Feinstein wages

The standard modern reconstruction of nominal and real wages for British workers across the conventional Industrial Revolution period, produced by Charles Feinstein and published in his 1998 Journal of Economic History paper “Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution.” The Feinstein series superseded earlier reconstructions (Phelps Brown & Hopkins on builders’ wages; Lindert & Williamson 1983) and became the empirical baseline for the long-running optimist-vs-pessimist debate about IR-era worker welfare.

The series shows real wages stagnant or declining through 1770–1820, with substantial improvement only in the 1830s–1850s — much later than older optimist accounts suggested. Combined with the anthropometric evidence (Komlos and others on declining adult male stature in the early IR), Feinstein’s data shifted the welfare-history consensus toward the pessimist position: the early IR did not benefit ordinary workers in measurable terms; the welfare gains came after roughly 1830 and accelerated in the second half of the 19th century.

The series is contested at its margins. Subsequent work has revised specific decade-level estimates and refined the cost-of-living deflator. Allen’s welfare-ratio framework provides an alternative that produces somewhat more optimistic numbers for the early IR. The Humphries-Schneider 2019 spinning-wages reconstruction extends the picture downward into the female-and-child-labour wage record that Feinstein’s adult-male focus did not capture.

Coverage

• Time: 1770–1870, decade-level estimates with annual interpolation.
• Variables: nominal wages by occupation; cost-of-living index; real wages by occupation; aggregate real-wage index.
• Geography: Britain, with London and provincial subseries.
• Coverage of women’s and children’s wages is limited; the series is best read as a male-adult-wage history.

What to be skeptical of

• The cost-of-living deflator is sensitive. Different deflators (Allen’s basket, Feinstein’s, the Lindert-Williamson 1983) produce materially different real-wage trajectories. The “stagnation in the early IR” finding is robust to most reasonable deflators but its magnitude is not.
• Adult male focus. The series tracks adult male wages in regular employment. The actual workforce included substantial female and child labour at lower wages and in less regular employment; aggregating Feinstein with the Humphries-Schneider spinning data suggests the early-IR workforce-average real wage was lower than the male-adult series implies.
• Regional aggregation. A national real-wage series obscures the Kelly-Mokyr-Ó Gráda 2023 finding that real wages rose sharply in the industrializing north and declined in the previously prosperous south. Treating Britain as a single labour market is a useful first approximation but a non-trivial simplification.

Source

• Feinstein, Charles H. “Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution.” Journal of Economic History 58(3), 1998: 625–658.
• Subsequent reconstruction work by Clark, Allen, Broadberry, Humphries, and others has refined and extended the Feinstein baseline.