Consols schmonsols! The modern prospector such as Mrs. Bennet would want to know how much is that in today's money. Using the Bank of England's trusty inflation calculator and plugging in 1813 (the year Pride and Prejudice was published), Darcy's worth £681K a year and his friend half that. In the Valley or London, what's that, a director level at a FAANG, and a tech lead? Using the annual yield to derive asset, the author in another paper put Darcy's net worth at £16.8m - £28m. Pathetic! Not even a one-percenter. I would not walk three dirt miles and muddy the hem of my dress and suffer a terrible cold for half that.
I have a stupid fascination for historical finance tidbits like this. I once wrote a price comparison paper for Les Misérables, Thénardier accused Valjean: "You eat forty-franc bunches of asparagus in January!” I have lost all my sources (it was likely wildly inaccurate and didn't take into account GDP, cost of living, relative wealth) but my paper says one franc in 1830 was about £2.2 (correct me please) - so a bunch of winter asparagus was £88? Sounds excessive. Cosette was purchased for a mere £3300, and her inheritance from Valjean was £1.32m.
Economic growth is the key to resolving the paradox you highlight of his seeming wealth then being inflation adjusted to only modestly high net worth today.
Using Maddison's estimate for UK per capita GDP in 1820, suggests that the average UK resident generates more than 10.7x as much wealth now than back then.
Of course, all these comparisons are fanciful and dependent on the utility one assigns to various things. In terms of the number of servants he could employ, a man of Darcy's wealth far outpaces all but the wealthiest in the first world whereas in terms of his ability to travel to Rome expeditiously, he can't measure up to a nearly broke student.
Yeah, the wealth generation statistic is interesting. I think a related way to think of why amounts of wealth that seem nominally not that extreme by today's standards were extreme hundreds of years ago is that there was much less you could spend that wealth on. People just didn't have the capacity to accumulate nor spend money to buy things and services at the same rates.
So viewing money as tokens of value, there was just less 'value' around full stop. So having much less of it still made you relatively extremely wealthy.
You could always spend wealth on land, building a manor, hiring staff to maintain the land/manor, arts, crafts, travel, even science.
Also, how much would Darcy pay for an electricity generator, an old CRT television with a PSX and all the PSX games ever made? That makes comparisons in discretionary spending difficult.
But comparing basic spending could be doable. It is, of course, easier to compare such spending for a median person than for an outlier.
Yeah it's extremely interesting to think about - it's all a system and when you think you could just spend more money on whatever was available (building a bigger house, horses, arts, hiring staff) you also have to consider that there would have been much tighter upper limits on all of these. The labour market was extremely illiquid, and smaller, and economies of trade and skills were much more localised than today.
Doubtless you could simply waste your money pretty much without limits (pay more unqualified people to do a bad job at building your house, for example) but it would have been much more limited in terms of how you could usefully deploy your wealth, just because there was much less of everything available.
Might have your characters mixed up? Darcy has plenty of land, Bingly wants something fitting his standing as a man of means. However, many rich/aristocratic families were prevented from selling their real estate interests, and could only access the derived profits. This naturally reduced the availability of land.
The author, in the first sentence of the second paragraph, has anticipated your objection:
> In what is probably my favourite piece ever written, I tried to estimate exactly how rich Mr. Darcy was – Mr. Darcy, of course, of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride & Prejudice.
He does - and then rejects GP's estimate, as he's more interested in analyzing relative incomes and income inequality (i.e. taking a social/political perspective) than looking at things from Miss Bennet's perspective.
Inflation figures over 200 years are pretty dodgy. How much was a dose of penicillin, an iphone or a flight to New York in 1819? There's a very real sense in which very average Westerners now are far wealthier than Darcy.
Conversely Darcy would have had far more power than the someone with net worth £16.8-28m would today. He'd probably have had a large say in who the local MP was, the local priest. Probably could turf a large chunk of the local population out of jobs and homes. Likely had a small army of servants.
> How much was a dose of penicillin, an iphone or a flight to New York in 1819? There's a very real sense in which very average Westerners now are far wealthier than Darcy.
One's wealthiness is always relative to others. The items listed here are goods that are broadly available today across wealth bands, and are therefore not markers of wealthiness.
