Think conservatively of the Enrichment, if you wish, and call the increase merely 2,000 or 1,500 percent. Any such order of magnitude of enrichment justifies the word “great.”
The Enrichment since 1800 shows in all the evidence. (It better, if it’s so Great.) Real per-person income in Brazil is now, I repeat, about the same as it was in the world-beating United States in 1941, or in the still-recovering postwar Britain in 1959.[8] Two centuries ago fully four out of five U.S. adults worked to grow food for their families and for the remaining nonagricultural fifth. Now a single American farmer feeds three hundred people. Since 1800 worldwide life expectancy at birth has doubled. World literacy is tending toward 100 percent. On Indian TV in 2014 an optimistic advertisement noted that for every adult illiterate in that bettering if still very poor country there are seven little children who can read a story. The scope of human life has widened, and bids fair to go on widening. All the instruments agree that most humans are massively better off now than their ancestors were two centuries ago.[9]
You will perhaps doubt that the Great Enrichment happened, or that it was so great, or that it will continue—or doubt that it is justified, in view of environmental decay and consumerist excess. But the evidence, regarded without prejudice, is overwhelming. From about 1800 to the present the world’s economy did something good, which looks to be permanent and looks to be justified. If contrary to the evidence we cling to our prejudices about economic history—our view that the Industrial Revolution was impoverishing, or that the Great Enrichment was an irremediable environmental disaster, or that Europe is rich only because of poverty in the Third World, or that the new rich are always getting relatively richer, or that after all any enrichment is vulgar—we will mistake how we got here and will give mistaken advice on how to move forward. We will betray the remaining poor of the world.
The prejudices, which is to say our justifying discourses, would not matter if the issue were divergent judgments about, say, the latest ice cream flavors from Ben and Jerry’s. We could then, in the easygoing American phrase, “agree to disagree.” Chocolate Therapy versus AmeriCone Dream. Whatever. But the judgment about whether the System has worked for ordinary people, and why or why not, is too important to leave to personal fancy or to prideful skepticism or to a political identity adopted in late adolescence, never to be reconsidered in the light of new evidence or mature understanding, reaffirmed daily by the particular group of shouters and sneerers we tune into on cable TV. If we are to help the remaining poor of the world, as ethically speaking we should, the political judgment needs to be made soberly and scientifically.
The Great Enrichment is the most important secular event since the invention of agriculture. It has restarted history. It will end poverty, as for a good part of humankind it already has. Surprisingly, though, economists and historians from left or right or center can’t explain it. Perhaps their sciences and their politics need revision.
§
Our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were very poor, which had in turn been the lot of their ancestors since time out of mind. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken. The good old days, in other words, were for ordinary people horrible to a degree that is hard now for residents of $80-a-day countries such as Italy or New Zealand to appreciate. The historian David Gilmour notes that from 1375 to 1795 the great city of Florence experienced famine prices every five years or so.[10] In 1879 the French literary historian Hippolyte Taine expressed the horror in a vivid metaphor: “The people are like a man walking through a pond with water up to his chin. . . . Old-fashioned charity and newfangled humanity try to help him out, but the water is too high. Until the level falls and the pond finds an outlet, the wretched man can only snatch an occasional gulp of air and at every instant he runs the risk of drowning.”[11] The British writer and literary historian Graham Robb, who quotes Taine, details the poverty of parts of rural France even in the improving nineteenth century. Over the winter in Burgundy the vineyard men hibernated, and not merely figuratively. An official reported in 1844 that “these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food.”[12] Robb remarks that in French agriculture in the nineteenth century “slowness was not an attempt to savor the moment.” Economists have long recognized that the world’s poorest agriculturalists often run out of energy before they run out of money, the more so when they are afflicted by malaria and tuberculosis and other debilitating diseases.[13] The ploughman homeward plods his weary way. “A ploughman who took hours to reach a field,” writes Robb, “was not necessarily admiring the effect of morning mist. . . . He was trying to make a small amount of strength last for the working day, like a cartload of manure spread over a large field.” Even in fast-enriching Sweden, whose economy grew after the liberalization of the 1860s faster than any economy except Japan’s, the novelist Vilhelm Moberg remarked of his childhood around 1900 in the countryside that he could bring to mind only the long summers. In winter “the children in a smallholder’s cabin . . . were too badly clothed to stand the cold. . . . Life in winter was quite literally shut in: we dozed by the open fire and slept through many hours of the [very long Scandinavian] night: it was, for children, a quiet vegetating in the darkness under the low cabin.”[14]
