In the 1600s and 1700s in England, prominent writers such as Daniel Defoe argued that the wages of laborers should be kept low. If wages were too high, laborers would only work a few days a week and be idle the rest of the time.
“There is a general taint of slothfulness upon our poor,” wrote Defoe in 1704; “there’s nothing more frequent than for an Englishman to work until he has got his pocket full of money, and then to go and be idle, or perhaps drunk, till ‘t is all gone.”[1] And in 1771 Arthur Young wrote: “Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.”[2]
This was part of the mercantilist mindset, said Edgar S. Furniss in 1920 in a book that I discussed earlier in a different context.
The prevailing view was that labor had what economists call a “backward-bending supply curve.” As wages went up—which normally would draw in more supply—a good portion of the work force worked less, not more. Apparently, they didn’t need more.
Why Early Industrial Workers Didn’t Work Much
But there was actually a good reason they might not need more. There wasn’t much to buy. They couldn’t go down to the local Best Buy for gadgets or go over to Starbucks for a cup of coffee. It wasn’t until coffee, tea, and gadgets became options that workers began voluntarily to work more.
At least that’s one theory. It belongs to historian Jan de Vries, who says that in order to have an Industrial Revolution there had to be an “industrious revolution.”[3] There had to be attractive objects to buy before laborers were willing to work hard. And beginning in the late 1600s (about the time that the above writers were complaining about the laziness of the working classes) such items began to appear. To obtain them, workers had to be more industrious. Soon, hours worked started to rise and the Industrial Revolution entered into high gear.
And there is evidence that de Vries is right. In the 1990s, Hans-Joachim Voth, a German historian, came up with an ingenious way of learning how much, on average, London workers were working. His idea was to use court records, not for the purpose of learning about criminals but to learn about witnesses to crimes.
A Measurement of Time Worked in the 1700s
Court records in the late 1700s were complete enough to include the time of day the crime was witnessed and what the witness was doing when the crime occurred. From that factual, unbiased information, Voth estimated that hours worked in 1760 ranged from 2,288 to 2,631 to per year; in 1803, from 3,366 to 3,538.[4] That is a remarkable increase in working hours. Even when Voth modified them based on other evidence, it was clear that workers had increased their work-hours by at least 20 percent.
The idea that trinkets and baubles became available may well explain why the average person began to work more , making possible the output gains of the Industrial Revolution.
Notes (Comments Follow the Notes)
[1] Quoted in Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labor Theories of the Later Mercantilists (New York: Kelly & Millman, 1957), 100.
[2] Quoted in Furniss, 118
[3] Jan de Vries, “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution.” Journal of Economic History 54, no. 2 (June 1994): 249-270.
[4] Hans-Joachim Voth, “Time and Work in Eighteenth-Century London,” Journal of Economic History 58, no. 1 (1998): 29-58, at 38, http://www.jstor.org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/stable/2566252.
The image is an engraving from Universal Magazine, London, date uncertain, showing a phase of silk production. In Jane Stroup’s possession.
Your post about the lower classes and work was thought-provoking. It’s odd to think of (North)Western Europeans as slothful. The year I lived in Germany my home was in a high-rise dormitory for students at the University of Tubingen. I lived on the floor with all the “foreign” students. I was the only American and the only native English speaker: German was the one language we all had in common. The lady who lived next door to me was from Rome. She invited me to spend Christmas with her that year (1978) and I did. She often mentioned that Italians are not particularly industrious: Italy had many rules and regulations that discouraged work. In fact, she lived part of each year in Tubingen precisely because she could get work. (One wonders about cause and effect: did Italian rules discourage work because Italians aren’t industrious or did the work-discouraging rules cause Italians to be un-industrious?) “Work is for northern Europeans” she told me (in German, of course).
I remember being struck by how few nice consumer goods German stores had. I even had trouble buying good quality nylons. “Why do industrious Germans have so few nice things to buy?” I can remember thinking. So the observations by Daniel Defoe and Arthur Young you noted in your post were surprising to me. Jan de Vries’ theory doesn’t exactly fit the German case: Germany in 1978 was still recovering from the devastation of WWII. The Germans I knew were working hard because they had a vision of a better future, a future with nice things to buy.
One point to consider is that the Germans could remember a past in which they had had nice things. In 1700, even 1750, most people could not find many non-necessities that were cheap enough for them to afford. And they probably could not envision a situation in which there were such things.
While I’m comparing work incentives in the USSR to pre-industrial England, here’s a most revealing anecdote often told in the former USSR:
A man starts off on his walk to work and sees two laborers, one digging a hole, the other coming behind him and filling it in.
“Hey, comrades, what are you doing?”
“Planting trees,” says one.
“But I don’t see any trees.”
“Usually there are 3 of us, but the comrade who puts the trees in the holes is out sick today.”
