Introduction

John Hatcher () and Judy Stephenson
Additional contact information
John Hatcher: University of Cambridge

Chapter 1 in Seven Centuries of Unreal Wages, 2018, pp 1-14 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The welfare and quality of life of people in the past are among the most important areas of historical enquiry, and the standard of living of populations is one of the leading determinants of the economic performance of nations. Yet, the chapters in this volume argue that the long-run series of wages and real incomes that have for decades habitually provided the means by which these phenomena are measured, as well as the foundations of much of the writing of economic and social history across the centuries and the countries of the world, are extremely unreliable. One by one the authors systematically expose the multiple weaknesses, inaccuracies and misapprehensions of the standard wage and income data and expose the gulf that exists between the ever-increasing ability to process huge quantities of data, facilitated by spectacular advances in statistical techniques and computer technology, and the poor quality of most of the raw material that is routinely processed.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palscp:978-3-319-96962-6_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9783319969626

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-96962-6_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Studies in Economic History from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().