The Australian poet and cultural-literary critic Clive James struck the right note. During the nineteenth century tuberculosis afflicted the poor especially, but also the middle and upper classes. The aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, died of it in 1859, as in 1850 had his bourgeois-liberal ally Frédéric Bastiat.[15] The working-class poet John Keats died of it too, in 1821, age twenty-five, before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain. James wrote, “Today’s young tourists of a literary bent, when they pass, on the Spanish Steps in Rome, the window of [Keats’s] last resting place, are being granted insight into the fearful realities of a world without antibiotics.” (In 1943 the recently invented penicillin was two years away from being widely available for civilian use. My own kidneys bear the damage from the only alternative, sulfa drugs, of which the correct dose for an injured infant was poorly understood.) To grasp “the suddenness and randomness of God’s wrath” in former times, James writes, we need to get inside the lives of our ancestors, “a trick of the mind . . . by which we can imagine how it must have felt when the only possible way to view reality without the benefit of religious faith was to despair.”[16] In 1917 in a backwater of a definitely enriching Sweden, the potato crop failed and some of the poorer people starved to death.[17]
So it was from the beginning to 1800, and in most places for many a painful year thereafter. In the opening lines of Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), the painter, doctor, and writer Carlo Levi described the poverty he saw when he was banished by the fascist state in 1935–1936 to a pair of villages in far southern Italy—”that other world, hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally patient, . . . that land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death.”[18]
It was an ancient and terrible business, as it is still in Chad and Bangladesh, and on the homeless streets of Chicago and Amsterdam, too. For nearly all of humanity’s time on earth the average amount of food and education and antibiotics and the rest per person stayed at subsistence, at $1 or $3 or $5 a day expressed in today’s prices, or in exceptional times, briefly, $6 or $8 a day. Thus it had been, in 1800, during the two thousand or so centuries since the mitochondrial Eve (and about the same span, approximate contemporary, as has recently been discovered, since her good friend the Y-chromosome Adam[19]). Or during the thousand or so centuries since the invention of full language. Or during the hundred or so centuries since the invention of agriculture. Or during the eight or so centuries since commerce had revived in the West. Or during the three or so centuries since Europeans had ventured by sea to Africa and India and the New World. Pick whatever period down to 1800 you want. For a long, long time nothing much happened to the economic misery of the average Jill.
She and her friend Jack could perhaps trap or purchase a little meat to go with their bread, or pick nuts to go with their grubs, but they lived in a wretched little hovel, or a tent, or a cave. Poor people (and some not-so-poor people) lived in literal caves even in France and Italy until well after World War II, for example at Matera in the arch of Italy’s foot. Jill before 1800 had two sets of clothing at most, or a string skirt. In the Jericho of Pre-Pottery Neolithic times, around 10,000 BCE, 40 percent of the burials were of infants or children.[20] In ancient Rome, on the 50-50 bet that a Jill survived to age fifteen, she could expect then to live on to age fifty-two—as against eighty-five for the same bet now.[21] Nowadays in rich countries, and in many very poor countries, almost all of a woman’s children survive to the fifteen-year-old starting line. In ancient Rome, by contrast, a third of Jill’s numerous children died before their first birthdays.
It had ever been so, as it is now in rural Ethiopia (one of the African cradles of Homo sapiens). Real income might go up for a while. In the richest parts of China and Europe in their most prosperous times it might rise for a while to $6 or $8 a day.[22] But as my mother’s generation puts it, “even $7 a day is no bag of bluebirds.” And then it would revert to $3 a day.
The old imperialist vision of China and India as always and anciently and particularly overrun with starvelings is a recent back-projection. The back-projectiing had unhappy consequences during the 1960s and 1970s in the eugenic excesses of the family-limitation movement and of the Chinese single-child policy.[23] The historian Niall Ferguson, for example, favors the back-projection, despite recent work by historians such as Takeshi Hamashita and Christopher A. Bayly showing that trade in the Chinese seas and the Indian Ocean was large, and that in the eighteenth century the lands around them were prospering.[24] For most of history a dense population such as that in the lower Yangtze Valley or the lower Rhine or the lower Ganges signaled that a place was doing comparatively well in aggregate—albeit less wonderfully well for the Jack or Jill at the bottom of the ruck. The Ganges Plain, for example, was rich around 1600, at the height of the Mughal Empire, when the economic historians Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta reckon it reached 61.5 percent of the British GDP per capita—admitting that British real income was then at one of its lowest points.[25] But in most eras the people of north India were $3- or $1-a-day poor on average, as were all the other commoners on the planet since the beginning. The economic historian Bozhong Li makes a case that the Netherlands and the lower Yangtze were qualitatively comparable in 1800, though he does not in the paper venture on direct comparisons of incomes.[26] In a paper with Jan Luiten van Zanden, though, he concludes that by 1800 Dutch real income per person was double that of this richest of Chinese regions.[27]
Doubling or even tripling was possible, then, an instance of (Adam) Smithian growth, as the economic historians put it, coming up to the world-beating standard of Holland in 1800. But the vastly greater enrichment since 1800, a growth by factors of ten or thirty or one hundred, was out of the question. One hundred percent, yes, maybe 200 percent, if you were in the Scottish Highlands and reformed your society to match the habits of Holland. But 9,900 percent? Never.
