Urban Disamenities, Dark Satanic Mills, and the British Standard of Living Debate

Abstract

What were the economic costs of the disamenities that the British worker incurred when migrating to the city in the last century? How important were these costs in accounting for the higher nominal wages for unskilled work in the cities? How much of the rise in wages during the Industrial Revolution might therefore be spurious mismeasurement? This paper supplies some answers. Like the results on mid-twentieth-century growth by contemporary economists, the nineteenth-century estimates also suggest the disamenities' effects to be trivial.