Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

https://notesonliberty.com/2019/04/16/mr-darcys-ten-thousand-a-year/

by well_i_never • 7 years ago

245 119 7 years ago

aniham• 7 years ago

One thing I don’t see pondered upon as much as Mr Darcy’s wealth is what did their expenses look like (other than Lydia’s dresses). How much was the upkeep of Pemberley? How much did the housekeeper earn? Bingley is generous and a spender. Every re-read (and there have been many) I wish I had more detail on their budgets.

oh_sigh• 7 years ago

I looked into buying a small estate in the midlands about 6 years ago and the price was around £1.5mm and upkeep was something like 500k/yr.

I passed.

adamson• 7 years ago

Why was upkeep that expensive? Would you be maintaining the entire estate as a perfectly manicured garden?

devchix3• 7 years ago

Consols schmonsols! The modern prospector such as Mrs. Bennet would want to know how much is that in today's money. Using the Bank of England's trusty inflation calculator and plugging in 1813 (the year Pride and Prejudice was published), Darcy's worth £681K a year and his friend half that. In the Valley or London, what's that, a director level at a FAANG, and a tech lead? Using the annual yield to derive asset, the author in another paper put Darcy's net worth at £16.8m - £28m. Pathetic! Not even a one-percenter. I would not walk three dirt miles and muddy the hem of my dress and suffer a terrible cold for half that.

I have a stupid fascination for historical finance tidbits like this. I once wrote a price comparison paper for Les Misérables, Thénardier accused Valjean: "You eat forty-franc bunches of asparagus in January!” I have lost all my sources (it was likely wildly inaccurate and didn't take into account GDP, cost of living, relative wealth) but my paper says one franc in 1830 was about £2.2 (correct me please) - so a bunch of winter asparagus was £88? Sounds excessive. Cosette was purchased for a mere £3300, and her inheritance from Valjean was £1.32m.

klenwell2• 7 years ago

I have a stupid fascination with historical finance in literature myself. I focused on Early Modern Elizabethan literature. Wrote a thesis arguing that Spenser's Mammon in Book II of the Faerie Queene was not so much about the familiar allegory of illicit wealth but rather a vitriolic topical attack on the emerging proto-capitalist financial industry in Elizabethan England and the challenge it presented to the traditional landed aristocracy. The earliest bankers were the goldsmiths and that, if you read closely, is how Spenser depicts Mammon.

A lot of fun and led me down some interesting rabbit holes on Elizabethan monetary policy, the impact of Henry VIII's Great Debasement, and the role of the Royal Mint as central bank. Left with with a deep appreciation for the stabilizing influence of the Federal Reserve.

Anyway, for anyone interested (haha), here's the canto in question:

http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?action=GET&tex...

barry-cotter• 7 years ago

The earliest bankers were the goldsmiths

Not according to Charles Kindleberger’s A Financial History of Western Europe. His explanation for this persistent myth is that some British banks could trace some of their antecedents to goldsmiths and it made decent advertising copy. Thus it gets into books about banking written by non-historians and perpetuates itself.

A more common origin for banks was money changers, international traders in commodities and traders in bills of exchange.

TheOtherHobbes4• 7 years ago

The prototypical modern bankers were the Fuggers - who were effectively early Europe's Fed, but somehow escaped the attention of contemporary poets.

thechao• 7 years ago

Your original estimate is odd. The article claims that 40£ was several years of income for a laborer. If we assume 20£/year is equivalent to a day laborer, that’s around 20k$/year (in Texas, where I live, that’s a bit on the low side). That gives Darcy’s income at around 10mm£/year, in modern terms.

I mean, setting aside the ridiculousness of trying to compare economies separated by 200 years.

azernik5• 7 years ago

You're assuming that a day laborer in the UK had income and standard of living similar to a lower-income Texan in 2019. It was closer to that of a lower-income Haitian in 2019.

