How does your life compare to King Louis XVI?
In this analysis, I am going to give you complete power to make an economic comparison between any two time periods. It does not rely on data or equations that typically have all sorts of hidden assumptions. I merely ask the following two questions:
• What is important to you?
• How does what you have now compare with what they had in the past?
We will build up a picture based on the comparonomic graph, so we can see how things have changed in a more detailed way than a comparison of income levels.
This analysis is not the first one to point out we are better off than King Louis. Matt Ridley explains how specialisation and exchange via markets mean that modern folks have access to vastly more goods and services compared to King Louis. The explanation of specialisation and markets may well be correct, but I will set aside any reason of why things have changed and focus on how they have changed. To keep things relatively simple I have selected seven sectors of the economy that people find important:
• Health/medical care
• Education/information
• Travel/transportation
• Food/beverage
• Housing
• Entertainment
• Communication.
In some economies, people spend more directly on these things or via taxes (e.g. health/education). This is not a distinction of interest, just how the quality and quantity of the end product of each of these parts of the economy change.
The list is not claiming to be complete or definitive. It is a high-level example that is useful to show how it is possible to create a simple summary of how an economy changes over time. The list could be expanded to include clothing, home appliances and professional services but this summary will do for now. Appendix 1 suggests some ways a more comprehensive and definitive picture of the economy can be produced using the same tool.
I have purposefully chosen to mostly use stories to illustrate the differences in each sector of the economy. This makes use of the fact that we seem to have more affinity for stories than data (availability heuristic). Steven Pinker’s latest book, Enlightenment Now, provides vast quantities of well-researched data that you could also use as a basis for putting together comparonomic graphs.
We will start with comparing our life to King Louis XVI’s and then repeat the exercise for comparing ourselves to an average person 50 years ago. The main reason for this is that the first set of comparisons is relatively easy and less debatable. It helps us get used to using the comparonomic graph to describe how things change. As discussed previously, the comparisons we are making when we talk about ‘we’ is an average person now in a relatively affluent OECD country — the middle billion.
Health/sanitation
There are large parts of the modern health system that would seem miraculous to King Louis XVI — antibiotics, vaccines, surgeries, scans, and so on. King Louis, it seems, had a good idea of how bad things were back then and delayed what would now be a relatively simple medical procedure. This fear of medicine meant he did not consummate his marriage for nearly 10 years. Let’s just say he had some delicate issues in his nether regions that any man now would opt for the most powerful painkillers possible.
As well as the state of curing medical ills, the general sanitation was likely to lead to more illness and would be horrific to modern folks. Patrick Süskind describes it marvellously in the first chapter of Perfume:
In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots …, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank like a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter.
These conditions most of us can avoid these days unless you accidentally wander into a teenager’s bedroom. I can’t imagine anyone these days wanting to swap their health and sanitation for that of King Louis. Despite his wealth and our relative ‘poorness’, we can show that our health system and state of medicine is vastly better now.
The slope of the lines I put on the comparonomic graph are subjective, and you are welcome to redraw them with your preferred slope. Create your own on this site. They are simple enough that you don’t even need a printout — any pen and paper can be a comparonometer.
Education/information
The category of education and information combines both what is known and how easy it is to learn these things. The list of things that we know compared to King Louis I’m sure would fall into the category of unimaginable. While it was accepted that the earth was round, the idea that the earth was not the centre of the universe was controversial. No periodic table, electricity, understanding of bacteria, viruses and no Twitter. When it comes to access to information, again you couldn’t do anything other than think what we have now would be considered mind-blowingly magical.
Travel
All forms of modern transport are unimaginably better than in the day of King Louis. The obvious example that would seem like magic is air travel but cars and even a new bicycle would seem astonishing. Forcing a modern citizen to use 18th-century transport only would no doubt appear horrifically bad. Enough on travel.
Food/beverage
The comparison for food and beverage is a little more debatable. I’ve often heard the phrase that a meal ‘is fit for a king,’ a way of complimenting it. No doubt the King would have eaten exceptionally well for his time, but I suspect he would be blown away walking into a modern supermarket. Louis had no chocolate, ice cream, out-of-season fruit and veges, craft beer, or hundreds of wines from around the world. I would miss a good curry, Caesar salad, hamburger, spaghetti bolognese, guacamole, and sushi. Nope, King Louis had none of that.
