Sheilagh Ogilvie: belief

Transcript context

…Now, one commonly hears the claim that the Black Death — of course, it was terrible for society, terrible for those who died, but that in some ways — medium term, longer term — it had positive effects. That wages went up, that spurred labor-saving innovation, helped Europe grow. Is there any truth to that? Or is that just a story that’s fabricated? My personal view is that it is mostly a happy story, a takeaway from something that we all intuitively know was terrible. I think the sheer scale of the human suffering or death — 30 percent to 60 percent of the European and Middle Eastern population died. Compared to modern pandemics, it’s the worst pandemic we have any information about. Just a lot of people died. Walking through villages and towns after the Black Death would’ve been way worse than Dresden after the Second World War or Altadena after the fires a month ago. Even the survivors — in the longer term, maybe their wages went up, and in some cases their bargaining ability vis-à-vis employers went up, but for the time being, their employers were dead. Their villages were deserted. They were basically walking around having lost one- to two-thirds of their neighbors. It took a while for the beneficial redistributional effects to kick in. It wasn’t until the later 14th or even the early 15th century that the wage effects really started redistributing towards the workers and away from the owners of land and capital. The other thing is that the effects were really different in different societies. The happy story is one that we tell ourselves about Western Europe, where there was a comparatively free bargain that went on between workers and employers. In Eastern Europe, the shortage of labor after the Black Death actually created an incentive for the major employers who were the feudal landlords to strengthen their controls, their restrictions over their serfs, over their unfree peasants. You actually get something called the second serfdom coming into effect, where the incentives for landlords to coerce unfree labor become really strong when you have very little labor. So, Eastern Europe goes into serfdom. Western Europe frees itself from serfdom. Even the happy story — it’s regionally very various. 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?…

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