Downwardly Mobile

Interesting economic history factoid I came across the other week: until the industrial revolution, your grandchildren were on average likely to end up doing significantly shittier work than you did.

Two reasons behind this. Firstly, economic growth was all but nonexistent. More people meant less food, which meant - rather upsettingly - starvation. So on the whole, populations didn't grow very much. And the number of 'good' jobs stayed pretty stable.

Secondly, reproduction rates were higher at the top of the economic ladder - that is, the rich were likely to have more children that made it past puberty than the poor did. Multiply that by a couple of generations, and a lord was likely to have a lot more descendants than his serfs.

But, of course, with the number of good jobs frustratingly static, all those kids couldn't grow up to be lords like great granddaddy was. Luckily, there were convenient labour gaps at the more poverty stricken end of the economy because those damned peasants kept snuffing it. So everyone could move down a level.

There were exceptions, of course. But the result was that the overriding economic tendency was towards downward mobility: on average, each generation could expect lives slightly worse than their parents had. This is the exact opposite of the scenario the western middle classes have got used to the last couple of centuries.