EDIT: I was a bit low - BoE's inflation calculator puts a £20 income in 1813 at £1,362.94 in 2018, or about the average income of a Haitian today. So let's say, a lower-income Afghan?

jacques_chester• 7 years ago

The author, in the first sentence of the second paragraph, has anticipated your objection:

In what is probably my favourite piece ever written, I tried to estimate exactly how rich Mr. Darcy was – Mr. Darcy, of course, of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride & Prejudice.

He goes into considerable detail.

https://joakimbook.blogspot.com/2016/12/how-rich-is-mr-darcy...

azernik5• 7 years ago

He does - and then rejects GP's estimate, as he's more interested in analyzing relative incomes and income inequality (i.e. taking a social/political perspective) than looking at things from Miss Bennet's perspective.

absherwin• 7 years ago

Economic growth is the key to resolving the paradox you highlight of his seeming wealth then being inflation adjusted to only modestly high net worth today.

Using Maddison's estimate for UK per capita GDP in 1820, suggests that the average UK resident generates more than 10.7x as much wealth now than back then.

Of course, all these comparisons are fanciful and dependent on the utility one assigns to various things. In terms of the number of servants he could employ, a man of Darcy's wealth far outpaces all but the wealthiest in the first world whereas in terms of his ability to travel to Rome expeditiously, he can't measure up to a nearly broke student.

davnicwil2• 7 years ago

Yeah, the wealth generation statistic is interesting. I think a related way to think of why amounts of wealth that seem nominally not that extreme by today's standards were extreme hundreds of years ago is that there was much less you could spend that wealth on. People just didn't have the capacity to accumulate nor spend money to buy things and services at the same rates.

So viewing money as tokens of value, there was just less 'value' around full stop. So having much less of it still made you relatively extremely wealthy.

roywiggins• 7 years ago

Darcy's worth £681K a year and his friend half that. In the Valley or London, what's that, a director level at a FAANG, and a tech lead?

One big difference being, when he dies, that income reverts to his heirs and their heirs. If he was earning that as a wage, it wouldn't. So it's not directly comparable.

adrianN• 7 years ago

If he was earning that as a wage, he'd be working long hours every day.

thaumasiotes• 7 years ago

True, the income comparison is spurious, but the followup statistic is directly comparable:

Using the annual yield to derive asset [value], the author in another paper put Darcy's net worth at £16.8m - £28m.

tomcam• 7 years ago

Man I love that stuff. Would love it if you contacted me through my profile, or at least pointed us to the paper you wrote. Right up my alley.

devchix3• 7 years ago

You're kind to ask. The paper was written a long time ago and very thinly sourced, more of a toy of dubious value. As we've agreed in this thread, attempts to directly translate asset values and income from a radically different economy will be frustratingly wrong.

azernik5• 7 years ago

A minor quibble - Mrs. Bennet was her mother. Miss Elizabeth Bennet became Mrs. Darcy.

These things mattered in early-19th-century England.

benj1114• 7 years ago

"but my paper says one franc in 1830 was about £2.2"

My rule of thumb pre Euro was 10 (French) Francs to the £, so one Franc being worth 10p.

Pounds carried over with the same value during decimalisation, I havent found anything about the Franc changing so if true this is quite a devaluation over the years.

dmurray2• 7 years ago

Pounds carried over with the same value during decimalisation, I havent found anything about the Franc changing

The French Franc was revalued 100-1 in 1960. It's in the second line of the Wikipedia page on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_franc

kgwgk• 7 years ago

the author in another paper put Darcy's net worth at £16.8m - £28m. Pathetic! Not even a one-percenter.

You don’t even need £3mn of household wealth to be in the top 1%; less for a individual.

conjectures3• 7 years ago

Inflation figures over 200 years are pretty dodgy. How much was a dose of penicillin, an iphone or a flight to New York in 1819? There's a very real sense in which very average Westerners now are far wealthier than Darcy.

