In 2014, the OECD published How Was Life?: Global Well-being since 1820, the result of a collaboration between the OECD and the OECD Development Centre, on one side, and an international group of economic historians organised around the Clio-Infra initiative and the Maddison Project, on the other (van Zanden et al., 2014[1]). This joint undertaking built on Angus Maddison’s long career at the OECD and the OECD Development Centre, and on the close contacts that he maintained with these institutions. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the OECD Development Centre had published Angus’ pioneering books on long-term economic growth in the world economy.

In 2014, the OECD published the report How Was Life?: Global Well-being since 1820 (van Zanden et al.[1]). Its aim was to provide an historical counterpart to the How’s Life? report published bi-annually by the OECD since 2011. The latter report was a first attempt at the international level to go beyond the conceptual stage and to present a large set of comparable well-being indicators for OECD countries and, to the extent possible, other major economies. How Was Life? added an historical dimension to this pioneering work, presenting data for 25 large countries, eight world regions and the world as a whole for the period since 1820. How Was Life? was based on a collaboration between the OECD and the economic historical community organised around the Clio-Infra initiative and the Maddison Project. These initiatives supplied the historical data for the How Was Life? report, the expertise to assess the quality of the data and the possibilities for interpreting the long-term trends in the world economy. This volume continues the efforts initiated in How Was Life?.

Through the report, data shown for world regions and the world as a whole are population-weighted averages for all countries included in the Clio-Infra database. The coverage of countries typically increases as more country data become available for more recent periods. To ensure more meaningful trends for world regions over time, imputations are made for missing countries.

Are we better off than our ancestors? Did quality of life improve over historical times? And, if so, did the tide of progress lift all boats? The Industrial Revolution was a critical break in human history that reshaped societies and initiated a new era of economic growth. According to the international estimates of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) produced by Simon Kuznets, Angus Maddison and their followers, material living standards have increased substantially since the adaptation of the steam engine and other path-breaking techniques that truly reshaped the world. The latest historical estimates of GDP presented in this book show that per capita GDP in the world economy expanded 13-fold between 1820 and 2016. The average human now is undoubtedly much richer than her or his counterpart two centuries ago.

This chapter provides an introduction to, and summary of, the contents of this book. It outlines the aim of the project and provides an overview of the indicators covered, comparing them with those used in the OECD Better Life Initiative. The chapter also presents the criteria used through the report to assess the quality of the indicators used and discusses practical and methodological issues. Finally, the chapter summarises the content of each chapter and its main highlights.

GDP estimates form the backbone of our understanding of economic change in the past and the present. This chapter presents and discusses the results of an update of the Maddison Project, which aimed to incorporate the results of the 2011 round of the International Comparison Programme (ICP), and of the efforts of many scholars who have extended and deepened the work on historical national accounts. A method is presented to test the reliability of various approaches to back-project historical time series of GDP, and it is concluded that Maddison’s 1990 benchmark still produces the most plausible results. The implications for this for the growth of the world economy since 1820 are discussed.

Despite the substantial implications of working time for considerations of living standards and economic output, historical data on working hours are sparse. This chapter presents a new dataset on the length of the working week in manufacturing globally from 1820-2010 Oisín Gilmore would like to thank Herman de Jong, Rick Veldkamp, Pedro Miguel, the editors of this volume and other participants in the OECD workshops on historical well-being held in Utrecht in September 2018 and in Paris in June 2019. This chapter was supported by the Institut für die Geschichte und Zukunft der Arbeit (IGZA) and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).. The dataset contains some 4 300 observations and covers 120 countries or political units. It shows that workers in manufacturing worked 60 to 90 hours per week in the 19th century, compared to around 40 hours today. This is a reduction of 20-50 hours, that is, 50-125% of today’s average working week. The data also show that weekly working hours declined rapidly after World War I, with the introduction of the eight-hour day, and again later in the 20th century, with the generalisation of the five-day week. This decline in weekly working hours stalled since the 1950s-60, and seem to have reversed in the most recent period.

The use of social spending to provide safety nets barely existed before 1820. In the next two centuries, it spread around the world. Countries now differ greatly in their commitments to social spending, which continue to take a larger share of national product in richer countries toward the north and west, and lower shares in poorer countries to the south and east. The most striking trend in the make-up of government social spending is the long drift from public investments in the young towards public subsidies to the elderly.

This chapter provides an overview of long-term changes in wealth inequality based on the Gini index and the wealth share of the richest 10%. The authors wish to thank Peter Lindert, Livio Di Matteo, Salvatore Morelli and Giacomo Gabbuti for supplying us with some data on wealth inequality. This chapter received support from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Program/ERC Grant agreement No. 725687, SMITE-Social Mobility and Inequality across Italy and Europe, 1300-1800, as well as from the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) (12553347). The chapter relies on current databases such as the World Inequality Database (WID) but expands the time series for a range of countries (back to 1820 in the case of France, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States) and by producing new estimates. Our data confirm the general picture of a creeping increase in inequality during the 19th century, followed by declines from the onset of World War I (1914) until the 1960s and, in many (but not all) countries, a new tendency towards higher inequality since the 1970s. The correlation of wealth inequality with per capita GDP is found to be quite weak and not always positive, implying that higher wealth inequality cannot be considered a simple side effect of economic growth.

