Here Bryan Caplan shares my frustration with historians who take their economics for granted. My own experience with high school and college history is that economic causes and effects are merely asserted – taken for granted as though it can be observed like a cue ball hitting an 8 ball into a pocket. The other methodology in my experience is simply quoting an economic illiterate from the time, as though Charles Dickens would be the authority on economics.
After picking apart his old history textbook, Bryan gives what the textbook should have said:
So what should history textbooks say about these matters? This: Working conditions during the early Industrial Revolution were bad by modern standards, but a major improvement by the standards of the time. Factory work looked good to people raised on backbreaking farm labor - and it looked great to the many immigrants who flocked to the rising centers of industry from all over the world. This alliance of entrepreneurs, inventors, and workers peacefully kickstarted the modern world that we enjoy today.
And what of the "workers' movement"? A halfway decent textbook would emphasize that it wasn't quantitatively important. Few workers belonged, and they didn't get much for their efforts. Indeed, "workers' movement" is a misnomer; labor unions didn't speak for most workers, and were often dominated by leftist intellectuals. A fully decent textbook would discuss the many possible negative side effects of labor market regulation and unionization - so students realize that the critics of economic populism were neither knaves nor fools.
Don Boudreaux also linked to Bryan’s post.
The list of egregiously mistaken yet most widely held beliefs about economic history is long. And one of the worst offenders on this list is the notion that labor unions created the American middle class – the myth that workers’ ability to bargain for higher wages and fringe benefits is chiefly a consequence of their heroically organizing with similar workers to collectively demand from employers this higher pay. (Remember, workers at Ford Motor Co. were not unionized until 1941, but twenty-seven years earlier Henry Ford more than doubled his workers’ pay. And he did so not chiefly out of any “personal concern” for his workers; rather, he did so because, by lowering worker turnover and reducing worker absenteeism, this higher pay for workers would result in higher profits for Ford.)
Is it possible that unionization had a positive net effect on the livelihood of labor? Yes. Is unionized labor what created the middle class? Give me a break.
Economic historian Mark Koyama also commented on Bryan’s post.
My memory was not 100% accurate as the best estimate for male working hours in London in England in 1830 (when working hours were at their absolute longest) is actually 3356 rather than 3000. This estimate is from Voth's use of court data in order to reconstruct how individuals used their time (2001). By 1870 other estimates put it at 2755. Working hours in excess of 3000 hours per year are seen as extraordinarily long in comparison to more recent episodes of industrialization so 4000 in the US still seems unrealistic (though it is not that much greater than the highest upper bound some historians have estimated). Of course, the point is that workers seemed to prefer working long hours in factories and using their wages to buy newly available consumption goods (cotton underwear which could be washed easily must have drastically increased consumer surplus relative to scratchy woolen underwear) rather than working in agriculture (where wages were lower and hours probably also long at least during some periods of the year).
In the UK and by extension the US, if a household had an able bodied adult male able to work then normally they would not be desperately poor (Robert Allen's wage series show that real wages in English and the US were perhaps 2 or 3 times southern European wages and people were able to survive there). One reason why perceptions of poverty increased in England during the early 19th century (in addition to the point that it was just more concentrated and hence visible) was to due with the social dislocation associated with urbanization (much higher rates of illegitimacy, more single earner households etc.). Families without male earners were indeed desperately poor and reliant on very young children working and these households became more common during Industrialization.