You can tell the same story on a smaller geographical scale about what is now Belgium and the Netherlands. In 1568 the Low Countries were rich by the miserable standards of Europe, which is why Philip II of Spain wanted to go on taxing the place. Tax revenues from his Dutch- and French-speaking subjects thereabouts sometimes exceeded his silver revenues from the New World (though neither was enough to prevent the European hegemon from engaging in controlled defaults on numerous occasions, so uncertain were the fortunes of Spanish wars[28]). Two and a half centuries later, by 1820, the Netherlands was still the richest place in the world, with Britain only recently equaling it, while the southern part of the Low Countries (what was shortly to become Belgium) was smartly industrializing—but still at merely $6 or $8 a day. It meant ample bread but not much meat. Secondhand clothing if you were poor. Untreatable disease. Some education, but for most people not beyond a little reading of the Bible or the latest scandal sheet. Few books, few panes of glass, few shoes, horses, chairs—all expensive in hours of labor to get. No bag of bluebirds.
You would not want $3 a day, or $7, even if everyone around you had the same. When people can vote with their feet to escape it, they do. Most North Koreans who can, do. The Nigerian men selling handbags on the streets of Venice (Vu cumprà? “Wanna buy?”) have done so most courageously. More descendants of the people in Carlo Levi’s pair of mezzogiorno towns, Aliano and Grassano, now live in Argentina than in their home district of Lucania.[29] Levi’s people, residing in the middle of the Italian foot, had heard the improbable boast of the city of Eboli (over to the west, on the shin of the Italian leg) that Christ had stopped there (Cristo si è fermato a Eboli). The hopeless Lucanese in the 1930s remodeled the boast into a bitter antijoke. Yes, Christ had stopped in Eboli—but he had gone no further, not bothering to take the branch line east to visit Lucania. Levi, who as an Italian and Jew and antifascist had little patience with the widespread modern notion of the State as benevolent savior, writes:
None of the pioneers of Western civilization brought here his sense of the passage of time, his deification of the State or that ceaseless activity which feeds upon itself [thus the Great Enrichment]. No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding.[30]
[1] When I use the phrase “pretty good” here, as I will often do again often, I am referring to the Ohio State political scientist John Mueller’s lucid book Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery (1999), which in turn refers to the comically modest marketing in Garrison Keillor’s hometown of Lake Wobegon. For example, “If you can’t find it at Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, you can probably get along without it.”
[2] The figures are Angus Maddison’s estimate of world income before 1800 in 1990 prices, brought up by me to the prices of 2010 or so. Maddison 2001, appendix B, table 21, p. 264.
[3] I use throughout for recent times the readily available figures of real income per person in U.S.-equivalent prices from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the so-called Penn Tables (devised by Alan Heston and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania). The Penn Tables are conceptually the best, but in truth there is little at stake in the choice among the three. Roughly speaking—which suffices for present purposes—they tell the same story. For example, for 2012 the World Bank and for 2010 the IMF both put Brazilian real GDP at about $33 a head per day, 24 percent of the U.S. level in the corresponding year (and equal, as I have noted, to the average for the world). For 2010 the Penn Tables put it at $27 a head, or 21 percent of the their estimate of the U.S. level. A difference between 24 and 21 percent does not change any conclusion here or elsewhere in the book. We are dealing throughout with rough figures of how much people make, earn, and consume. The three sets of estimates (and a fourth, from the CIA, giving much the same results) are conveniently gathered (for 2011/2012) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita.