> Conversely Darcy would have had far more power than the someone with net worth £16.8-28m would today. He'd probably have had a large say in who the local MP was, the local priest. Probably could turf a large chunk of the local population out of jobs and homes. Likely had a small army of servants.
Power is a great (the ultimate ?) example of a resource whose access and distribution can be compared over time.
Power over others has never been quantified like monetary wealth has, yet it is intrinsic to humans given we are a highly social species. For people like Darcy, such power over others was a hereditary birthright. You couldn't buy a share of that power as an investment. Therefore, there was no market that could estimate the monetary value of that power.
That isn't the case, wealth is an absolute measure. Inequality, power and to some degree satisfaction are relative to others, but wealth can be created and destroyed independently. Which is the major argument against socialism, incidentally. If wealthiness were a relative measure, full blown communism would be great for wealth. Which it most certainly is not.
Modern inhabitants of the first world are insanely wealthy.
Not for the purpose for quantifying the wealth of someone who owns no slaves.
And slavery is a definitionally different situation because a slave has absolutely no leverage to negotiate for their interests, so whatever quantification of a slave's value and consequent slave owner's net worth is not generalizable to relationships between free people except in very extreme situations.
Another way of looking at this is that all else equal, when freed, a former slave's net worth goes up by a constant factor based on their new status and rights.
And "needed" that small army of servants because he couldn't just buy a reliable car and drive it himself. Cooking and washing were major chores. Dress and other tasks related to his station in life took help in a way that almost no one needs or even wants today.
I think the point is, you have to conflate them more and more the farther back in time your inflation calculation tries to go.
Some things are pretty much the same today as they were 200 years ago, like land or a person's time. Relative wealth--relative to your surrounding society--allows you to buy those. That was true 200 years ago, and it's true today, although it might cost you a bigger pile of nominal currency (e.g. more British pounds) today than back then.
But no amount of wealth in the early 1800s could have bought you a 6-hour journey from London to New York, NY. Whereas, today it is something that many people can afford, at least occasionally. No amount of money in the 1800s could have bought you high-fidelity recordings of all Beethoven's works that you can carry with you anywhere on your wrist.
So which category better represents inflation since the early 1800s? In terms of things you could buy back then, like land or people's time, you can do a pretty straight calculation. But when you get to brand new categories of things to spend money on, like penicillin or an electric scooter trip, you're essentially "dividing by zero" because these things did not exist at all back then.
You have to invent some sort of way to value a thing in past dollars that could not have actually existed at that point in the past. The farther back you go, the more it just becomes guesswork.
Standard of living is a function of wealth, but wealth is not the sole factor. It also includes quality of the environment, crime levels, access to good medical care, education standards, civil rights, house affordability and so on.
Most people nowadays are poorer than Mr Darcy in a monetary sense, but probably have a higher standard of living.
The sibling post makes the point that in the past, being wealthy was a much bigger component of this - if you're rich you can afford a doctor (versus none), you can eat when others go hungry, you can afford to travel at all, you can be educated, etc.
As I understand it, standard of living is objective - you can quantify it fairly well. Quality of life is subjective.
What does it mean to be 'poorer in a monetary sense' if it leads to comparisons where person A has better healthcare, transportation, information access etc than person B but B > A?
Your comment focuses on standard of living issues. But your earlier claim was that these are separate from 'monetary wealth'. I think you would need to specify what 'monetary wealth' is separate from 'standard of living' in order to make a convincing argument.
You'll find this hard to do, because any wealth measurement is either a thing, or an instrument that will get you a fraction of the things other people have. Financial wealth is cashed out in stuff. So cross temporal comparisons are going to involve comparing the stuff two people can command. And the stuff they can command is embedded in the technology and society of their respective times.
> Darcy's worth £681K a year and his friend half that. In the Valley or London, what's that, a director level at a FAANG, and a tech lead?
One big difference being, when he dies, that income reverts to his heirs and their heirs. If he was earning that as a wage, it wouldn't. So it's not directly comparable.
What I've found in looking at historical financial comparisons in the past is that they are inherently unstable / inexact as you get further and further back.
Fifty years ago, even, things fall apart a little. At one point in an early Mad Men episode, some reference is made to whether or not Draper is making $40,000 a year. A basic inflation calculator puts this at about $342K today, but the implication in the show (and in other reading) suggests it likely involved much more purchasing power than $342K implies.