Apparently, it took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal for King Louis. The other thing we take for granted is hygiene of our food. The personal sanitation of the King’s team was horrific by today’s standards. Take nearly 500 people with primitive sanitation who didn’t know about washing their hands, and you can be sure he frequently had a side serving of faeces — King’s banquet anyone?
The reason this section is debatable is that King Louis also misses out on sugar cereal, fizzy drinks, and orange plastic-wrapped cheese. No doubt these days we make some shitty ‘food’ but the average person can choose to avoid this if they wish. I’m guessing if most modern people had the choice for the rest of their lives of eating and drinking only what King Louis had or what they have now, they would choose today’s options. In the comparonomic graph below, we can show that food and beverage have at least got a little better. The slope is always debatable. My personal opinion is that it has become much better than shown on this graph, but I’ll be conservative for this example.
Housing
Housing is a clear case that King Louis’s palaces were, well, … quite palatial. How cool would it be to live in one of these? It would be much better than the home I live in for sure. But not everything was better. The previous chapter showed how different aspects of housing are better or worse.
Given that size and bling seem important to lots of people, and we take modern things for granted, we will assume that the King’s housing was better than ours. There was a curious story of an English couple selling their tiny London apartment and buying a French castle for the same price. This is an option open to anyone, as castles with the level of services equal to King Louis’s are inexpensive (no electricity, no toilets, no plumbing, and massive maintenance bills). Anyway, let’s assume for this part of the economy, his castle was better than our home.
Entertainment/recreation
How cool would it be to have your own court jester? Yes, I know this is more of a stereotypical English royal thing but I suspect the reality would get a bit dull after a while. Levels of entertainment and recreation keep getting better. I’m sure the quantity and quality of entertainment and leisure available to us now would blow the socks off Louis XVI.
Communication
So why include communication given it’s a tiny part of most economies? Well, the importance of parts of the economy consists of the amount of time we spend on things as well as the amount of money we spend. This way the comparonomic graph can more fully capture all the things we deem essential (see Appendix 1 of book for more details of this logic).
Progress in communications is straightforward. We mostly have access to as much as we want. We can communicate anywhere in the world at an incremental cost of virtually zero. King Louis would not have believed it. In the pursuit of brevity, I will leave that one there.
What becomes clear is that even though King Louis was vastly wealthier than the average person now, the quality of things that he had compared to the average person was lousy. A comparison of wealth doesn’t do an effective job of analysing how life compares.
Summary of how to live like a king — we already do much better
This type of analysis is provocative because if you use conventional economics, then King Louis was vastly wealthier. An inherent assumption in the relative wealth is that he was better off. But this simple analysis shows we are much better off in most ways. More importantly, it is a richer picture of how we think things have changed in magnitude and direction for different parts of what matters to us. There are no hidden assumptions, but like all economic models, there is a lot of subjectivity in the analysis. With comparonomic graphs, we expose the subjectivity for everyone to see and open it to debate. If you don’t agree that you eat like a king, then you can change the slope and have a good yarn about that comparison. You can even say that you don’t care about some things and remove them or add in things important to you that I have left out. The compelling thing about comparonomic graphs is you don’t have to rely on experts to tell you how things are — you can think about it and do your own analysis.
The value of a model is not how well it describes the world, but how well it communicates to others how you see the world and how it allows you to understand it. You can then have a discussion and focus on the critical bits you either agree or disagree on.
King Louis was ‘richer’ than you according to conventional economics, but the comparonomic graph shows this does not mean the same as someone richer than you today. The difference between the two models is as dramatic as being told there is a mountain of wealth when in reality there is a desert of poverty. Many of the King’s living conditions would be considered inhumane for a prisoner today (medical, lack of hygiene). Real dollars suck as a measurement when the quality of goods and services changes so dramatically. The point of this example is to show how much a standard economic model can miss. Sure, he was wealthier, but look at how much reducing things to a simple measure of real dollars can overlook.
The comparison to a king from hundreds of years ago is a little trivial but it was surprising to me how dramatically better we live than King Louis XVI.
Note - this is a modified chapter from the book Comparonomics that has full list of references etc