This analysis of the condition of the working classes in Glasgow in the first half of the nineteenth century is provided in two stages. An average real wage index for 1810–1840 exhibits a marked decline as a result of the high proportion of textile workers in the labor force. Quality indicators, such as housing conditions and mortality rates, deteriorated, and working-class diets at best did not improve. The evidence examined for Glasgow suggests no improvement in the standard of living of the city's working-class population.

In an effort to begin to solve the continuing controversy over how high the standard of living was in Japan prior to industrialization, this paper goes beyond the inadequate quantitative data and examines also qualitative and local evidence. Information on housing and food, urban water quality and waste disposal, and life styles is examined along with representative family budgets and two sets of real wage estimates. The evidence, taken together with life expectancy estimates, suggests that the standard of living in mid-nineteenth-century Japan was not only higher than in the 1700s, but relatively high in comparison to most of the industrializing West.

Among the developed countries, Australia in the period 1890–1940 experienced the fastest growth in population but the slowest in per capita income. When adjusted to incorporate the direct deflation of consumption expenditure, however, the growth of real GDP is raised by one-third, albeit to the still modest level of 0.8 percent annually. Inspection of a number of historical social indicators, not all caught in GDP, gives no support to the hypothesis of stagnant living standards. Finally, increases in life expectancy, a shorter working week, and earlier retirement also suggest substantial improvements in dimensions of standards of living not directly reflected in measured GDP. Conservatively, we estimate that living standards may have doubled over the half-century.

This paper uses independent real wages, earnings, labor force data, and an examination of Kuznet's 1953 data to explore the recent contention that real per capita incomes for most of the American population declined from 1923 through 1929. It concludes that there is little evidence to support this contention.