Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedBrad DeLong: belief
22 Feb 2023 Conversations with Tyler Brad DeLong on Intellectual and Technical Progress
“I think the numbers then are what big progress meant back then. John Stuart Mill in the 1870s could think, and had some reason on his side, that there actually had not been an increase in working-class real wages across the years from 1800 to his day.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Brad DeLong
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 22 Feb 2023
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…What do you think the numbers are showing us? Because they don’t look that good. Is it that we don’t trust the numbers? Or is it that numbers like that are what big progress meant back then? I think the numbers then are what big progress meant back then. John Stuart Mill in the 1870s could think, and had some reason on his side, that there actually had not been an increase in working-class real wages across the years from 1800 to his day. A bunch of that is distribution, but a bunch of that is simply slow growth. Things like the 2 percent per year income and productivity growth that we have grown used to since the coming of the Second Industrial Revolution, since the start of Bob Gordon’s one big wave — that really is completely unprecedented. There was nothing like that before, not in the biggest efflorescences, not in the classic British Industrial Revolution. If we’re trying to think about the period, say, 1870 through to the 1920s, when you have some kind of modern consumer society, what’s the best number for reflecting how big that change was?…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.