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Colonial America was an income per capita leader: Before the 20th century, the period during which Americans most clearly led Britain in purchasing power per capita was in the colonial era -- when the Americans were British.
- 932KB
- Peter H. Lindert, Jeffrey G. Williamson
- 46
- 2015
- In 1774, colonial Americans had the highest standard of living on earth. AVG. ANNUAL INCOME. £13.85. According to historian Alice Hansen Jones, Americans at the end of the colonial era averaged an annual income of £13.85, which was the highest in the western world.
- The average tax rate in colonial America was between 1 and 1.5% U.S. TAX RATE. 1-1.5% Colonial and Early Americans paid a very low tax rate, both by modern and contemporary standards.
- The Depression of the 1780s was as bad as the Great Depression. Between 1774 and 1789, the American economy (GDP per capita) shrank by close to 30 percent.
- The US’s largest European trading partners in the late 1790s were the German city-states of Hamburg and Bremen. American trade with the Hanseatic city-states of Hamburg and Bremen boomed with upon the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars.
Mar 23, 2015 · New data now allow conjectures on the levels of real and nominal incomes in the 13 American colonies. New England was the poorest region, and the South was the richest.
- Peter H. Lindert, Jeffrey G. Williamson
- 2015
- A New Approach with New Data
- New Findings About American Income Per Capita Leadership
- New Findings About American Inequality
- History Lessons
- References
Armed with new evidence, we apply a different approach to the historical estimation of what Americans have produced, earned, and consumed. National income and product accounting reminds us that we should end up with the same number for GDP by assembling its value from any of three sides – the production side, the expenditure side, or the income sid...
America actually led Britain and all of Western Europe in purchasing power per capita during colonial times. Britain’s American colonies were already ahead by 38% in 1700 and by 52% in 1774, just before the Revolution (Figure 1). Angus Maddison’s (2001) claim that American income per capita did not catch up to that of Britain until the start of the...
Colonial America was the most income-egalitarian rich place on the planet. Among all Americans – slaves included – the richest 1% got only 8.5% of total income in 1774. Among free Americans, the top 1% got only 7.6%. Today, the top 1% in the US gets more than 20% of total income. Colonial America looks even more egalitarian when the comparison is b...
American history suggests that inequality is not driven by some fundamental law of capitalist development, but rather by episodic shifts in five basic forces – demography, education policy, trade competition, financial regulation policy, and labour-saving technological change. While some of these forces are clearly exogenous, others – particularly ...
Atkinson, A B, T Piketty, and E Saez (2011), “Top Incomes in the Long Run of History,”Journal of Economic Literature49, 1: 3-71 Lindert, P H, and J G Williamson (2016),Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700,Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press Maddison, A (2001), The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective,Paris, OECD Develo...
Jamaica, which did not join the rebellious thirteen British mainland colonies in 1776, was the wealthiest British colony in 18th-century North America, its planter class enjoying riches while its enslaved peoples endured degrading conditions that undermined their families and threatened their lives.
Oct 27, 2015 · Planters, merchants, ordinary white people, and the occasional free colored person amassed considerable wealth in the plantation system as black chattel slavery was embedded into British American colonial life in the eighteenth century.
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richest. Colonial per capita incomes rose only very slowly if at all, for five reasons: productivity growth was slow; population in the low-income (but subsistence-plus) frontier grew much faster than that in the high-income coastal settlements; child dependency rates were high and probably even rising; the terms of trade were