Going back 100 or 200 years, and the economics drift. Prices for goods and for services change relative to each other, so straight-up purchasing power comparisons are hard to establish.
Today, we probably wouldn't parse a $2M inheritance as set-for-life (maybe?), but clearly the implication is that Cosette was, right?
All that is a long way of saying that we can really only know that Darcy was rich, and enjoyed a very healthy income assuming his source assets were protected and working. His friend, less so, but still solidly a member of the correct class.
Agatha Christie once said that when embarking on her writing career she never thought she would be wealthy enough to afford a car, or too poor to afford servants. Things change quite fast.
And I would say that a $2M inheritance is set for life, withdrawing 4% of that should leave you at a steady income of $80,000 a year for doing nothing.
Great quote. Perhaps compare the cost of servants with the cost of having a dishwasher/washer/drycleaner bill, and a car to the cost of a personal jet. Shows how education and engineering and medicine and law have lifted the value unskilled labour to unprecedented levels.
Living off $2M/year is fine, except of course interest rates are now 1% in much of the developed world. Higher returns now requires higher risk.
Agreed! I originally did the comparison to better understand what wealth stratum Valjean eventually attained, was 600,000 francs crazy money back then? Marius' grandfather sent him 60 pistoles monthly (600 gold francs!) was that an exhorbitant stipend? Must have been, as he eventually found work as a translator for 700 francs a year. He pawned his watch for 45 francs, just a little more than a bunch of asparagus! Hugo went into fascinating details about how much things cost in the chapter called "Marius Poor". By these measures Cosette was rich, but we don't know the percentage of the population in possession of 600,000 francs or more. Valjean carried this sum around as a wad of cash. Before this he had buried it in the woods! And at that time Paris had an Exchange. Amazing!
I have a stupid fascination with historical finance in literature myself. I focused on Early Modern Elizabethan literature. Wrote a thesis arguing that Spenser's Mammon in Book II of the Faerie Queene was not so much about the familiar allegory of illicit wealth but rather a vitriolic topical attack on the emerging proto-capitalist financial industry in Elizabethan England and the challenge it presented to the traditional landed aristocracy. The earliest bankers were the goldsmiths and that, if you read closely, is how Spenser depicts Mammon.
A lot of fun and led me down some interesting rabbit holes on Elizabethan monetary policy, the impact of Henry VIII's Great Debasement, and the role of the Royal Mint as central bank. Left with with a deep appreciation for the stabilizing influence of the Federal Reserve.
Anyway, for anyone interested (haha), here's the canto in question:
Not according to Charles Kindleberger’s A Financial History of Western Europe. His explanation for this persistent myth is that some British banks could trace some of their antecedents to goldsmiths and it made decent advertising copy. Thus it gets into books about banking written by non-historians and perpetuates itself.
A more common origin for banks was money changers, international traders in commodities and traders in bills of exchange.
Your original estimate is odd. The article claims that 40£ was several years of income for a laborer. If we assume 20£/year is equivalent to a day laborer, that’s around 20k$/year (in Texas, where I live, that’s a bit on the low side). That gives Darcy’s income at around 10mm£/year, in modern terms.
I mean, setting aside the ridiculousness of trying to compare economies separated by 200 years.
You're assuming that a day laborer in the UK had income and standard of living similar to a lower-income Texan in 2019. It was closer to that of a lower-income Haitian in 2019.
EDIT: I was a bit low - BoE's inflation calculator puts a £20 income in 1813 at £1,362.94 in 2018, or about the average income of a Haitian today. So let's say, a lower-income Afghan?
I'm not sure how useful the BoE calculator is for that. It's probably more useful to just look at standard of living qualitatively.
Given that a Victorian era lower-class Londoner probably looks more like a lower-class Haitian than a Texan.
I'm less sure how to compare from Austen's era, especially outside of a major city. But things like getting any medical care at all or getting enough food to eat suggests ways that poor people of that era would be disadvantaged compared to most poor people of a developed county today.
I would also caution against focusing on major cities; only around 40% of Brits lived in cities in 1811, and rural poverty was and remains even more grinding than urban poverty.
