WHAT HAPPENED TO STANDARDS OF LIVING IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION? I turned to the end of Joel Mokyr’s essay to find the answer to the question of what happened to living standards in the Industrial Revolution. Mokyr calls this debate “the main battlefield on which scholars have argued for decades.” Mokyr (at p.77) summarizes the conclusions: “… living standards remained more or less unchanged between 1760 and 1820 and then accelerated rapidly between 1820 and 1850….” Most studies have focused on some measure of real wages as an indicator of the standard of living. Other studies which use stature as a measure conclude (at p. 81): “…net nutritional status, as measured by stature, increased between about 1760 and 1820 and then went into a secular decline for half a century. Indeed, the cohorts born in 1850-1854 are shorter than any cohort born in the nineteenth century….”
So there were no definite answers in the late 1990’s when the essay seems to have been written.