Conversely Darcy would have had far more power than the someone with net worth £16.8-28m would today. He'd probably have had a large say in who the local MP was, the local priest. Probably could turf a large chunk of the local population out of jobs and homes. Likely had a small army of servants.

ghaff6• 7 years ago

And "needed" that small army of servants because he couldn't just buy a reliable car and drive it himself. Cooking and washing were major chores. Dress and other tasks related to his station in life took help in a way that almost no one needs or even wants today.

danans3• 7 years ago

Your examples have an interesting pattern.

How much was a dose of penicillin, an iphone or a flight to New York in 1819? There's a very real sense in which very average Westerners now are far wealthier than Darcy.

One's wealthiness is always relative to others. The items listed here are goods that are broadly available today across wealth bands, and are therefore not markers of wealthiness.

Conversely Darcy would have had far more power than the someone with net worth £16.8-28m would today. He'd probably have had a large say in who the local MP was, the local priest. Probably could turf a large chunk of the local population out of jobs and homes. Likely had a small army of servants.

Power is a great (the ultimate ?) example of a resource whose access and distribution can be compared over time.

Power over others has never been quantified like monetary wealth has, yet it is intrinsic to humans given we are a highly social species. For people like Darcy, such power over others was a hereditary birthright. You couldn't buy a share of that power as an investment. Therefore, there was no market that could estimate the monetary value of that power.

joshvm2• 7 years ago

Is this a conflation between wealth and standard of living?

WalterBright2• 7 years ago

I think George Washington was the richest man in America in his time. I toured his Mount Vernon estate. I wouldn't want to live like that.

ghaff6• 7 years ago

I'm not sure any sensible person would.

If only because you'd be rolling a huge pair of dice with respect to health care, dental care, etc. Your children have decent odds of dying young. Women in childbirth. Infections. No modern dental care etc.

Sure, some made it to old age without serious problems. (And people die young today in spite of modern medicine.) But I'll take the bet on today's medicine.

paulsutter• 7 years ago

Top 1% in the US is $421k a year, and top 1% in the world is $32,400 a year[1]

Also note that Mr Darcy need only sit and drink tea to receive his income.

Pathetic! Not even a one-percenter. I would not walk three dirt miles and muddy the hem of my dress and suffer a terrible cold for half that

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/05061...

jimmy6DOF• 7 years ago

So, Tim Harford from the BBC/FT did a radio show on this and they say:

Darcy's 10K can be: 1. Inflation adjusted to 838K GBP 2. Earnings power adjusted (as labor purchase price parity) to 9.995M GBP 3. Adjusted by a Per Capita GDP percentile factor to 65M GBP (or income off of capital assets/'Consols' of $3B GBP)

BBC More or Less Podcast: How Rich was Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csvq3g PS- They basically mirror the NOL guy's article's antecedent from '016

And whatever happened to tracking how much money bill gates could drop and not pick up due to the value of his time ? { 1999: https://www.templetons.com/brad/billg.html ;} That was a good frame of reference.

ubermonkey• 7 years ago

What I've found in looking at historical financial comparisons in the past is that they are inherently unstable / inexact as you get further and further back.

Fifty years ago, even, things fall apart a little. At one point in an early Mad Men episode, some reference is made to whether or not Draper is making $40,000 a year. A basic inflation calculator puts this at about $342K today, but the implication in the show (and in other reading) suggests it likely involved much more purchasing power than $342K implies.

Going back 100 or 200 years, and the economics drift. Prices for goods and for services change relative to each other, so straight-up purchasing power comparisons are hard to establish.

Today, we probably wouldn't parse a $2M inheritance as set-for-life (maybe?), but clearly the implication is that Cosette was, right?

All that is a long way of saying that we can really only know that Darcy was rich, and enjoyed a very healthy income assuming his source assets were protected and working. His friend, less so, but still solidly a member of the correct class.

neaden2• 7 years ago

Agatha Christie once said that when embarking on her writing career she never thought she would be wealthy enough to afford a car, or too poor to afford servants. Things change quite fast.

