Eight Centuries of Wages in Britain I
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The main focus of my research group, currently, is gathering data on various structural-demographic (SD) variables for dozens of past societies. We’ve been using an AI-assisted approach to collecting data on socio-political instability (you can read about our experience with AI here). The goal is to do this for all substantial historical states for which data sources are rich enough. I will report on this research phase in the weeks ahead.
At the same time, we are gathering data on other SD indicators, because we aim to investigate how accurately they can predict instability (actually, the correct term is “retrodict”). The most important indicator is wages, because that allows us to quantify the wealth pump. In today’s post I will look at an exceptionally long wage time-series for Britain, from 1206 to 2025.
You, reader, might ask: why should I care about how much English workers earned centuries ago? To understand this, consider that we, today, again ended up in a period of spiking instability, which may (hopefully not) explode into another civil war. Turning off the wealth pump was how past societies emerged from their crisis periods. And sometimes they managed to do so without bloodshed, as we shall see in Part II. How about learning from both negative and positive outcomes?