To what extent did the Industrial Revolution generate a rapid increase in standards-of-living for the working class?

 Standard of living can be a difficult concept to measure or define, given its normative nature, but it can consist of different factors such as level of income, quality and quantity of goods and services available to consumers that can lead to wellbeing. The industrial revolution shifted the occupations of the working class towards manual related industries such as manufacturing, given the increase in urbanisation but it is clear that a large proportion of the population did not experience a rapid increase in standard of living. Those researching this topic can be split into two categories, optimists who believe in increased standard of living and pessimists, that believe in the opposite. 

Over this period, the working class had to work in poor working conditions with ‘little to show in terms of living standards’ according to Marx as well as on many more days during the year (Voth, 2004). Real wages increased by a substantial amount, by more than 80% for adult men from 1820 to 1850 and under 30% from 1790-1820 but despite this, the gains would have been ‘bought by longer hours of more intensive work, performed in more dangerous and unhealthy workplaces, by Englishmen and women many of whom lived in the unhygienic, disease-ridden, dark, damp and crowded conditions of British cities’ during the 19th century and this carries onto poor housing (Voth, 2004). Income is often criticised as a measure of standard of living, especially in this data which only feature the male population, since it is an input into wellbeing rather than output. It does not factor in what the income is used for. In the process of urbanisation, food and other necessities faced higher prices, offsetting higher wages. It is a relatively poor indicator considering any increases are offset by riskier jobs taken on by workers for which they receive a premium; in fact, incorporating the additional working hours into wages suggests stagnation for the first 20 years of the IR. (Voth, 2004) This would mean material standards of living for the working class are lower, indicating poor standards of living. 

The rise in real wages may have benefitted consumers to a small extent. The period of 1804-06 recorded high levels of luxury consumption, where Englishmen and women were accumulating clothing and other durables at a higher rate, giving out a larger share of their disposable income; total expenditure on non-essential items increased by 137%. (Voth, 2004) Note that this specifically refers to ‘Englishmen’, whereas poorer countries may have faced a worse scenario. Therefore, the material standards of living, and therefore quality of life, must have been higher for the working class. How effective this was depending upon the level to which a consumer is willing to substitute work for leisure, from a micro viewpoint. A worker only has limited number of hours in a day, which he can use for either work or leisure. If the utility he receives from leisure does not compensate the hours he works, this would mean a decrease in quality of life due to lower utility. Although this can differ from consumer to consumer, it gives us guidelines on how much the standard of living improved. Additionally, the benefits of increased choice would only apply to higher income groups or workers, which are a small percentage of the entire population. Lower income groups, as well as those unemployed, would not experience this. In fact, the post-war depression in 1816 had 17% unemployment, but this fell to 1-2% in the latter boom years. (Feinstein, 1998) Ultimately, the data does not effectively support increased living standards.

An effective way to measure the data for standard of living is height levels of the population and namely for the working class, measuring net output rather than input as real wages do. This is a good indicator of the quantity of nutrition and calories taken by the human body and is influenced by people’s working environment. In the early stages of the industrial revolution, there seemed to be an inverse relationship between height and income which was puzzling and could imply that they are not highly correlated. Despite this, Floud et al. found that average heights increased by 3.3cm from 1760 to 1830, but then fell. (Voth, 2004) Indeed, the ‘the high relative price of food, poor housing, deteriorating public health and food adulteration, can partially explain the declining trend in heights showed for the nineteenth century’ (Cinnirella, 2008). The heights estimated for the period 1865-80 display the inability of working-class families to have an adequate nutritional status despite the higher real incomes. Nevertheless, there are various problems with using this as an indicator and when the data is looked at accurately, as it increased in a period where real wages were stagnant. For a start, the evidence used shows minute changes in height which isn’t conclusive for standard of living. Height can be influenced by various other factors, namely genetics and geographical location; it does not necessarily indicate that the workers lived in poor standards. 

Evidently, industrialisation led to higher quality education and infrastructure investment, translated into better healthcare facilities and awareness of nutrition. According to the theory of technophysio evolution, ‘humans have gained an unprecedented degree of control over their environment’ (Floud, 2011). The product of ‘their and previous generations’ ingenuity and investment’ would not only increase the provision of necessities such as those mentioned above, but also raise accessibility to better quality and quantity of goods and services, hence leading to better standards of living as consumer choice is higher. These improvements would have led to changes in diet for workers, where ‘labouring men may be as little used to dine without meat as they now are to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and medical discoveries may have added several more years to the average length of human life’ and may be ‘within reach of every diligent and thrifty working man’ (Floud, 2011). Also, the process of IR also led to increased civil and political rights in Britain, which had a ‘high number of civil liberties. This, along with the increased consumer choice through urbanisation can lead to increase living standards for the entire population, which includes the working class. But the effect of this is questionable when industrialisation can lead to a more polluted environment, and workers are more likely to fall in; the effects of this would cancel out with the improved healthcare and other facilities. It also means the creation of slum housing and increased crime rates particularly with lower income groups, which decreases quality of life. (Feinstein, 1998) Malthusian economists would argue the concept of limited natural resources, so any economic growth would be offset by population increase, which was the case for the UK during industrialisation where they faced higher birth rates as well as increased migration from countries such as Ireland, contributing to Britain’s ‘rapidly expanding urban population’. This would explain the rise in food prices as well as poverty in urbanised areas in the UK and would lead to lower quality of life. 

On balance, the evidence points towards a large proportion of the population experiencing a decrease in living standards for various reasons in the period of the industrial revolution. Whether or not this is conclusive depends upon the time period considered for the data and standard of living. It is difficult to assess the working class given that their living standards depended on their specific occupation and the number of hours they worked. Indeed, ‘most British workers and their families did not experience an actual deterioration in their standard of living during and after the Industrial Revolution. But neither did they enjoy the rapid progress which the super-optimists have discerned’ (Feinstein, 1998) Additionally, the benefits of industrialisation to living standards are more likely to come after the actual period of the IR, with more long-term advantages than the short term in the form of better infrastructure and health services. It also tends to depend on previous generations and fertility of the population in question, but these factors are unaccounted for when measuring living standards in the specific time period of the industrial revolution. Having said that, the issues with the working conditions are apparent, and the process of urbanisation evidently leads to poorer living standards, given that individuals from rural areas had a better nutritional status and height compared to those in urban centres, regardless of income. Therefore, it can be concluded that the industrial revolution did not result in a rapid increase in the standard of living at all for the working-class, but a decrease for most.

Bibliography

Cinnirella, F. (2008). Optimists or pessismists? A reconsideration of nutritional status in Britain 1740-1865. In F. Cinnirella, European review of Economic History (pp. 325-354). Cambridge.

Feinstein, C. (1998). Pessimism perpetuated. In C. Feinstein, Journal of Economic History (pp. 625-658). Cambridge.

Floud, F. H. (2011). Chapter 1. In F. H. Floud, The changing body (pp. 1-40). Cambridge.

Muldrew, J. (2011). Chapter 3. In J. Muldrew, Food, energy and the creation of industriousness (pp. 117-162). Cambridge.

Voth, H. (2004). Living standards and the urban environment. In F. a. Johnson, The Cambridge Economic history of modern Britain, vol (pp. 268-294). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.