Wages through the Ages: The Influence of Technology on the Standard of Living

This paper is a review of 850 years of the history of worker salary, cost of living, and productivity. ``Nicholson´s Journal´´ of 1798 provides data on English farming back to 1050 A.D. by reviewing old chronicles and the household records of kings. To relate the past to the present, modern history is extended using American farming data compiled by the U.S. Department of Commerce since 1804. Farming is one of the few occupations with a long, continuous history. The industrial revolution and automation have had their influence on farm employment and productivity. From this review of data, relative productive wages (defined as salary divided by cost of living divided by productivity) are quantitatively found to have remained constant (within a factor of ??2) for 850 years??in spite of historical events such as the Black Plague, the Industrial Revolution, and the Great Depression. Finally, this principle of relative productive wages is used to speculate about the short- and long-term influence of automation on our future economic standard of living.