And I would say that a $2M inheritance is set for life, withdrawing 4% of that should leave you at a steady income of $80,000 a year for doing nothing.

devchix3• 7 years ago

Agreed! I originally did the comparison to better understand what wealth stratum Valjean eventually attained, was 600,000 francs crazy money back then? Marius' grandfather sent him 60 pistoles monthly (600 gold francs!) was that an exhorbitant stipend? Must have been, as he eventually found work as a translator for 700 francs a year. He pawned his watch for 45 francs, just a little more than a bunch of asparagus! Hugo went into fascinating details about how much things cost in the chapter called "Marius Poor". By these measures Cosette was rich, but we don't know the percentage of the population in possession of 600,000 francs or more. Valjean carried this sum around as a wad of cash. Before this he had buried it in the woods! And at that time Paris had an Exchange. Amazing!

rtkwe• 7 years ago

Before the advent of modern shipping it's not terribly surprising. Asparagus was once know as 'the food of kings' and has a limited growing period and requires a fairly large amount of land compared to what it produces. There's only really 2 harvests of asparagus possible one in early spring and the other in fall so absent modern refrigeration asparagus in the middle of winter would have been grown in a greenhouse increasing it's cost.

It's easy to forget these days where we're able to get most fruits and vegetables any time of year we please thanks to shipping letting us get summer produce in winter from the opposite hemisphere but produce has definite seasons and it used to be very hard and expensive to get produce out of season.

tmaly2• 7 years ago

In the same respect as this post, the Golden Age made some insanely wealthy people. If you have ever visited the mansions in Newport, RI, the Breakers is something to marvel at.

But what fascinated me more was how Cornelius “the Commodore” Vanderbilt actually built his wealth. If you visit the mansions, they only talk about the social life and everything about the mansions.

But Commodore amassed some like 200 million in that day and age. There was very little regulation, and he fits the mold of someone who with very little education, excelled at business.

joncrane2• 7 years ago

At The Breakers, all the bathrooms had hot and cold running fresh and salt water. I believe many of the fancy mansions in that area had.

I remember visiting on a field trip from nerd sleepaway camp in Massachusetts.

As an adult, I could see myself splurging to get running salt water in my seaside mansion. I've always loved salt water.

tmaly2• 7 years ago

Plumbing in general during that age was amazing. I cannot even imagine what it would cost like to build one of those mansions today.

ghaff6• 7 years ago

One of the things I found interesting about The Breakers is that--hot and cold running water notwithstanding--the living quarters were pretty spartan even by middle class standards today. All the bling was in the public rooms.

These were summer "cottages" to be sure and the same dynamics probably didn't apply to their regular homes. Nut I found it interesting nonetheless.

dsyko• 7 years ago

I'm curious what is the reason for having running salt water? For taking baths?

JackFr• 7 years ago

'When [J.P.] Morgan died in 1913, he had as estate of $80 million, that's $1.2 billion today, as compared to Rockefeller's worth of nearly a billion, that's $l90 billion today. When Rockefeller read this in the papers he supposedly said, "And to think, he wasn't even a rich man."'

http://www.learner.org/series/biographyofamerica/prog17/tran...

asmithmd1• 7 years ago

Cornelius Vanderbilt's story is amazing. He quit school at the age of 11 to work on his father's ferry in New York Harbor. At 16 he started his own ferry moving freight and passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan. He built his fortune by investing in steamships and later railroads

hirundo• 7 years ago

“My dearest sister, now be serious. I want to talk very seriously. Let me know every thing that I am to know, without delay. Will you tell me how long you have loved him?"

"It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

Elizabeth already knew Mr. Darcy's income and despised him. It was upon learning of his wealth that her love bloomed. A practical woman, Miss Bennet.

jefftk• 7 years ago

For someone like Me Darcy income came entirely from wealth. He wasn't working, and someone in his position wouldn't be. So Elizabeth already knew he was extremely wealthy before seeing Pemberley.

gwern• 7 years ago

I always took that as implying that what she learned was that Darcy had taste. You can have Darcy's much bruited income as a topic of conversation, no doubt about his wealth, but pounds only buy you so much status.

kirrent• 7 years ago

I'm not sure if you're being serious or not, but Elizabeth is still being sarcastic here, as is very much in her character, despite Jane's request to the contrary.

