2023-07-30 15:33:45
The development of humanity often takes place gradually, but over time many positive trends have become clearly visible. One such trend is the increasing abundance and availability of food. HumanProgress.org’s series of articles examines the affordability of food relative to wages in England from the 13th century to the present day. Gregory Clark, a professor at the University of California, Davis, has done extensive research on England’s economic history. As part of his research into the state of the working class in England, Clark developed an extensive data set that included the nominal wages of skilled and unskilled workers in England between the 13th and 19th centuries, as well as the nominal price of food. It is important to highlight that Clark assumes a 10-hour working day before 1720 in his calculations. Using the concept of time prices developed by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley, we can calculate how many hours a person must work to earn enough money to buy a particular food item. In this analysis, Clark’s nominal food prices serve as the numerator and nominal hourly wages from Clark’s and the UK’s Office of National Statistics’ Annual Survey of Hours of Work and Earnings serve as the denominator. Figure 1: Food abundance from the perspective of unskilled workers in the number of working hours in England As can be seen in Figure 1, one pound (0.45 kg) of beef required 3.05 working hours in the 1600s, which by 2022 will be 0.29 working hours decreased. One pound of mutton required 3.27 working hours 400 years ago, but today it is only 0.43 hours. The availability of one pound of pork decreased from 3.52 working hours to 0.29 hours. Figure 2: Abundance of food from the perspective of unskilled workers in England per working hour In Figure 2, we can see that an unskilled worker in 1636 could buy 0.33 pounds of beef from one working hour. This has risen to £3.45 by 2022. An unskilled worker can now buy 3.44 pounds of pork instead of 0.28 pounds. Put another way, with the same number of labor hours it took to buy 1 pound of beef in the 1600s, they can buy 10.5 pounds of beef in 2022. An unskilled worker received 7.6 pounds instead of 1 pound of mutton. Instead of 1 pound of pork, you can buy 12.1 pounds today. Figure 3: Abundance of food from the perspective of skilled workers in England in number of working hours In Figure 3, we can see that a skilled worker worked 2.14 working hours for one pound of beef in the 1600s, but in 2022 only 0.23 working hours are needed for this. The cost of one pound of mutton decreased from 2.29 labor hours to 0.34 hours, and one pound of pork decreased from 2.47 labor hours to 0.23 hours. Figure 4: Food Abundance from the Perspective of Skilled Workers in England by Hour of Work Figure 4 shows that in the 1600s, a skilled worker bought 0.47 pounds of beef for one hour of work. This has risen to £4.41 by 2022. A skilled worker now gets 2.96 pounds instead of 0.44 pounds of mutton. And instead of 0.41 pounds of pork, he gets 4.39 pounds for an hour’s work. Put another way, for the same number of labor hours that bought 1 pound of beef in the 1600s, skilled workers can buy 9.4 pounds of beef in 2022. The skilled worker gets 6.8 pounds instead of 1 pound of mutton. And instead of 1 pound of pork, you can buy 10.9 pounds. According to these statistics, it is clear that meat products have become much more abundant for both skilled and unskilled workers. Also note that the gap between unskilled workers and skilled workers has decreased. For example, for one pound of pork in the 1630s, an unskilled laborer had to work 3.52 hours, while a skilled laborer had to work 2.47 hours, a difference of more than an hour. However, in 2022, an unskilled worker would have to work 17.4 minutes to afford a pound of pork, while a skilled worker would have to work 13.8 minutes, a difference of just 3.6 minutes. Finally, it can also be concluded that the growth rate of food abundance has clearly accelerated in the last 200 years. Whereas between 1636 and 1865 the rate of increase in the abundance of beef, mutton and pork per unskilled worker increased by about 0.18% per year, between 1865 and 2022 it increased by 0.7%. Similarly, the compound annual growth rate for a skilled worker rose from 0.2% before 1865 to 1.03% after. Since the mid-1800s, then, the growth rate of wages relative to prices has increased dramatically.
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#abundance #food #today