So, Tim Harford from the BBC/FT did a radio show on this and they say:
Darcy's 10K can be:
1. Inflation adjusted to 838K GBP
2. Earnings power adjusted (as labor purchase price parity) to 9.995M GBP
3. Adjusted by a Per Capita GDP percentile factor to 65M GBP (or income off of capital assets/'Consols' of $3B GBP)
BBC More or Less Podcast:
How Rich was Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csvq3g
PS- They basically mirror the NOL guy's article's antecedent from '016
And whatever happened to tracking how much money bill gates could drop and not pick up due to the value of his time ?
{ 1999: https://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html ;}
That was a good frame of reference.
Before the advent of modern shipping it's not terribly surprising. Asparagus was once know as 'the food of kings' and has a limited growing period and requires a fairly large amount of land compared to what it produces. There's only really 2 harvests of asparagus possible one in early spring and the other in fall so absent modern refrigeration asparagus in the middle of winter would have been grown in a greenhouse increasing it's cost.
It's easy to forget these days where we're able to get most fruits and vegetables any time of year we please thanks to shipping letting us get summer produce in winter from the opposite hemisphere but produce has definite seasons and it used to be very hard and expensive to get produce out of season.
"but my paper says one franc in 1830 was about £2.2"
My rule of thumb pre Euro was 10 (French) Francs to the £, so one Franc being worth 10p.
Pounds carried over with the same value during decimalisation, I havent found anything about the Franc changing so if true this is quite a devaluation over the years.
I think you're correct that the franc has hugely devalued against the pound in that time. But based on the context from the first paragraph, devchix's post was talking about something different, equating one 1830 franc to £2.2 in today's money, possibly by a "wildly inaccurate" methodology.
The historical exchange rate should not be hard to figure out. Both countries were on a gold standard at that time. One 1830 franc was worth 290mg of gold. One 1830 sovereign was worth 7.3g of gold, or about 25 old francs. So using 1 pound = 10 new francs = 1000 old francs, that's about a 40x decline in the franc/pound rate between 1830 and 2000, unless I've made an error somewhere.
Were talking about large relative declines either way.
Considering their fortunes have ebbed and flowed at similar times. Both were super powers of their day, both are now large developed economies, I would have expected the outcomes to be much closer.
If only because you'd be rolling a huge pair of dice with respect to health care, dental care, etc. Your children have decent odds of dying young. Women in childbirth. Infections. No modern dental care etc.
Sure, some made it to old age without serious problems. (And people die young today in spite of modern medicine.) But I'll take the bet on today's medicine.
It's not just that. Most everything you did was physical. No indoor plumbing. No ice cream. No fresh vegetables in winter. Itchy clothes. Hardly any books. Travel was difficult, slow, and quite uncomfortable. Lousy shoes. No A/C. Roasting or freezing indoors in winter. Little information about what was happening more than a day's walk away. A rotting mouth. No movies.
Hence "if only." Given sufficient money, you could still have a pleasant life with plenty of entertainment options and reasonable comfort in many climates. [ADDED: Which Virginia is not especially.]
And does what's happening far away really have that much of an impact on my life even today? We're used to knowing all these things but information flow was a lot less even a few decades ago.
You're kind to ask. The paper was written a long time ago and very thinly sourced, more of a toy of dubious value. As we've agreed in this thread, attempts to directly translate asset values and income from a radically different economy will be frustratingly wrong.
“My dearest sister, now be serious. I want to talk very seriously. Let me know every thing that I am to know, without delay. Will you tell me how long you have loved him?"
"It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”
Elizabeth already knew Mr. Darcy's income and despised him. It was upon learning of his wealth that her love bloomed. A practical woman, Miss Bennet.
The reason she rejected him was due to the way she perceived his mistreatment of Wickham. She didn't realize just how bad of an egg he was, and how lucky Wickham was to have a connection with Darcy. Upon receiving Darcy's letter, where he bares his entire soul and how he went to considerable expense to make things right for Wickham and her sister anyway, she began to see him in a new light. She was already well down the path to falling for him when they toured his estate the first time.
Obviously that sealed the deal, but Austen wouldn't be hailed as one of the world's greatest novelists if the plot of her seminal work was that easily reduced to money.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or not, but Elizabeth is still being sarcastic here, as is very much in her character, despite Jane's request to the contrary.