TheOtherHobbes4• 7 years ago

It's not simple sarcasm. There's plenty of truth in it, so there's an element of knowing self-deprecation - not just on Elizabeth's part, but also Austen's, because the sentiment that would have been recognised by many of her readers.

Austen herself was in the same position as Elizabeth, with a tiny inheritance that provided no financial security. So P&P is as much a fantasy about finding financial safety as it is about finding a man.

For all the landscaped country houses and bonnets, it was a very brutal period for many women - and for men too, in other ways.

vinceguidry• 7 years ago

The reason she rejected him was due to the way she perceived his mistreatment of Wickham. She didn't realize just how bad of an egg he was, and how lucky Wickham was to have a connection with Darcy. Upon receiving Darcy's letter, where he bares his entire soul and how he went to considerable expense to make things right for Wickham and her sister anyway, she began to see him in a new light. She was already well down the path to falling for him when they toured his estate the first time.

Obviously that sealed the deal, but Austen wouldn't be hailed as one of the world's greatest novelists if the plot of her seminal work was that easily reduced to money.

pvg5• 7 years ago

One striking thing about Mr. Darcy's income is you could still survive on it (not inflation-adjusted) in a developed country today. It's right around the individual poverty line. It's also close the median household income worldwide.

ngokevin• 7 years ago

There's a presidential candidate (Andrew Yang) running on Universal Basic Income which would give every US citizen adult almost that amount ($1K/mo), just to survive especially as automation and AI is ravaging the top five common jobs in the states. The math actually works out to be feasible.

https://www.yang2020.com/what-is-freedom-dividend-faq/

ghaff6• 7 years ago

Assuming, at a minimum, health care and other social social safety net services. But, yes, Mr. Darcy was very wealthy by the standards of the time and would be today. (Although, as others have pointed out, comparing wealth across such a long time period is difficult in many ways.)

pvg5• 7 years ago

comparing wealth across such a long time period is difficult in many ways.

If it can be done for dance⁷, it can surely be done for wealth.

⁷ Ibid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTchxR4suto

computator• 7 years ago

I want to understand the fascination with Jane Austen's works, especially by hackers and designers (and an economist in this article). Paul Graham (founder of Hacker News) mentions Jane Austen in at least 5 essays, see below. I haven't read any of Austen's books, but I think I'll need to.

(1) "Everyone admires Jane Austen. Add my name to the list. To me she seems the best novelist of all time. I'm interested in how things work. When I read most novels, I pay as much attention to the author's choices as to the story. But in her novels I can't see the gears at work. Though I'd really like to know how she does what she does, I can't figure it out, because she's so good that her stories don't seem made up. I feel like I'm reading a description of something that actually happened." -- http://paulgraham.com/heroes.html

(2) "One of the reasons Jane Austen's novels are so good is that she read them out loud to her family. That's why she never sinks into self-indulgently arty descriptions of landscapes, or pretentious philosophizing. (The philosophy's there, but it's woven into the story instead of being pasted onto it like a label.) If you open an average 'literary' novel and imagine reading it out loud to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader." -- http://paulgraham.com/desres.html

(3) "What we can say with some confidence is that these are the glory days of hacking. In most fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel." -- http://paulgraham.com/hp.html

(4) "Like Jane Austen, Lisp looks hard. [...] Indeed, if programming languages were all more or less equivalent, there would be little justification for using any but the most popular. But they aren't all equivalent, not by a long shot. And that's why less popular languages, like Jane Austen's novels, continue to survive at all. When everyone else is reading the latest John Grisham novel, there will always be a few people reading Jane Austen instead." -- http://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html

(5) "Good design is suggestive. Jane Austen's novels contain almost no description; instead of telling you how everything looks, she tells her story so well that you envision the scene for yourself." -- http://paulgraham.com/taste.html

everybodyknows• 7 years ago

Austen also wielded a somewhat wicked wit.