[4] “Make, earn, and consume” because in a correct accounting (but see note 53) the figures would show that what an economy produces is the same to the last cent as what its people earn as income and what they consume, whether in the marketplace, in homework, or in leisure. The figures are from the IMF and World Bank, in 2010. Gregory Clark (2009) argues that Maddison’s figure of a little over a dollar a day in 1800 is too low for subsistence.
[5] “World,” CIA World Factbook, April 10, 2013.
[6] The economic historian Stefano Fenoaltea and the economist Philipp Lepenies have both pointed out to me recently that for short-run reasons of policy at the time, the concept of national product used by Simon Kuznets, the deviser of the modern program of income measurement, and eventually by Maddison, did not go beyond trading figures, that is, what people could buy. Homework is mostly ignored. It is a major error for the long run (as Kuznets and other students of the matter realized), since production in the home of, say, made clothing and processed food was a large part of consumption in earlier times, as was at all times the care industry for children, husbands, and parents (as the economist Nancy Folbre has persuasively argued). The money value of sheer leisure—the merry beggar singing careless by the highway—is ignored as well. That last item at least might be equal in ancient and in modern times, and its value would rise along with the opportunity cost in making goods and services (but see de Vries 2008; Voth 1998). On the other hand, much of modern consumption is understated in the same figures—the quality point I make below. Let us hope the errors offset. But not to worry, and if to worry, not to worry too much: errors at such magnitudes do not matter for anything I say here, because we are concerned with orders of (very great) magnitude. Any factor of 10 or 30 or 100 will do.
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_for_Economic_Co-operation_and_Development Indicators.
[8] In Maddison’s tables, which seem best for the purpose, Brazilian GDP per person in 2001, deflated to 1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars, was $5,570 (Maddison 2007, table 4c, p. 522). From Index Mundi, which collected its numbers from the annual CIA Factbook (http://www.indexmundi.com/brazil/gdp_real_growth_rate.html), one can reckon from the ratio of Brazil’s real per-capita income in 2010 to that in 2000/2002 that the Maddisonian figure for 2010 would have been about $8,021. One looks through Maddison’s tables, then, for the United Kingdom (table 1c, p. 441) and for the United States (table 2c, p. 466) to find the years in which they achieved the 2010 Brazilian level. Other methods I have tried do not yield believable results. Having visited Brazil four times briefly over the past few decades (though wholly ignorant of Portuguese), I am an Expert on Brazil; and having lived in England for a few months as a teenager in 1959 (Woodbine cigarettes, pints and quarts of Ludlow beer), and having been a small child in the United Statesin the 1940s (radio drama, penny candy), I can attest that the present result seems about right.
[9] For example, the OECD’s instruments, overlapping with mine, agree. See van Zanden et al., eds. 2014.
[10] Gilmour 2011, p. 20.
[11] Quoted in Robb 2007, p. 84.
[12] Robb 2007, p. 78.
[13] For recent expositions, see Fogel 2004; Floud et al. 2011. But on Fogel, see de Vries 2008, pp. 117–120. A judicious survey is Kelly and Ó Gráda 2012.
[14] Quoted from Moburg’s memoir in Brown 2008, pp. 9–10.
[15] Examine Wikipedia’s astonishing “List of Tuberculosis Cases” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tuberculosis_cases (the editors, to be sure, plead for “citations to reliable sources”). Beyond those mentioned in the text: Burns, Schiller, Scott, Balzac, Chopin, John C. Calhoun, nearly the entire Brontë family, Delacroix, Thoreau, Napoleon II, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Ruskin, Chekhov, and Orwell.
[16] James 2007, pp. 350, 352.
[17] Brown 2008, p. 16, the year corrected by Myllyntaus and Tarnaala 1998, p. 36.
[18] Levi 1945.
[19] Poznik et al. 2013, p. 565.
[20] Mithen 2003, p. 60.
[21] Parkin 1992.
[22] Goldstone 2009 is an excellent guide to the recent scholarship, for example pp. 80–81. I have depended on Goldstone’s little book, and look forward to a big one he is writing.
[23] Connelly 2008, chap. 4.
[24] Hamashita 2007 and Bayly 2004.
[25] Broadberry and Gupta 2012, Table 12.
[26] Li 2011.
[27] Li and van Zanden 2012.
[28] Drelichman and Voth 2014.
[29] Gilmour 2011, p. 319.
[30] Levi 1945, p. 3.
This is why I can’t take doomers seriously
Things used to be really expensive. It cost many hours working to earn the money to buy things that cost just minutes today. The time price is the true price and it has been falling for most products as population has increased.