It's not simple sarcasm. There's plenty of truth in it, so there's an element of knowing self-deprecation - not just on Elizabeth's part, but also Austen's, because the sentiment that would have been recognised by many of her readers.
Austen herself was in the same position as Elizabeth, with a tiny inheritance that provided no financial security. So P&P is as much a fantasy about finding financial safety as it is about finding a man.
For all the landscaped country houses and bonnets, it was a very brutal period for many women - and for men too, in other ways.
It's also because she sees how Darcy's servants and tenants view him. He is a popular man and treats the people who depend on him well which speaks positively to his character.
Sounds right, but she wasn't purely mercenary like her friend Charlotte, who admitted to marrying Mr. Collins for his money, which filled Elizabeth with horror.
For someone like Me Darcy income came entirely from wealth. He wasn't working, and someone in his position wouldn't be. So Elizabeth already knew he was extremely wealthy before seeing Pemberley.
I always took that as implying that what she learned was that Darcy had taste. You can have Darcy's much bruited income as a topic of conversation, no doubt about his wealth, but pounds only buy you so much status.
Hear, hear. And not just taste as evidenced by his possessions, but also the good taste to appreciate her uncle and aunt. I think we should also give some weight to the good impressions that Georgiana and the housekeeper at Pemberly may have made upon her.
Also coincident with her seeing his grounds was here talking there with tenants, servants and relatives who spoke very highly of his character and generosity.
What's really interesting about this Napoleonic Time Period is not so much how much the wealthy earned, but how little they paid their servants.
Much like modern fading businesses they had an addiction to cheap labour to prop up dated capital. Then when the mills and the mines and the factories turned up paying better wages, most of them failed to adapt. If they were lucky they sold out to the National Trust.
In the same respect as this post, the Golden Age made some insanely wealthy people. If you have ever visited the mansions in Newport, RI, the Breakers is something to marvel at.
But what fascinated me more was how Cornelius “the Commodore” Vanderbilt actually built his wealth. If you visit the mansions, they only talk about the social life and everything about the mansions.
But Commodore amassed some like 200 million in that day and age. There was very little regulation, and he fits the mold of someone who with very little education, excelled at business.
'When [J.P.] Morgan died in 1913, he had as estate of $80 million, that's $1.2 billion today, as compared to Rockefeller's worth of nearly a billion, that's $l90 billion today. When Rockefeller read this in the papers he supposedly said, "And to think, he wasn't even a rich man."'
One of the things I found interesting about The Breakers is that--hot and cold running water notwithstanding--the living quarters were pretty spartan even by middle class standards today. All the bling was in the public rooms.
These were summer "cottages" to be sure and the same dynamics probably didn't apply to their regular homes. Nut I found it interesting nonetheless.
Cornelius Vanderbilt's story is amazing. He quit school at the age of 11 to work on his father's ferry in New York Harbor. At 16 he started his own ferry moving freight and passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan. He built his fortune by investing in steamships and later railroads
I think perhaps french novels have more fascination with money than English novels. The monetary calculation than brings Madam Bovary to ruin is worked out to exact detail by Flaubert. Also Stendhal, in Charterhouse of Parma, almost all characters are expressed in terms of so many francs and sous per year.
Amongst the English, I think Trollope did have a particular engagement with wealth and money matters in his novels.
>I think perhaps french novels have more fascination with money than English novels.
Personally I was always fascinated by the Count of Monte Cristo (not much later than Austen's work, published in 1844), when he arrives in Paris and presents to Mr. Danglars an unlimited letter of credit by the bankers French & Thomson:
>"Why," said Danglers, "in the letter -- I believe I have it
about me" -- here he felt in his breast-pocket -- "yes, here
it is. Well, this letter gives the Count of Monte Cristo
unlimited credit on our house."
"Well, baron, what is there difficult to understand about
that?"
"Merely the term unlimited -- nothing else, certainly."
"Is not that word known in France? The people who wrote are
Anglo-Germans, you know."
and, later:
>"Well, sir," resumed Danglars, after a brief silence, "I
will endeavor to make myself understood, by requesting you
to inform me for what sum you propose to draw upon me?"
