comparative economies

[ljgeoff]

Does anybody know of work done that compared current economies to historical ones? I know I've seen stuff around comparing how many hours a serf from the middle ages had to work for his food and housing compared to the present day, but darned if I can find it.

What I was wondering was, if one were to take the US GNP or something, and see what the average worker made as a percentage of that, and compared that to historical values. Um, like if the average minimum wage worker makes .01% of the US GNP, how does that compare to the percent of GNP that a medieval serf would have made? Or compared to the average pre-contact Native American, or the average farmer of China's Han Dynasty -- I just wonder how we'd compare.

Comments

[turbo-swami.livejournal.com]

I have never seen a work compare pre-medieval or medieval societies to modern economic exchange. All the diagrams that I have seen with comparisons to modern economic exchange, depicted industrialized societies. I think comparisons are hard to make between the Han Dynasty and modern China for work hours because the societies are very different. The diagram would have to account for self-sufficient farming and bartering. Sales records did not exist in the same way they do now. I think popular historiographies (as opposed to Revisionist, Progressive, post-modern ect)would be more likely to have a diagram of work hours for pesant-earnings in comparison to modern economics. The only book that I have read that has touched on the subject is "Past Imperfect" by Peter Charles Hoffer. I hope this comment does not seem pretentious. My point is that most scholarly works seem to reject juxtaposing concepts like wages and GDP into pre-industrailized societies. I once asked on of my professors if the Song Dynasty could be identified in terms of GDP, and he seemed to become irate at the question.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of this issue as a "quality of life" kind of thing. The question came to me during my HS256 class. We were talking about the first emperor, Legalism and the exploitaion of the underclass. Bill Mihalopoulos (who I'm enjoying quite a bit) made a comment about the exploitation of present day underclass, and I wondered how the two compared.

To support my family, I must work every day of the week for six to eight hours. Now, I realize the the quality or physical intensity of my work is different, and the quality of life is certainly different, but I was wondering if comparisons could be made. The current US GDP is about 13 trillion, or 13 X 10(to the 12th). I make about 23,000 a year, or 23 X 10(to the third). So my slice of the American Pie is about 1.77 billionth.

I don't think that you sound pretentious at all, and I think that your Professor may be a fool; I find comparative culture study fascinating, but to make the comparison one needs a yardstick.

[turbo-swami.livejournal.com]

Bill Mihalopoulos is the teacher who chided me for asking if the Song Dynasty could be identified in terms of GDP.

[ljgeoff.livejournal.com]

Bill Mihalopoulos is the teacher who chided me for asking if the Song Dynasty could be identified in terms of GDP.

Ha!