The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. Weird, but moving, it’s narrated from heaven by a 13-year old murder victim.

Also England Under the Tudors by GR Elton, reprinted in the Folio History of England series. Some striking numbers are that the population of England at the time was around 3 million and that the King’s annual revenue was less than 100 000 pounds. Here are some thoughts on this.

(a) Given that 80 or 90 per cent of the population were peasants who had no real chance of an education, the pool from which English governments drew their talent was smaller than that available to a lot of city councils in Australia. Did this make a difference?

(b) Estimating Mr Darcy’s income, Brad DeLong says, with suspicious precision, “In 1810 the pound had a present-day value of £27.28”. As I recall there was a fourfold inflation following the discovery of the New World goldmines, so lets say that the price level has risen 100-fold since Tudor times. This gives a government budget of around 10 million pounds per year or $30 million Australian dollars, which is less than it costs to run a medium-sized university.

On a related theme, Brad riffs off Virginia Postrel’s observation that

CHEAP STAPLES: I bought a five pound bag of Gold Medal flour yesterday for 69 cents. I find that amazing.

to estimate a 400-fold improvement in standards of living since the 16th century.

Over 500 years, this would imply a doubling time of around 60 years or, using the rule of 70, an annual growth rate in income per capita of about 1.2 per cent . I think this overstates things a bit because the relative price of food has been declining at least for the past century, suggesting more rapid productivity growth in agriculture than in the economy as a whole. However, some of the price decline is due a lower income elasticity of demand reflecting the finite capacity of the human stomach – the treatment of this is complicated.