This chapter describes trends in adult length of life and its distribution based on 15 144 life tables derived from various sources that for some countries cover a period of over 200 years. Since 1800, life expectancy in the most developed countries has increased from around 55 to 81 years for men and from 57 to 87 for women, an increase of about 50%. Concurrently, inequality in length of life in the best-performing countries has been cut by over 2/3 for both men and for women. This decrease, however, is not independent of the change in average life expectancy, as the two are strongly connected. Our data show that, in spite of great improvements in average life expectancy and reductions in length of life inequality since 1800, at each level of life expectancy there is substantial variation in inequality of length of life between different countries.

Education is far from universally attainable, with the resulting educational inequality having wide implications for both individuals and societies. Because of this importance, this chapter reports trends in educational inequality from the 19th century to the present. We do this by using relative and absolute measures of inequality in (formal) educational attainment. Overall, we observe a strong decline in the Gini coefficient of years of schooling over the period, a decline that is caused mostly by a reduction in the share of persons with no formal education. Looking at absolute inequality, as measured by the standard deviation, we find a rising trend in the first half of the 20th century and a decline afterwards.

This chapter provides an overview of global trends in gender equality in health, socio-economic resources and politics over the entire 20th century. It does so by extending the historical gender equality index (HGEI) introduced in the previous How Was Life? report back to 1900 and forward to 2010, and by including additional indicators. While progress since 1900 towards gender equality is visible especially in the dimensions of health and socio-economic resources, cluster analysis reveals that the groupings of countries by level of gender equality remains similar through time. The main exceptions are Southern Europe and the Nordic countries, which witness substantial improvements in the post-1950 period.

This chapter relies on a global data set on basic commodity prices to provide first estimates of global extreme poverty in the long run using a “cost of basic needs” approach. Author’s affiliation: Department of History and Art History, Economic and Social History, Utrecht University. I wish to thank Marco Mira d’Ercole, Bram van Besouw, Tim van der Valk, Gareth Austin, Alex Kolev, Wouter Ryckbosch, Mark Sanders, Jutta Bolt, Aditi Dixit, Auke Rijpma and Jan Luiten van Zanden for their suggestions, comments and remarks. I particularly thank Bas van Leeuwen for providing price data on China, as well as for sharing digitisalised ILO price data (together with Pim de Zwart); Robert Allen for discussing his method and results; Leandro Prados de la Escosura for all his valuable comments and for sharing his newly updated long-run inequality estimates for Spain along with his invaluable remarks and comments; Guido Alfani for the inequality data on sub-Saharan Africa; Christoph Lakner and Prem Sangraula from the World Bank for sharing the CPI dataset used by the Bank for global poverty measurement; and Guus Wieman for his excellent research assistantship. I want to extend my gratitude to the participants at the 2017 Posthumus Conference, the 2017 Economic History Society Annual Conference, and the workshops organised by the editors of this volume in Utrecht and at the OECD in Paris. All analysis has been conducted with R open source statistical computing software (R Core Team, 2018[37]). All remaining errors are my own. For 135 years since 1820, more than half of the global population lived in conditions of extreme poverty. It took another 46 years to cut this rate in half, which only happened as recently as 2001. In the years that followed, the reduction of extreme poverty accelerated tremendously, and in 13 more years the global poverty rate was halved again. Compared to other available estimates, the world in the 19th century was less poor than we had thought, but poorer in the more recent period. Notably, the total number of people living in conditions of extreme poverty in 1820 stands at 757 million, which is almost identical with the count two centuries later in 2018, at 764 million.

Biodiversity is important for human well-being as it provides ecosystems services such as the pollination of crops, the prevention of disease, and recreation. This chapter presents historical trends in biodiversity based on multiple indicators. Globally, the average abundance of species population has declined by 44% since 1970. Multiple indicators that cover a long-term timeframe show that biodiversity has declined for the better part of the Holocene, with this trend accelerating since 1900. In the shorter term, efforts to arrest the decline have borne some fruit, with a 36% increase in species abundance in Western Europe since 1970, which contrasts however with an 81% decline in Latin America and the Caribbean. This chapter also puts forward a framework for analysing key drivers of changes in biodiversity. An application of this analytical framework to the case of the Netherlands identifies population growth, intensification of agriculture, expansion of infrastructure and pollution as the key human drivers of biodiversity loss in the country since 1900.

This chapter provides an overall picture of well-being based on the whole body of evidence included in the two volumes of How Was Life? When considering average (country-level) measures, both the different indicators included in individual chapters as well as the composite indicator included in this chapter highlight great progress and convergence in well-being across the world. However, great differences between world regions continue to exist. Moreover, a slowdown in a number of indicators has become visible in recent decades. When focusing on (within-country) well-being inequalities, income inequality has increased again over the last few decades, while inequality in education and length of life have continued to decrease.