Seeing poverty beyond that Dickens wrote about in 'A Christmas Carol'
Charles Dickens' “A Christmas Carol” was an important book of the 19th century. It spoke to the power of redemption and can be credited for focusing concern for the poor during Christmas season.
Worry for the poor wasn’t new but was renewed during the early Victorian age. One example is the carol “Good King Wenceslas,” which told the story of a king (and later saint) who served the poor. That song was penned 10 years after Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol,” not 500 years earlier when the events occurred.
Other religious traditions have similar considerations at wintertime holidays. Of course, the giving of Chanukkah gifts to children and the poor predates Christmas. Islam does not celebrate Christmas, as they recognize Jesus as a prophet, not messiah. Still, residents of the small village of Hussayah, Saudi Arabia, greeted my men with gifts of cakes and tea on Christmas 1990.
Among these three Abrahamic religions, concern for the poor is a clear duty for believers. But the description of the poor in the Old and New Testaments and the Qur’an are radically different from poverty in the Victorian age. And the poverty of Dickensian London is even more radically different from poverty today. These are blessings about which we should understand and be thankful.
A number of researchers have attempted to measure economic growth from antiquity through the current age. This can be accomplished by examining the archeological record or trade and possessions and by examining surviving texts. The earliest of these are accounting ledgers found in modern day Iraq. Poetry may have been passed through an oral tradition; debts were written in clay and stone.
This research tells a pretty clear story. From the earliest recorded human experiences, say 6,000 years ago, through the 16th century, there was scant economic progress. The average person worldwide produced less than $1,000 a year in goods and services, as measured in today’s dollars. Most of this was agricultural, though there was also some manufacturing. Services, like education and healthcare, were scantly produced.
That meant that a healthy adult man with some skills as a plowman or blacksmith could perhaps produce $4,000 worth of goods each year. This included the value of their homemade and homegrown goods. That meant everyone worked, from before adulthood until death. Food was grown, animals tended, and yarn spun throughout the day. For almost all the world, this averaged to about $2 per day at today’s prices. So, imagine living this year only on what you can buy at a local grocery for $2 per day.
Today the United Nations definition of poverty is the consumption of just over $2 per day. Just under 10 percent of the world’s population live under that definition of poverty. Prior to 1700, nearly everyone worldwide did. Yes, there were kings and royalty, whose wealth was increased by skimming a share of the daily $2 from their subjects. The great monuments of earlier ages — the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Zimbabwe, the Ziggurat of Ur and Windsor Castle — were built by emperors and kings who extracted their wealth from desperately poor peasants.
Beginning in about 1700, economic growth in Europe started to increase, then it accelerated. There is no clear consensus why this happened. Some theories are plainly wrong. Imperialism and colonization cannot explain it. Places without empires grew briskly, often more robustly than the large imperial powers. It wasn’t just technology. China and northern Africa were awash in modern science and mathematics long before the Scots discovered trousers and a written language. Both algorithm and algebra are named after Arab mathematicians.
The best explanation of this stunning explosion of economic growth comes from Professor Deidre McCloskey. My summary of her work is simple. European cities that began to trade slowly became prosperous. That prosperity created a new class of people, a merchant class, whose wealth permitted cultural and political influence. Where that influence spread, so did prosperity.
Nowhere was that more obvious than in America. In the colonies that permitted a Ben Franklin to flourish, growth followed. In places where labor was owned, like South Carolina, growth languished. At the start of the American Revolution, the South was richer, and more productive than the North; by 1860, per capita GDP in northern states were 50 percent higher than in the South. Slavery was an economic catastrophe for the South; its moral and political failings were far worse.
All of this brings us back to Charles Dickens. Had he written in 1643 rather than 1843, the fine distinctions on poverty would’ve been silly. Nearly everyone was poor. There wasn't even a publishing industry to deliver his work to middle class families, because there really weren’t middle class families, and most Europeans were illiterate. Yet, Dickens' characters and audience of 1843 were mostly middle class, a relatively new distinction.
In 1700, the typical European, Asian, African or American produced about $2 per day. Today, the average U.S. citizen produces $191 per day in goods. That is close to a hundred-fold increase in 300 years. I apologize for all this math. There’s an easier way to explain this.
In 1700, a man would have to work eight to 10 hours each day to earn enough income and grow enough food to feed each member of his family about $2-worth of food at today’s prices. Today, the average American produces and earns almost $24 per hour. That means that adult could feed a family of four the same amount of food with only 20 minutes of work each day.
This Christmas holiday is not about worldly wealth, but it is a time of giving thanks for the many blessings we enjoy. In Dickens’ world, a character could say of starving poor that, “they had better do it [die] and decrease the surplus population.” This was intended as only a modestly shocking statement. At that point we were only 150 years into the miracle of modern economic growth. By then maybe 10 percent of the world’s billion residents lived within the grips of subsistence-level poverty. Today, more than 90 percent of the world’s 8.1 billion souls live above that line of abject poverty.
There is much to pray for in this season, using the old, clear language. Deliverance from evil, abundance of peace and bounty for the poor. At the same time, we must recognize and give thanks for the economic miracle that has lifted so many from despairing poverty.
Michael J. Hicks, PhD, is the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research and the George and Frances Ball distinguished professor of economics in the Miller College of Business at Ball State University.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Seeing poverty beyond that Dickens wrote about in 'A Christmas Carol'
