Few historical problems have attracted so much attention over so many years as the social consequences of the British industrial revolution. For the most part, historians presumed that working people produced very little historical evidence that could be used to contribute to our understanding. However, projects to catalogue and encourage the use of the nation's scattered, yet extensive, archive of working-class autobiography have revealed that such evidence does, in fact, exist. The insertion of working-class autobiography helps to offer a new perspective, one which suggests a more positive interpretation of industrial life than historians have usually been willing to admit. Yet there remains a problem with the archive. During the industrial revolution, life-writing was a male art form. Women only started writing autobiographies in any number around 100 years after the conventional periodisation of the industrial revolution. This article surveys the autobiographical writing during and after the industrial revolution – around 1,000 items in all – in order to rethink the relationship between economic growth and social change. It confirms that industrial growth improved the position of working men in society, but concludes that female perspectives on this change are far more ambivalent.

In this article, the authors discuss the standard of living in medieval villages in central Europe on the basis of accessibility to dress, which is usually represented by the only archaeological material remaining—dress accessories, including buckles, strap ends, and rings. They attempt to establish a method of determining the value of the finds based on the different technological qualities of their material, decoration, and types of artefacts, and then discuss the dress accessories from selected village sites with complementary data from rural cemeteries dating from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. Their overview shows that there was a large degree of similarity between the finds from rural areas and typical urban assemblages.

This study aimed to provide insight into the daily lives of disabled Japanese veterans and their families during World War II (WWII). After the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese government expanded the conscription system in order to enable large-scale mobilization while providing comprehensive military support led by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The top priority was to create mechanisms to direct disabled veterans into the home front, so-called Saiki hōkō. Even under the scheme, families of disabled veterans in farming villages during WWII had difficulty recovering their pre-war living standards. However, some households economically exceeded their prewar living standards as veterans returned to work while also receiving pensions and taking advantage of support from the government.

In Sweden, a psychiatry reform, aimed at improving the living conditions of the psychiatrically disabled, came into force in 1995. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the impact of the reform by investigating quality of life and standard of living 2 years later in a randomly selected group of people with longstanding psychiatric disability. Self-ratings and interviews were conducted in a study group and a control group. The study group consisted of 19 women and 18 men (mean age 46.1 years) diagnosed with neurosis, schizophrenia or affective disorder. The control group consisted of 19 women and 17 men (mean age 48.7 years). Self-rated quality of life was significantly poorer in the study group (P < 0.0001, unpaired t-test), and so was housing (P < 0.001, test of similar proportions in independent samples). We found no significant positive correlation between subjective quality of life and standard of living in either group but a significant negative correlation in the control group (P < 0.05; r = 0.40, Pearson correlation coefficient). The results suggest that, in 1997, people with longstanding psychiatric disability still had poorer quality of life than the general population. This may be due to factors other than outward standard of living.

This article consists of a wide-ranging review of the international empirical literature, the aim being to show the extent to which there is an empirical (statistical) basis for payment of a compensatory allowance between former spouses after divorce. Two factors are primarily examined in light of that literature: first, the fact that the allowance is conditional on inequality between the standards of living enjoyed by the former spouses at the time of the divorce, and second, the fact that regard can be had to the previous occupational choices of the former spouses in calculating the allowance. Our analysis shows that while the empirical literature is in relatively broad agreement on the question of inequality in the standard of living, the empirical justification for the connection between compensation and previous occupational choices, on the other hand, is considerably less widely recognized.

Will 70% of a worker's final annual employment earnings sustain living standards after retirement? Despite increasing skepticism, the most dominant measure of retirement income adequacy by financial planners, pensions plan advisors, academics and public policy makers is the “final employment earnings replacement rate”, where 70% is considered the right target to ensure living standards remain at approximately the same level after retirement. Using Statistics Canada's LifePaths dynamic population micro-simulation model, this paper asks whether those individuals from the 1951–1958 Canadian birth cohort who attain roughly a 70% final employment earnings replacement rate (as conventionally measured) at retirement do, in fact, achieve approximate continuity in their living standards. We find that the conventional final earnings replacement rate measure has little predictive value for living standards continuity between working-life and retirement. The primary reason is that employment earnings in a single year is not a reliable representation of a worker's standard of living — it relies on an inadequate pre-retirement measurement period, does not incorporate important components of consumption sources (such as home equity), and ignores household size (particularly children). As a result, we find that the correlation between the conventional earnings replacement rate and actual living standards continuity is relatively low (0.11). The paper therefore suggests an alternative metric for assessing how well a worker's living standard is maintained after retirement — i.e., the Living Standards Replacement Rate, or the LSRR. The LSRR provides a more accurate, understandable and consistent measure of retirement income adequacy.

This paper discusses some of the criticisms recently raised by Rafael Dobado-González about our work on real wages in the Americas in the long run. Although addressing a series of issues, Dobado mainly questions our use of the welfare ratio methodology to assess standards of living in colonial Spanish America. In this article we explain how, despite its limitations, this methodology provides a solid, transparent metric to compare economic development across space and time. In particular, welfare ratios present more economically relevant information on living standards than the commodity wages that Dobado prefers (Dobado González and García Montero 2014). We argue that Dobado fails to offer convincing evidence against our findings; hence, we stand by these results, which suggest that the divergence between North and Latin America began early in the colonial period.

Popular satisfaction with current standards of living in reform-era China is explored in this article, using survey data from the 2004 China Inequality and Distributive Justice Project. Three major patterns are found: first, people of rural origin, with low levels of education and living in the west region, who are disadvantaged in the inequality hierarchy, report greater satisfaction with current standards of living than do privileged urbanites, the highly educated and residents in the coastal east. Second, inequality-related negative life experiences and social cognitive processes including temporal and social comparisons, material aspirations, and life goal orientations mediate the effects of socioeconomic characteristics. Third, the social sources of satisfaction with current standards of living vary across urban, rural and migrant residents. It is suggested that these patterns have largely stemmed from the unique political economic institutional arrangement and stratification system in China.

Price statistics and, in particular, food price statistics are much more abundant that those of consumption. In this article we use price statistics to analyze the qualitative variations in consumption and, specifically, the diet composition, a variable which is difficult to observe, but has remarkable implications in the evolution of living standards, health and mortality. Our analysis focuses on the years between 1910 and 1912, in a period of important changes in Spanish mortality, in order to analyze the provincial variation in the level and structure of food prices. The estimated relative price indexes suggest significant regional differences in diets which should be taken into account in living standards and mortality studies.