Experts who know: how good is this article?
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200701-how-the-black-death-make-the-rich-richer
The medieval bits certainly agree with what I was taught and read.
Quote from: sinenomine on July 03, 2020, 09:01:00 AM
The medieval bits certainly agree with what I was taught and read.
How about the interpretations beyond basic facts?
William Chester Jordan's work on this was important at one point.
I haven't followed the narrative studies since, but his discussion of the interactions between the plague, the "Little Ice Age" and other intersecting factors was useful. There are several articles on "famine" in this listing (search for the term) below:
https://princeton.academia.edu/WilliamCJordan
and many, many references in his book, "Europe in the High Middle Ages,"
https://books.google.com/books/about/Europe_in_the_High_Middle_Ages.html?id=b23xAAAAMAAJ
M.
OK, it is absolutely agreed that the decline in population caused by the Black Plague raised wages, on account of competition from the landowners for the fewer remaining laborers. Thus, the poor [peasants] got richer, and the rich [landowners] got poorer. How the rich could get richer in a situation where output is down and the poor get a bigger share of that is beyond arithmetic.
The business concentration part in the wake of the Black Plague I have never read before. May or may not be true.
However, the authors are fanciful in measuring business importance and concentration."Walmart was larger than the economy of Spain", they stated. That's Walmart measured by turnover and Spain measured by value added [roughly, GDP]. Measured commensurately, by wages + rents + profits, equal to value of output, Walmart is a tiny size of the Spanish economy!
I don't think they know what they're doing.
I call bogus on this article. It implies cause and effect with phrasing like "accelerated a pre-existing trend." The Byzantines had sericulture in the second half of the first millennium A.D. and it spread to Italy and other parts of Western Europe as a result of the Crusades, a century and half before the Black Death. I find it doubtful that "peasants had more money to spend" when in 18th century France they lost up to half of their income to signeurial estate owners and government taxation (a grievance that lent rural support to the revolution in 1789). Similar situation for the Russian peasantry up through the Bolshevik Revolution/civil war.
Bogus yes.
But surviving peasants did get better off on account of the Plague, and that lasted quite a while.
Events in 18th century France and early 20th century Russia occurred some hundreds of years after the Black Plague. In the interim, population regenerated, and the gummint took more and more stuff, you know, to keep up appearances, have wars, and such ! :-)
Not quite related, but I just read a selection of entries f4om Pepys' diary on the 1665-6 plague and great fire in London.
His observations about denial, the behaviour of some highly placed officials, and the confusion over reported deaths were instructive.
I'm sure that iteration of the bubonic plague (a.k.a. ""Black Death," owing to the necrosed tissue of dying figures' bodies, not a racial slur) has also been studied for its effects on British economy at the time.
I've recalled, too, that one loss in the 13-1400s was that of scholars who were literate and able to transcribe manuscript texts. I believe one source ascribes the loss of books in the more legible carolingian uncials--and the rise of archived texts in 《batard》(so-named due to its illegibility)-- to population depletion among scholastic, monastic, and commercial scriveners, as well.
M.
Quote from: dismalist on July 03, 2020, 06:00:29 PM
OK, it is absolutely agreed that the decline in population caused by the Black Plague raised wages, on account of competition from the landowners for the fewer remaining laborers. Thus, the poor [peasants] got richer, and the rich [landowners] got poorer. How the rich could get richer in a situation where output is down and the poor get a bigger share of that is beyond arithmetic.
The business concentration part in the wake of the Black Plague I have never read before. May or may not be true.
However, the authors are fanciful in measuring business importance and concentration."Walmart was larger than the economy of Spain", they stated. That's Walmart measured by turnover and Spain measured by value added [roughly, GDP]. Measured commensurately, by wages + rents + profits, equal to value of output, Walmart is a tiny size of the Spanish economy!
I don't think they know what they're doing.
That's how I'd sum it up. It's a real shame. The long-term effects of the "Great Mortality" (the most common contemporary term for the disaster) are a fascinating field of study. But the article writer's efforts to use a little (I suspect very little) reading on it to make points about what's going on today made a complete mess of things.
Quote from: dismalist on July 03, 2020, 06:00:29 PM
OK, it is absolutely agreed that the decline in population caused by the Black Plague raised wages, on account of competition from the landowners for the fewer remaining laborers. Thus, the poor [peasants] got richer, and the rich [landowners] got poorer. How the rich could get richer in a situation where output is down and the poor get a bigger share of that is beyond arithmetic.
The business concentration part in the wake of the Black Plague I have never read before. May or may not be true.
However, the authors are fanciful in measuring business importance and concentration."Walmart was larger than the economy of Spain", they stated. That's Walmart measured by turnover and Spain measured by value added [roughly, GDP]. Measured commensurately, by wages + rents + profits, equal to value of output, Walmart is a tiny size of the Spanish economy!
I don't think they know what they're doing.
It's a basic Malthusian argument. Existing resources are distributed across a fewer people and, on average, people are wealthier.