"Why, truly," replied Monte Cristo, determined not to lose
an inch of the ground he had gained, "my reason for desiring
an `unlimited' credit was precisely because I did not know
how much money I might need."
Dickens had a fascination with poverty and its effects, but he did not have a fascination with wealth and its technical details. For him a wealthy person was someone who could, on a whim, help out a poor child or go on a merry adventure.
Is this really true? Mr. Pickwick is a not-poor man who ends up in debtors prison for alleged "breach of promise" to marry his landlady. Wealthy Steerforth is a central character in David Copperfield and so on.
I would say yes it's true, other than I didn't talk about the villains where their wealth is generally seen as a constrictor of their moral nature.
But essentially the wealthy characters have no focus on the mechanics of their wealth, other authors might say how much a character makes per year, what they are primarily invested in, how much of the wealth came from what things, what the coming war means for their investments. For Pickwick it is enough that they are wealthy and can do what wealthy people do. Pickwick in debtor's prison is a chance for him to focus on how the poor are generally treated from the viewpoint of a sympathetic rich character, as well as having an amusing situation "rich man in debtor's prison".
Even Scrooge, he lends money at exorbitant rates, underpays his employee, and does not use any money for his own enjoyment. No focus really on how the business works.
Pickwick is not a villain. But yeah, I suppose we can reasonably hairsplit over 'mechanics of wealth'; to me 'did not have a fascination with wealth' seems almost axiomatically impossible for a Victorian writer.
I did not say Pickwick was a villain, I said that my original statement was true except I did not talk about the villains. I wrote "did not have a fascination with wealth and its technical details." the AND in the sentence is meant to combine the two as I thought was clear, sure he had a fascination with being wealthy in the same way that I do about having enough money to never work again, travel the world, and have heaps of fun.
At any rate Steerforth really reinforces my point - how is he wealthy? Like many wealthy characters in Dickens he is because it is a fact of his nature to be so, as it is in his nature to be handsome.
He does not do anything for his wealth, the wealth does not force him to attend board meetings or consider what competitors will do in other regions or how the slow down in the business means he will have to lay off workers or sell some of his land. The wealth allows him to have merry adventures with a pretty girl until he dies.
In Dickens it seems wealthy people never lose wealth by bad decisions or new technologies supplanting what they had or ships failing to deliver cargo on time, they tend to loose wealth by profligacy in either gambling or drink but generally both.
This is not a fault in Dickens, not everyone has to focus on the mechanics of wealth. Indeed perhaps his keeping away from such details helps hold the atmosphere of the fantastical that clings to his works, and has allowed them to keep being read so long.
The details of businesses that no longer would be viable probably make for dreary literature.
One thing I don’t see pondered upon as much as Mr Darcy’s wealth is what did their expenses look like (other than Lydia’s dresses). How much was the upkeep of Pemberley? How much did the housekeeper earn? Bingley is generous and a spender. Every re-read (and there have been many) I wish I had more detail on their budgets.
In addition to the points mentioned, upkeep is really continued development that must be performed within historically set constraints. I found this short video about the work at Euston Hall interesting—though Grafton inherited the estate, he came from the music industry in Nashville as a relative outsider with an eye for costs and revenue. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hypmo53fWfw
Live-in housekeeping is around £50k a year for a couple - not bad for living rent-free on a nice estate - although I used to know someone who provided house-keeping for much less in return for not having to pay for rent and food. So cheaper options are possible.
Gardening is maybe £25-30k/yr, unless the estate is absolutely huge.
Heating will cost a lot in the UK. So will maintenance, especially if there's significant land involved. Roads, fences, walls, drains, sewers, and so on are all more expensive than most people realise, and large estates are usually listed, so there are expensive restrictions and maintenance obligations.
But I'm not quite seeing how that would add to up £500k for a £1.5m estate - which would be fairly small, even with the way prices were back then. I'd have expected something closer to £100k to £200k.
A friend of mine (who lives in a house of a much smaller scale) spends £2000 a year on gravel alone for his drive. Then he either needs to spend weeks spreading or pay someone to to do the same. Once you have a lot of something, things sure get expensive.
