It feels to me like the hairs of the nobility are doing amazingly well. That is more than enough money to support a lifestyle of leisure. Such a lifestyle is not available to the vast majority of people. So it seems like they mostly did secure a superior existence for their heirs.
This is only true if you restrict “nobility” to Great Britain and if you only count “nobles” those who are considered such in our current day. This is a confusion of the current British noble title (specifically members of “Peerage of Great Britain”) with “land owning rentier class that existed before the industrial revolution”. For our discussion, we need to look at the second one.
I do not have specific numbers of UK, but quoting for Europe from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobility#Europe): ”The countries with the highest proportion of nobles were Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (15% of an 18th-century population of 800,000[citation needed]), Castile (probably 10%), Spain (722,000 in 1768 which was 7–8% of the entire population) and other countries with lower percentages, such as Russia in 1760 with 500,000–600,000 nobles (2–3% of the entire population), and pre-revolutionary France where there were no more than 300,000 prior to 1789, which was 1% of the population (although some scholars believe this figure is an overestimate). In 1718 Sweden had between 10,000 and 15,000 nobles, which was 0.5% of the population. In Germany it was 0.01%.[46]
In the Kingdom of Hungary nobles made up 5% of the population.[47]All the nobles in 18th-century Europe numbered perhaps 3–4 million out of a total of 170–190 million inhabitants.[48][49] By contrast, in 1707, when England and Scotland united into Great Britain, there were only 168 English peers, and 154 Scottish ones, though their immediate families were recognised as noble.”
Based on above, I think expecting 1% to be landed rentier is a conservative estimate for 18th century for whole Europe. Even if we go with one tenth of this, expecting 0.1% of the population to retain this (which would imply that their population dropped while all other classes increased dramatically), would mean about 68 thousand people in the UK, and over 700 000 in whole Europe.
AND they are expected to live off from rents of land. I doubt that living of land rents is true for the majority of the 1500 current British nobles you referred to.
Perhaps I have listened to too much Georgist propaganda, but it seems to me that land is pretty important even today. But maybe this is mostly true for land in cities? Not sure. I would like to see some statistics about what was the typical consequence for being an aristocrat during the industrial revolution. I can imagine that each of the following was true for someone, the question is how many:
you get killed
you survive, but your land is taken away
you sell the land trying to join the new economy, but you suck at the new economy, so you lose the money
you keep the land, but it is at an unimportant place, the rent is too low
you keep the land, you get a big rent, you are a successful modern rentier
I’d like to see a pie chart of this. Maybe some other options, if I forgot them.
7% of income tax returns in the USA include rental income. Most of that 7% can’t live off just the rents. But I would say more than 1% of the USA can easily live off of land rents.
The heirs of European nobility are still very rich on average. So I feel like the main example goes the other way.
Not fully. Most of the nobility is gone. Only like 0.01% remains maybe what could be called “rentier”, or even less compared to what had been before.
It feels to me like the hairs of the nobility are doing amazingly well. That is more than enough money to support a lifestyle of leisure. Such a lifestyle is not available to the vast majority of people. So it seems like they mostly did secure a superior existence for their heirs.
This is only true if you restrict “nobility” to Great Britain and if you only count “nobles” those who are considered such in our current day. This is a confusion of the current British noble title (specifically members of “Peerage of Great Britain”) with “land owning rentier class that existed before the industrial revolution”. For our discussion, we need to look at the second one.
I do not have specific numbers of UK, but quoting for Europe from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobility#Europe):
”The countries with the highest proportion of nobles were Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (15% of an 18th-century population of 800,000[citation needed]), Castile (probably 10%), Spain (722,000 in 1768 which was 7–8% of the entire population) and other countries with lower percentages, such as Russia in 1760 with 500,000–600,000 nobles (2–3% of the entire population), and pre-revolutionary France where there were no more than 300,000 prior to 1789, which was 1% of the population (although some scholars believe this figure is an overestimate). In 1718 Sweden had between 10,000 and 15,000 nobles, which was 0.5% of the population. In Germany it was 0.01%.[46]
In the Kingdom of Hungary nobles made up 5% of the population.[47] All the nobles in 18th-century Europe numbered perhaps 3–4 million out of a total of 170–190 million inhabitants.[48][49] By contrast, in 1707, when England and Scotland united into Great Britain, there were only 168 English peers, and 154 Scottish ones, though their immediate families were recognised as noble.”
Based on above, I think expecting 1% to be landed rentier is a conservative estimate for 18th century for whole Europe. Even if we go with one tenth of this, expecting 0.1% of the population to retain this (which would imply that their population dropped while all other classes increased dramatically), would mean about 68 thousand people in the UK, and over 700 000 in whole Europe.
AND they are expected to live off from rents of land. I doubt that living of land rents is true for the majority of the 1500 current British nobles you referred to.
Perhaps I have listened to too much Georgist propaganda, but it seems to me that land is pretty important even today. But maybe this is mostly true for land in cities? Not sure. I would like to see some statistics about what was the typical consequence for being an aristocrat during the industrial revolution. I can imagine that each of the following was true for someone, the question is how many:
you get killed
you survive, but your land is taken away
you sell the land trying to join the new economy, but you suck at the new economy, so you lose the money
you keep the land, but it is at an unimportant place, the rent is too low
you keep the land, you get a big rent, you are a successful modern rentier
I’d like to see a pie chart of this. Maybe some other options, if I forgot them.
7% of income tax returns in the USA include rental income. Most of that 7% can’t live off just the rents. But I would say more than 1% of the USA can easily live off of land rents.