Sheilagh Ogilvie: evaluation

Transcript context

…Just from a theory point of view, I’ve never understood the happy story. I see that the supply of labor goes down, but one would think the demand for labor and the products of labor would go down more or less proportionally. Why is there any reason to expect real wages to go up in that scenario? The wage evidence actually does suggest that gradually, as the economy recovered after the Black Death in Western Europe, wages went up. Employers actually immediately start complaining to the government, “Oh, you have to suppress wages. There aren’t enough servants. There aren’t enough laborers.” Even in Western Europe, the rulers try to do that. There was a perception, at any rate, that workers felt that they were able to demand higher wages, and in particular, females were demanding higher wages. This was seen as really outrageous because women were supposed to be obedient, disciplined workers, and here they were saying, “I’m going to leave the village unless you increase my wages. ” Although your reasoning is right, I think the balance of the effect really was to increase wage pressure. But how the society responded to it depended a lot on whether the employers could get the state on their side to help suppress the wage demands. Let’s say we send you back in time, let’s say to southwestern Germany. It’s an area you know a lot about, during the Black Death, and you can give people advice, what they should do to cope. What do you tell them?…

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