Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

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You’ve rather missed my point. I’m not saying nothing improved. I’m saying the imperial profits didn’t go to the people doing the dying for empire.

50% wage growth over fifty years whilst Britain’s running the largest empire in history? Compare that to the United States over the same period. The US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever. If imperial profits were trickling down, you’d expect Britain to outpace non-imperial industrialising nations. It didn’t, if anything it was worse.

The literacy and life expectancy gains you’re citing came from industrialisation and public health reforms, not imperial dividends. Meanwhile the landed gentry who actually controlled the imperial trade were getting obscenely wealthy.

Life expectancy of 50 in 1900 still meant working-class Londoners in overcrowded tenements with open sewers, whilst their supposed countrymen lived in townhouses with servants. The Victorian poor saw industrial revolution gains, not imperial ones.

I’ve done more digging now because even though its apples to oranges, the UK itself is now no longer an empire, and we have a 50 year window on when it wasn’t…

So just for additional context on how wage growth compares across different periods (I’ve average across decades):

Victorian Britain (with empire):

- 50% real wage growth over 50 years (1800-1850)

Modern Britain (post-empire):

- 1970s-1980s: 2.9% annual real wage growth

- 1990s: 1.5% annual growth

- 2000s: 1.2% annual growth

- 2010s-2020s: essentially zero growth

Real wages grew by roughly 33% per decade from 1970 to 2007, then completely stagnated. By 2020, median disposable income was only 1% higher than in 2007; less than 1% growth over 13 years.

The really depressing bit? Workers actually did far better in the post-imperial period (1970-2005) than they ever did during the height of empire.

Which tells you everything you need to know about who was actually pocketing the imperial profits.

And the post-2008 wage stagnation shows the same pattern's still alive and well, just without colonies to extract from. Capital finds new ways to capture the gains; financialisation, asset inflation, whatever: whilst labour still gets the scraps.

Different methods, same fucking result.

The Victorian poor weren't sharing in empire's spoils, and modern workers aren't sharing in productivity gains either. I guess mechanisms change, but the outcome doesn't.

Asset inflation going into non-productive assets like land or monopoly privileges. Tech monopolies are famous example of this, which is why they're large percentage of the SP500.

Most loans are for land, which mean your banking system isn't directing loans toward productive assets which increase economic activity.

So, no, the mechanism didn't change FMPOV.

> Which tells you everything you need to know about who was actually pocketing the imperial profits

No, not really. Britain did not exist in isolation. Economic growth was generally very slow in the 1800s.

So you need to compare Britain with its peers like France or Germany in both periods.

> US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever

Yes, having infinite farmland in a still mostly agrarian economy gives you a massive head start.

Before the 20th century the link between the population and the amount of productive land was very direct.

Everyone bringing this up is missing the point entirely.

I thought people would be able to “get” it on their own so I didn’t bother replying but you’re the fourth person, so let me help you understand.

Britain had 1/3rd of the fucking planet, including an active workforce and their accumulated generational assets.

The US had: barely arable farmland, the trials and tribulations of european settlers are well documented.

Yet wages went up more in one of these, and not the one that was controlling 1/3rd of the planet.

Wages were higher in the North American colonies even before their insubordination.

Yes, the poor European settlers out there raping and a pillaging, burning and a looting,destroying cultures and entire people's to build their shiny palace on the hill. Remove the beam from your eye septic

I'm discussing wealth distribution, not defending genocide. If you can't tell the difference, that's your problem.

> the trials and tribulations of european settlers

Yet it was already the richest place per capita in the 1700s. At least in the Northeast the average British colonist was earned more money, was healthier, lived significantly longer and was even actually taller than the average person who remained in Britain.

All because they had more land per capita.

> active workforce and their accumulated generational assets

Yes, its just that per capita (across the entire empire) that workforce wasn’t very productive.

Did something happen after 1860 in the USA that suddenly caused a large proportion of the working population to start receiving wages, thus boosting "average wage growth" artificially?

I'm fairly sure statisticians know about history and account for it.

> The US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever

I understand what you mean. But also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny

You are right that common people in Britain didn't get as much out of Pax Brittanica as America's did during its own period of expansion.

Quite a different situation. An empire is when you go to a populated place and extract wealth from the people who live there. That’s not what manifest destiny was. America expanded into land that was sparsely populated by natives americans and mexico who had no wealth to extract.

The wealth was in and on the land.

> expanded into land that was sparsely populated

Yes, that’s exactly the situation that results in highest income/wealth per capita. As long as that land can be utilized productively.

That last sentence is doing all the work though. North American indians lived on the largest continuous region of agricultural land in the world, connected with perhaps the best river network, and never had above subsistence levels of wealth per capita.

It's hard to farm all that land when there are no horses to pull a plow, or pigs, cows, or sheep to raise for meat and milk and wool and manure. They didn't have all the crops that colonists crossed over with either: wheat, rice, and soybeans. The only crop of comparable productivity was corn, which was domesticated in South and Central America and had to be adapted to North America over many generations.

After they crossed the Bering Strait they also didn't receive any of the subsequent Old World advances in metallurgy, agriculture, chemistry, societal organization and so forth.

It's asking quite a lot of a relatively small population base to invent all those things independently while also lacking everything necessary to have comparable agricultural yields.

There was no Silk Road bringing gunpowder and paper and the Black Death to these societies. That means the native populations colonists encountered were the survivors of utterly cataclysmic epidemics. It's like if aliens brought a virus to Earth that killed 95% of the population and then they went "Hmm...these earthlings, they're not terribly productive are they?"

I'm not an anthropologist or an economist or a historian so there are many other factors I missed.

"America expanded into land that was sparsely populated"

What does this remind you of?

It wasn't sparsely populated until you murdered everyone

Yes. America had no empire. Except for the giant land empire that was, and is, America. Or does invading and occupying thousands of square miles of land, annihilating entire nations, and enslaving and slaughtering the natives, a process that was still very much ongoing between 1860 and 1890 not count as empire building?

You’re absolutely correct. The UK built an empire because it industrialized early and had the money and technology to do so. But the empire isn’t what made it rich in the first place.

The Empire wasn't profitable.

> The US saw 60% real wage growth from 1860-1890 with no empire whatsoever.

Um. Weren't they carving one out of the American West? I mean, there were people there beforehand... it feels like a not-dissimilar situation.

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