Excellent point. But these changes are much less than the 100x wealth increase, which implies that there is a very strong poverty-inducing force, it’s just not completely negating progress.
Hmm, I don’t feel like I have a good intuition for what a 100x wealth increase should look like.
On the one hand, you could imagine a 100x wealth increase that didn’t grow the size of the middle class at all, and just preserved existing proportions, so that 90% of the wealth still remained with the top 10%.
I imagine you mean something like “if the poorest 10% of 1700 had their wealth go up by 100x, then they should still be much better off than the poorest 10% of today are now”. Then an obvious question is, how much has the wealth of the poorest 10% of today gone up relative to the poorest 10% of 1700?
This source, which says it’s maintained by the University of Sheffield, mentions that “During the eighteenth century wages could be as low as two or three pounds per year for a domestic servant, plus food, lodging and clothing. A beggar would normally hope to be given between a farthing and two pence in alms, while a parish pauper could hope for a weekly pension of between a few pence and a few shillings”.
One farthing and two pennies is apparently 9/960ths of a pound, and at the same time it mentions that A man’s suit could easily cost £8, while even the uniform of a child looked after by the Foundling Hospital cost £1 12s. 10 ½d. So (rounding the cost of that uniform down to one pound to avoid dealing with old British units), that implies that a beggar would have needed to beg 106 years to afford one child’s uniform, assuming that they didn’t spend any of that money on anything else.
I do find that a little hard to believe—what did the beggars wear, then? (Maybe the number was supposed to be weekly not yearly?) But even if we assume that the beggar had 100x the income implied here, it seems to me plausible to assume that ownership of a smartphone alone—that many homeless people of today do own—would represent a 100x increase in wealth compared to that, given the complex international supply networks and high-end chip manufacturing that goes into building a smartphone.
Excellent point. But these changes are much less than the 100x wealth increase, which implies that there is a very strong poverty-inducing force, it’s just not completely negating progress.
Hmm, I don’t feel like I have a good intuition for what a 100x wealth increase should look like.
On the one hand, you could imagine a 100x wealth increase that didn’t grow the size of the middle class at all, and just preserved existing proportions, so that 90% of the wealth still remained with the top 10%.
I imagine you mean something like “if the poorest 10% of 1700 had their wealth go up by 100x, then they should still be much better off than the poorest 10% of today are now”. Then an obvious question is, how much has the wealth of the poorest 10% of today gone up relative to the poorest 10% of 1700?
This source, which says it’s maintained by the University of Sheffield, mentions that “During the eighteenth century wages could be as low as two or three pounds per year for a domestic servant, plus food, lodging and clothing. A beggar would normally hope to be given between a farthing and two pence in alms, while a parish pauper could hope for a weekly pension of between a few pence and a few shillings”.
One farthing and two pennies is apparently 9/960ths of a pound, and at the same time it mentions that A man’s suit could easily cost £8, while even the uniform of a child looked after by the Foundling Hospital cost £1 12s. 10 ½d. So (rounding the cost of that uniform down to one pound to avoid dealing with old British units), that implies that a beggar would have needed to beg 106 years to afford one child’s uniform, assuming that they didn’t spend any of that money on anything else.
I do find that a little hard to believe—what did the beggars wear, then? (Maybe the number was supposed to be weekly not yearly?) But even if we assume that the beggar had 100x the income implied here, it seems to me plausible to assume that ownership of a smartphone alone—that many homeless people of today do own—would represent a 100x increase in wealth compared to that, given the complex international supply networks and high-end chip manufacturing that goes into building a smartphone.