Were People in the Past Poor and Miserable?

Were People in the Past Poor and Miserable? was published in Kyklos 59, 2, 2006.  Standard economic theory would suggest close linkages between income, broader measures of the quality of life and ‘utility’. When we look at broader measures of objective and subjective wellbeing in both rich and poor countries today, however, the relationship to absolute income is perhaps surprisingly weak. Turning to the past, there is plentiful evidence that people in the past were nearly all absolutely poor and broadly worse off according to other objective quality of life measures, less evidence that these two were intimately linked, even less that everyone was miserable, and less again that those who did feel miserable felt so because they were absolutely poor.