"If he'd did not have £15,000 a year, I would think him a very silly fellow." Mansfield Park

pvg5• 7 years ago

I don't think it's some special fascination by hackers, designers or economists. She's a hugely popular and accessible novelist and, in the English-speaking world, many people are introduced to her work sometime in secondary school. They're fun reads and you should definitely check them out - if anything, spending time trying to parse out what Paul Graham thinks about them can only make them less fun.

asark• 7 years ago

(1) I'm with him on her technical composition of a story being hard to tease apart (in a good way) but not so sure about them seeming unusually real or true. Structure and purpose of the novels' parts, the flow from incident to incident and scene to scene, is smooth and natural (more or less), plot, I dunno. Probably a personal thing.

(2) seems wrong to me, if by "literary" he means "broadly recognized as part of the 'Western Canon'" and not "recent works self-consciously written as literary fiction". Most read aloud really well, in my experience.

(3) Ugh.

(4) Austen's among the widest-read of the "canon", and not especially challenging (probably not an unrelated fact). This comparison is a real stretch. He couldn't think of someone better to use as an example? Huh.

(5) IDK about using it to illustrate this particular point, but yeah, basically.

If you struggle with Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (I do—I find them too smug in a "gee look at me, the author, writing such clever things" way, though I think that's what people like about them so it must just be a me problem) try Persuasion. It's short and apparently Austen didn't get a chance to do her usual "punch-up" edit before she died, which probably explains why it comes off (to me) as less full of itself than the others and a much more agreeable read.

Emma seems to be her parody of herself, as best I can figure. I enjoyed it. Longer. Desperately wants to be a tragedy. (spoiler?) Isn't. Probably it shouldn't be, I mean she's Jane Austen and I'm just some asshole. Oh well, still good.

Haven't read Mansfield, which I understand is very well regarded, or her juvenilia. Tried Northanger but seemed pointless without a better-annotated copy, which I'll probably get around to acquiring and reading some day.

nilkn2• 7 years ago

Point (4) strikes me as a bit off because Jane Austen is generally among the easiest classical authors to read. Pride and Prejudice in particular is a simple romance story that can easily be read and appreciated by almost anyone with little to no preparation. Compare this to, say, William Faulkner or James Joyce and calling Austen an example of difficult literature seems almost absurd.

TheOtherHobbes4• 7 years ago

She's very easy to read, but she's not so easy to understand. There are multiple levels of irony and character insight in all of the books.

You can take them at face value as superficial and nostalgic proto-Harlequins, and a lot of readers do. She practically invented the surly and arrogant romantic hero who actually loves his mother and is kind to children, small animals, and feudal tenants.

But the books are actually blisteringly insightful and perceptive social and psychological commentary, written by a fiercely modern spirit trapped rather unhappily in a superficially elegant but oppressively limiting social scene she both loved and hated.

Most contemporary authors wrote as if they were outside the scene and looking in, so you don't get the same sense of ironic but intimate self-disclosure.

Austen wrote as someone inside and looking out, describing her own perceptions and reactions - many of which are contradictory and complex. So as a writer, she's both sympathetic and uniquely fascinating.

ducttapecrown• 7 years ago

Wasn't the comparison on the basis of the amount of usage rather than the difficulty of usage?

billfruit• 7 years ago

I think perhaps french novels have more fascination with money than English novels. The monetary calculation than brings Madam Bovary to ruin is worked out to exact detail by Flaubert. Also Stendhal, in Charterhouse of Parma, almost all characters are expressed in terms of so many francs and sous per year.

Amongst the English, I think Trollope did have a particular engagement with wealth and money matters in his novels.

nradov• 7 years ago

Dickens?

bryanrasmussen4• 7 years ago

Dickens had a fascination with poverty and its effects, but he did not have a fascination with wealth and its technical details. For him a wealthy person was someone who could, on a whim, help out a poor child or go on a merry adventure.

jaclaz• 7 years ago

I think perhaps french novels have more fascination with money than English novels.