Similar to: “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”
As rigid as the English class system was, the poor could always use more money for more comforts, luxuries, nutrition, etc. (as others have commented).
The one big test of the work vs. available goods is the Soviet Union (and maybe other communist countries) where goods were in very short supply and wages relatively unchangeable.
Why work more or harder if you could not buy more or buy what you wanted. And buying anything had significant transaction costs in time, research, and legal risk (for black market goods).
Result: most people didn’t want to work more hours, and often not even for more money. They would accept harder work for more leisure. Thus workers went to arctic regions for a huge increase in pay and cumulative vacation time.
Perhaps applicable to your issue is the fact that workers will work harder in return for leisure. Freedom has value!
Work continues to change. The loss of jobs in the United States over the past couple of decades has been due to two main changes in the business environment.
The most discussed is undoubtedly the movement of these manufacturing jobs to China and other Asian countries where labor is much cheaper than here in the United States. China was the first supplier of goods based on this “new” labor for the western countries, and as a result the Chinese economy grew at a clip far exceeding 15% in most years. However, as the migration of labor from their farms to their cities began to tap out the available new internal labor market, the China labor costs began to rise.
Western countries then began to source materials from other, even lower cost economies — India, Vietnam, and Indonesia among others.
This trend toward “globalization” has recently been slowed, partly due to our Covid shutdown, and partly due to the re-imposition of tariffs on imported products, particularly from China. Undoubtedly this convergence of economic and political considerations will continue to drive imports up and down in the future, as conditions change.
The second major factor at work has been the steady transition to automation in our factories, illustrated by this video. Robots are more precise, don’t get hurt on the job, need no medical and retirement benefits, do not go on strike and can work around the clock, without vacation, holidays or sick days.
Capital investment for equipment such as this has gained favorable tax treatment and this shift toward automation will continue wherever it makes sense.
(Victor Brown, a former senior industrial executive, has a new book out, “Welcome to College—Your Career Starts Now!”.)
I’m fascinated by your post. But if I’m doing the numbers right, the American 40-hour/week work schedule is a good bit less at 1960 hours/year. The 3538 would be 12 hours/day 6 days/per week. Brutal. Makes me wonder about the bauble thesis… Personally, I think under those conditions I’d be more interested in spending my money in the pub than on a new kitchen gadget!
Today we have plenty of basic items like food and clothes, so when we think of spending disposable income we often think of gadgets one might purchase at Best Buy. But a weakness in the “gadgets-weren’t-available-and-therefore-they-didn’t-work” theory is that although there were fewer gadgets there was lots of other stuff to buy—much of it extremely important to a healthy and happy life. In Restoration England a whole roasting chicken cost about $100 in today’s money, but if you had the money it was available. In other words, with a higher income a lower class person could buy more and more nutritious food. And more and warmer and more stylish clothes. And plate and utensils. And personal services from others. And soap and other personal care items. And medical care. And work animals. Not to mention books and pamphlets and education generally.
So I think the “no gadgets” theorists may be guilty of that common historical sin known as anachronism.
Another interesting post! I think there is an element of truth to what you are saying. While there are likely some general equilibrium issues with my comments, I never claimed to be good at general equilibrium, so I will talk about stuff from only a partial equilibrium perspective.
So the industrial revolution brought about labor specialization, which raised employee productivity, giving the factory owner more stuff to sell. The factory owner wanted to keep all those profits, but found he could profit even more if he raised wages so he could hire more people to produce even more stuff. Now there are people with more more money that they can use to buy things just as there is more stuff to sell. So that supports what you are saying.
Something else was likely also going on: as people specialized in factory production, they likely become less self-sufficient (more reliant on trade) than they were before. My guess is that before the revolution they spent more time making clothes and such than they did after. I don’t know how Hans-Joachim Voth counted time spent doing making clothes for an immediate family member, but I could easily see that being classified as a chore and not working time.
Both things could be going on simultaneously and the second does not mean that de Vries’s thought was incorrect!
Do you discount the potential desire of the poor to build enough wealth to purchase non-trinket goods such as education for the eldest son or land? Was the class distinction so limiting that one could never escape it (the distinction with America that de Tocqueville considered exceptional)?
My investigations on the history of the steward show that in both the 1600s and 1700s, on the estates, some of the villagers owned their property (from 1-5 acres). Stewards (who represented the landowners) were cautioned to honestly negotiate purchase and sale of property from and to villagers. (I found some of this in neat old documents in the Library of Congress, bound in with other old items). Some of these villagers became significant land owners.
This was, of course, rural economics so that would not apply to cities. However, some of these villagers traded up to obtain land nearer towns and cities so as to reduce the travel to market and to supply staples (e.g., eggs) to the city. It was this that generated my thoughts about upward mobility and a willingness to invest significantly in sweat equity.