The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain - Professor Sir Roderick Floud

The editors and authors of the Cambridge Economic HIstory of Modern Britain celebrate the launch of the Fourth Edition: www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
The fourth edition of The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, edited by Sir Roderick Floud, Professor Jane Humphries and Professor Paul Johnson, has involved many leading economic historians in the UK, Europe and the USA, incorporating much new research.
The new edition will be launched at Gresham College, beginning with a short lecture by Sir Andrew Dilnot, followed up by two presentations by other authors (one from Vol. 1 covering 1700-1870 and one from Vol. 2 covering 1870-2010).
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College Website: www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: gresham.ac.uk/support/

[@davidparker64]

Quite a line-up. Thanks again. The Cambridge project has been worth its weight in gold, but I’ll eat my slippers if three-quarters of non-agricultural workers were in the secondary sector in 1710. I’ve no problem with most outside agriculture being industrial quite early on, but there are issues of definition (cf 1841-71) and of converting from males to persons that need resolving before we can be so categorical, not to mention vast implications for sectoral output and productivity. Crafts should stick to his guns for the time being. His agricultural shares remain convincing too (oddly I’d assumed they were Wrigley’s!). That wages performed relatively poorly in 1561-1621 has nothing to do with Malthus and everything to do with Potosí. What the wage/population graph shows isn’t too many people chasing too little cash, but on the contrary a combination of relative food abundance (neatly bookended by the crises of the 1550s and 1620s) and the contemporaneous influx of silver which raised prices in excess of stickier wages. The flow of precious metal may have responded to population growth and in turn have stimulated agriculture, but beyond that it’s coincidence: "real wages" had already been falling for a century to 1560 following the revival of central European mining, though population growth averaged only perhaps 0.1% for the first half of the period and may even have been negative for the first decades. That was a worrying aside from Nick Crafts - I hope he’s fighting fit for the next edition, which can’t be too far off in our age of rapid revision. But did French unions embrace labour market liberalisation and increased management freedom during the trente glorieuses? How much of Britain’s woes were down to a lack of vision and living off past achievements? Speaking of which, how much of British failure to keep up with western European competitors in the 1950s-70s was down to non-participation in the EEC?

[@chucku.farleyii3181]

Excellent. Thank you.

[@nthperson]

How is "Real GDP" defined? GDF is not a measurement of improved well-being but merely the addition of all expenditures by the private and public sectors on everything and anything. Thus, GDP increases when governments spend far more than the revenue raised regardless of what the spending is on. Spending on prisons and the criminal justice system increases GDP. Spending incurred by sending military into foreign nations to engage in warfare increases GDP. Does this spending increase the quality of life for people? Certainly, some individuals and some entities are enriched, but many others suffer a decline in their quality of life.

[@gregswanepoel5710]

too many uhms and ah

[@facethetruth9987]

Economics, a system where the many feed the few. It is the environment you all living and embrace and constantly moan about. Economics is endless growth, as simple as that, though other people will tell you different, it's about endlessly multiplying endlessly destroying until you have destroyed everything. Every political party policies are based on endless growth, economic growth, which is not sustainable you leave on an island, the land surface of just over 94,000 mi.², so it is not physically possible to endlessly multiply is it, unless your goal is to destroy it and yourself. So economic growth, cannot be sustained, what you should be looking for is stable at, stabilising the number of people to give yourselves a good firm future, we do not destroy your environment from greed and selfishness. I love how these people use this fancy words to cover the true intentions, don't believe me, go on to Google Earth, look at the UK, what do you see, every little square patch is farmland, natural countryside that has been destroyed to grow food for you, but because you are not capable of dealing with the truth, you clasp the farmlands as the countryside, and force what were left of a dwindling wildlife to live within it this food factory. There is no future in the policies and the way you behave, because the simple reason you could not endlessly expand into a space that is fixed. Try it at home with a cup, try endlessly filling it up without it overflowing, you will never be able to do it, and that applies to any space that size is fixed, it space governs how much you can put into it, not your desires or wishes.