On a similar note - say he wanted to replace his doors Now he won't just want to use form £100 from the hardware shop, so realistically will be looking at £600+ for nice handmade bespoke internal doors. And then a future £100 for the door furniture, maybe £100 to get each painted and prepared and maybe £100 for the fitting. Before you know it looking at £1000ish a door. He had over 25 doors, and this was 'only' a 6 bed house... yes you aren't replacing these every year, but just an example of one of the costs.
One striking thing about Mr. Darcy's income is you could still survive on it (not inflation-adjusted) in a developed country today. It's right around the individual poverty line. It's also close the median household income worldwide.
There's a presidential candidate (Andrew Yang) running on Universal Basic Income which would give every US citizen adult almost that amount ($1K/mo), just to survive especially as automation and AI is ravaging the top five common jobs in the states. The math actually works out to be feasible.
Assuming, at a minimum, health care and other social social safety net services. But, yes, Mr. Darcy was very wealthy by the standards of the time and would be today. (Although, as others have pointed out, comparing wealth across such a long time period is difficult in many ways.)
Interesting. Do you know why the government didn't simply buy them on the open market when they came up and retire them? A 20% premium seems like quite a lot.
Nice article but I don't think this part of the conclusion is correct:
'Wealth, in Piketty’s view, perpetuates itself, and effortlessly earns its return (never mind the work, risk and selection issues involved). By continually paying the interest on its debt, the governments of Austen’s Britain financed the leisurly lifestyles of the rich, just as the “natural” return of the modern-day rich contribute and maintain today’s inequality.'
This completely disregards inflation. E.g., if government bonds guarantee a 3% payout but inflation is at 3.5%, your wealth is not perpetuating but leaking away.
I think I have read somewhere that inflation in the end of the 17th - first half of 18th century was almost zero or there was even a deflation. I may be wrong. Maybe someone has a good source?
The book mentioned in the article, Capital in the 21st Century, shows this in really interesting detail. I can't remember the details myself, but the idea we have of inflation being normal is actually highly abnormal in the history of humanity. Can't recommend the book enough, really interesting to see how unique the last 100 years of high growth is compared to history due to the world wars and how we may be returning to "normal" levels of inequality.
I want to understand the fascination with Jane Austen's works, especially by hackers and designers (and an economist in this article). Paul Graham (founder of Hacker News) mentions Jane Austen in at least 5 essays, see below. I haven't read any of Austen's books, but I think I'll need to.
(1) "Everyone admires Jane Austen. Add my name to the list. To me she seems the best novelist of all time. I'm interested in how things work. When I read most novels, I pay as much attention to the author's choices as to the story. But in her novels I can't see the gears at work. Though I'd really like to know how she does what she does, I can't figure it out, because she's so good
that her stories don't seem made up. I feel like I'm reading a description of something that actually happened." -- http://paulgraham.com/heroes.html
(2) "One of the reasons Jane Austen's novels are so good is that she read them out loud to her family. That's why she never sinks into self-indulgently arty descriptions of landscapes, or pretentious philosophizing. (The philosophy's there, but it's woven into the story instead of being pasted onto it like a label.) If you open an average 'literary' novel and imagine reading it out loud to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader." -- http://paulgraham.com/desres.html
(3) "What we can say with some confidence is that these are the glory days of hacking. In most fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel." -- http://paulgraham.com/hp.html
(4) "Like Jane Austen, Lisp looks hard. [...] Indeed, if programming languages were all more or less equivalent, there would be little justification for using any but the most popular. But they aren't all equivalent, not by a long shot. And that's why less popular languages, like Jane Austen's novels, continue to survive at all. When everyone else is reading the latest John Grisham novel, there will always be a few people reading Jane Austen instead." -- http://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html
(5) "Good design is suggestive. Jane Austen's novels contain almost no description; instead of telling you how everything looks, she tells her story so well that you envision the scene for yourself." -- http://paulgraham.com/taste.html
(1) I'm with him on her technical composition of a story being hard to tease apart (in a good way) but not so sure about them seeming unusually real or true. Structure and purpose of the novels' parts, the flow from incident to incident and scene to scene, is smooth and natural (more or less), plot, I dunno. Probably a personal thing.
(2) seems wrong to me, if by "literary" he means "broadly recognized as part of the 'Western Canon'" and not "recent works self-consciously written as literary fiction". Most read aloud really well, in my experience.