Personally I was always fascinated by the Count of Monte Cristo (not much later than Austen's work, published in 1844), when he arrives in Paris and presents to Mr. Danglars an unlimited letter of credit by the bankers French & Thomson:

"Why," said Danglers, "in the letter -- I believe I have it about me" -- here he felt in his breast-pocket -- "yes, here it is. Well, this letter gives the Count of Monte Cristo unlimited credit on our house."

"Well, baron, what is there difficult to understand about that?"

"Merely the term unlimited -- nothing else, certainly."

"Is not that word known in France? The people who wrote are Anglo-Germans, you know."

and, later:

"Well, sir," resumed Danglars, after a brief silence, "I will endeavor to make myself understood, by requesting you to inform me for what sum you propose to draw upon me?"

"Why, truly," replied Monte Cristo, determined not to lose an inch of the ground he had gained, "my reason for desiring an `unlimited' credit was precisely because I did not know how much money I might need."

Animats• 7 years ago

"Never sell consols." - The Forsyte Saga.

The British government finally redeemed its last consols in 2015.

C1sc0cat2• 7 years ago

I had thought about buying some consols for my ISA (tax free investment account) the year or so before - my ISA was/is a bit stock heavy.

They where at around £80-85 and where redeemed at par £100 so would have been a nice little earner.

pmyteh• 7 years ago

Interesting. Do you know why the government didn't simply buy them on the open market when they came up and retire them? A 20% premium seems like quite a lot.

godelski2• 7 years ago

So £10000/yr is equivalent to $22.35 million a year. [0] That's quite a bit of money.

[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10000+1792+british+pou...

azernik5• 7 years ago

Wolfram Alpha is interpreting that as £10000/yr * 1,792.

As the top comment notes, according to BoE's inflation calculator [1], that's £680K/yr, or $850K/yr.

[1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...

godelski2• 7 years ago

Ahhh thanks. I didn't notice that because if you do searches like "100 1950 dollars" it does the inflation calculation for you. Guess it doesn't do well with pounds. I trusted the engine too much. Thanks for the catch.

neilwilson• 7 years ago

What's really interesting about this Napoleonic Time Period is not so much how much the wealthy earned, but how little they paid their servants.

Much like modern fading businesses they had an addiction to cheap labour to prop up dated capital. Then when the mills and the mines and the factories turned up paying better wages, most of them failed to adapt. If they were lucky they sold out to the National Trust.

vl• 7 years ago

In addition to money, there are a lot of things that are unclear in the Jane Austen’s novels for the modern reader. One such thing is time: when Mrs. Bennet asks Mr. Bingley “to dine with then”, at what specific time Mr. Bingley is supposed to show up (he seems to know implied time without asking)?

xkr• 7 years ago

Is there a chance you know an article that covers timing aspects of the novel?

misja• 7 years ago

Nice article but I don't think this part of the conclusion is correct:

'Wealth, in Piketty’s view, perpetuates itself, and effortlessly earns its return (never mind the work, risk and selection issues involved). By continually paying the interest on its debt, the governments of Austen’s Britain financed the leisurly lifestyles of the rich, just as the “natural” return of the modern-day rich contribute and maintain today’s inequality.'

This completely disregards inflation. E.g., if government bonds guarantee a 3% payout but inflation is at 3.5%, your wealth is not perpetuating but leaking away.

orkon2• 7 years ago

I think I have read somewhere that inflation in the end of the 17th - first half of 18th century was almost zero or there was even a deflation. I may be wrong. Maybe someone has a good source?

dtjohnnyb• 7 years ago

The book mentioned in the article, Capital in the 21st Century, shows this in really interesting detail. I can't remember the details myself, but the idea we have of inflation being normal is actually highly abnormal in the history of humanity. Can't recommend the book enough, really interesting to see how unique the last 100 years of high growth is compared to history due to the world wars and how we may be returning to "normal" levels of inequality.

TMWNN• 7 years ago

I've read that from the early 1600s to World War I England had net zero inflation.

Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

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