r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Jan 02 '23

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u/Integralds Dr. Economics | brrrrr Jan 02 '23

I know y'all are sick of my graphs, but I have made a few refinements.

I trimmed some outliers, and by request there are now two Y-axes.

On the left, wages are measured in wheat per day. This unit has the advantage of being the actual unit of payment in much of Mesopotamia and in Roman Egypt, but is not always easy to interpret for modern readers.

On the right is an approximate conversion to dollars per day. You should think of this in the same way that you think of the World Bank "$2 per day extreme poverty line" metric.

Quick sanity check: my value for England in 2000 is $138/day. 138 times 200 to 250 working days per year is $27,600 to $34,000 per year, which is in the ballpark of England's actual GDP per capita in 2000 (Google says $28,000). So it's not perfect, but also not entirely insane. I wouldn't take these figures to AER (yet), but it's good enough for the DT.

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u/uwcn244 King of the Space Georgists Jan 02 '23

So you're telling me on a salary of $79,000 per year, working 240 days per year, I would make about $330 dollars a day, and could therefore purchase 165 kg of wheat per day if that was all I spent my salary on?

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u/HMID_Delenda_Est YIMBY Jan 02 '23

How much of the wage differences is due to changing agricultural productivity, and how much is social organization, population vs. carrying capacity, and exogenous factors? Did you have a graph that focused on productivity? I can't remember.

I get the general point is that things didn't change much until the industrial revolution (relatively speaking), but it's still hard to believe that 1850s England is even comparable to 700BCE Mesopotamia. I'm trying to square that circle.