(3) Ugh.
(4) Austen's among the widest-read of the "canon", and not especially challenging (probably not an unrelated fact). This comparison is a real stretch. He couldn't think of someone better to use as an example? Huh.
(5) IDK about using it to illustrate this particular point, but yeah, basically.
If you struggle with Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (I do—I find them too smug in a "gee look at me, the author, writing such clever things" way, though I think that's what people like about them so it must just be a me problem) try Persuasion. It's short and apparently Austen didn't get a chance to do her usual "punch-up" edit before she died, which probably explains why it comes off (to me) as less full of itself than the others and a much more agreeable read.
Emma seems to be her parody of herself, as best I can figure. I enjoyed it. Longer. Desperately wants to be a tragedy. (spoiler?) Isn't. Probably it shouldn't be, I mean she's Jane Austen and I'm just some asshole. Oh well, still good.
Haven't read Mansfield, which I understand is very well regarded, or her juvenilia. Tried Northanger but seemed pointless without a better-annotated copy, which I'll probably get around to acquiring and reading some day.
Point (4) strikes me as a bit off because Jane Austen is generally among the easiest classical authors to read. Pride and Prejudice in particular is a simple romance story that can easily be read and appreciated by almost anyone with little to no preparation. Compare this to, say, William Faulkner or James Joyce and calling Austen an example of difficult literature seems almost absurd.
She's very easy to read, but she's not so easy to understand. There are multiple levels of irony and character insight in all of the books.
You can take them at face value as superficial and nostalgic proto-Harlequins, and a lot of readers do. She practically invented the surly and arrogant romantic hero who actually loves his mother and is kind to children, small animals, and feudal tenants.
But the books are actually blisteringly insightful and perceptive social and psychological commentary, written by a fiercely modern spirit trapped rather unhappily in a superficially elegant but oppressively limiting social scene she both loved and hated.
Most contemporary authors wrote as if they were outside the scene and looking in, so you don't get the same sense of ironic but intimate self-disclosure.
Austen wrote as someone inside and looking out, describing her own perceptions and reactions - many of which are contradictory and complex. So as a writer, she's both sympathetic and uniquely fascinating.
I still think her work is at most middling in terms of difficulty and likely not even that. Multiple levels of character insight is nothing compared to Ulysses parodying in sequence the entire development of the English language in stream of consciousness mirroring the gestation of a baby in a woman's womb, or the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury which tries to represent the internal experience of a severely mentally handicapped nonverbal 33-year-old man for whom past and present cannot be distinguished and who cannot understand simple phenomena like the movement of a horse-drawn carriage through space, or the second section of that same book which follows Quentin's turbulent and troubled mind through his final moments leading to his suicide. These sections are not just difficult to read, but also look outward from inside a character.
Jane Austen is a great author, and her works can often be appreciated and analyzed on multiple levels. But I just don't think she's a reasonable example of a difficult author when one considers the full spectrum of literature available today.
I don't think it's some special fascination by hackers, designers or economists. She's a hugely popular and accessible novelist and, in the English-speaking world, many people are introduced to her work sometime in secondary school. They're fun reads and you should definitely check them out - if anything, spending time trying to parse out what Paul Graham thinks about them can only make them less fun.
In addition to money, there are a lot of things that are unclear in the Jane Austen’s novels for the modern reader. One such thing is time: when Mrs. Bennet asks Mr. Bingley “to dine with then”, at what specific time Mr. Bingley is supposed to show up (he seems to know implied time without asking)?
Ahhh thanks. I didn't notice that because if you do searches like "100 1950 dollars" it does the inflation calculation for you. Guess it doesn't do well with pounds. I trusted the engine too much. Thanks for the catch.
I have a stupid fascination for historical finance tidbits like this. I once wrote a price comparison paper for Les Misérables, Thénardier accused Valjean: "You eat forty-franc bunches of asparagus in January!” I have lost all my sources (it was likely wildly inaccurate and didn't take into account GDP, cost of living, relative wealth) but my paper says one franc in 1830 was about £2.2 (correct me please) - so a bunch of winter asparagus was £88? Sounds excessive. Cosette was purchased for a mere £3300, and her inheritance from Valjean was £1.32m.