Housing is more expensive (relative to other goods) now than in 1300 because the population is so much larger. The population of England in 1300 was something like 1/15 of what it is now. Denser population means land costs more -- that's just supply and demand.

Most other things are cheaper than in 1300. Many other things simply didn't exist in 1300.

You mention Louis XIV (who by the way was ~400 years after the time we're talking about). Was he poor? Obviously not. But for much of his life he suffered from health problems that we could probably treat effectively now; only one of his (legitimate) children lived past infancy, whereas now death in infancy is very rare. Medical care of the sort we now take for granted was not available at any price in the time of Louis XIV, let alone in 1300.

Also not available at any price in 1300: Central heating. Running water. Transport faster than, say, 20mph over long distances. Any sort of near-instantaneous long-distance communication.

Do you like books? You can have, for a sum of money a typical professional can easily afford over a few years, a private library better than anyone had in 1300. Do you like music? You can have, for a sum of money a typical professional can easily afford over a few years, hundreds of first-rate professional performances at your fingertips. Do you like fine food? You can have, at prices a typical professional will pay without a moment's thought, ingredients from all over the world that weren't even heard of in 14th-century York. Do you like to play games? You can have a chess grandmaster in your pocket, or buy a thing that fits over your head and creates a very convincing illusion of actually being in a world that doesn't even exist.

Yes, housing is terribly expensive right now. Yes, that's a big problem, it makes a lot of people's lives much worse than they ought to be, and it's easy to imagine ways it could do a lot more damage in the future. But that's pretty much the only thing that's much more expensive now than in 1300, and there are sooooo many things that are much cheaper and/or more available now.

> You mention Louis XIV [...]

I mean, that's my point.

The fact that "things are less expensive now" is 100% due to the fact that tech has improved, so the poorest of the poor get now things that were inaccessbile to royalty at that time not because things have improved from a societal point of view. Society's dynamics in terms of balances of power have actually gotten much worse from what they used to be in medieval times - think about that.

Your username indicates you're a troll, but:

> Society's dynamics in terms of balances of power have actually gotten much worse from what they used to be in medieval times

Please provide some evidence that a laborer in medieval Britain would have had more political power than someone in the middle class today (since medieval laborers were middle class).

I would say that it's self evident that 14th century workers got a better deal than todays workers comparatively and the burden of proof would be on you if you are claiming otherwise.

Back then people died younger due to war or disease. Starting in 1350 the black death killed around a third of the population of England. I would say almost certainly the average labourer of the 14th century would have had much more power and influence than the average labourer would today.

I did do a google search though. This link from the economist is quite interesting and cites numerous studies.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/economic...

You're comparing the average medieval laborer, who was pretty solidly middle class, to a modern laborer, who is at best working class if not working poor. As another poster points out, a strong, healthy 18-20 year old male trained in a skill is a lot more useful in 1350 than the same person with the same training/education.

Wow, nice strawman there.

Isn't it enough evidence that laborers back then could buy a good property in the city for 2.5 years of work, and now you'd have to get a very good salary and be lucky to be able to afford the same in maybe 20, 25 years?

But given the way you've attacked me, I don't think anything I write here will change your mind.

Your account is seven hours old and has only commented on this thread.

0. Medieval laborers were middle class so it's important we compare medieval laborers to the modern middle class, not to modern laborers.

1. A property cost 2.5x gross yearly income for a laborer. They could obviously not afford to buy it in 2.5 years. Furthermore, I don't know what the access to financing was like in the 14th-16th centuries, but I'm willing to bet it's better today.

2. The definition of "good" property is pretty subjective, can we assume that means median? Google tells me[0] that the median price seems to be approximately a quarter million pounds. Raw salary data for York[1] (again just a single result from a single Google search) gives us £24,323.76. So £25k give or take. This is just for York proper obviously. If England is anything like the US including the outlying areas will increase median income by quite a bit.

So a "good" property in York is about 10x the gross yearly salary of the middle class. On it's face that's obviously terrible! It's 4x harder for the middle class to own their home now than in the middle ages!

That is, unless you want to look at all the things the middle class has access to that medieval laborer does not. All these things cost money, whether you like it or not. Even if you want to exclude the things that were a technological impossibility in the 14th century, you've still got access to representation in government and access to healthcare just to name two things that dramatically increase quality of life.

[0] http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property/York.html

[1] http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Location=York-England%3a...

> Isn't it enough evidence that laborers back then could buy a good property in the city for 2.5 years of work, and now you'd have to get a very good salary and be lucky to be able to afford the same in maybe 20, 25 years?

No, because you're talking about - and I quote - Society's dynamics in terms of balances of power. Buying a good property in the city is a very, very small part of that.

Consider that Mayor DeBlasio can't come in and arbitrarily decree that that house is his, now, and so is my wife and horse. Consider that if I don't like his policies, I can run against him, campaign against him, vote against him. Consider that I actually have a fairly good chance of running into him on the street and actually having a critical conversation about his policies without the possibility of being whisked away and beheaded.

> But given the way you've attacked me

Nobody attacked you, they asked you to back up your thesis with more evidence than "I can't afford to live in New York". You then accused someone of making a strawman argument, when all they did was ask you to compare the same laborer you used against something other than the single point you're offering.

Construction is still mostly manual labor. Tech on that field has not kept up with progress of other fields.

Add Baumols disease to the equation and you don't need "balance of power getting worse" to explain high house prices. It's just that construction worker expects to be compensater roughly equally to assembly robot operator. No matter the latter has lot higher productivity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease

You definitely make a good point. A lot of profit and productivity isn't driven back into doing what would make the most sense: making everyone's lives better.

But, as a consequence of whatever we're focusing on (what is it really, anyway?) lives have gotten better overall, for everyone.

I think everyone would rather live in a Star Trek world. I would. Maybe we could.

With a 50k salary you can afford a 125k house at the same 1300 ratio. This seems about right for a rural area but not, of course, for an urban one. Of course neither the laborer in 1300 or today is able to spend their full salary for 2.5 years straight on a dwelling. They would have to save over a much longer period of time as that 2 pounds a year has to cover food, clothing, coal etc.

Sure both Louis and the laborer didn't have central heating and the internet but Louis could afford whatever WAS available for luxury and the laborer today can afford those 'luxuries' that even royalty didn't have access to 700 years ago.

Not saying social differences aren't huge but they are influenced by perception, social norms, media, and both absoulte and relative levels of comfort/luxury. It's hard to compare directly.

UK minimum ('laborer') wage is £13k, not 50.

My reply was very US centric and I didn't make that clear. My figures were in USD. 50k is the median household income in the US which, now that I think about it is not that useful a number for this.

> It's hard to compare directly.

It is. But still, if we think about the improvements we've had in terms of technology and compare them to the "political" changes in society (which are nil), you gotta sit down and think for a while. We're basically still stuck in 0AD.

I'm pretty sure you have a poor understanding of the "political" state of society of both the 14th and 21st centuries if you think the changes between the two are nil.

Do I?

I don't know, it doesn't look like things are much different. There's still lords and there's still servants.

I should have looked at your username before even bothering — but you're really dismissing how bad actual slavery is.

I don't think the fixed basket of goods is the best measure of purchasing power for this case.

I'd use the income value (aka "economic status") as a comparison, since IMO, you're really trying to scratch at "what is two and a half year's income worth now vs back then?" That figure is £181,600.00 from the same page you link, or £72,640.00/year.

Now, why don't laborers make that much now is an interesting question perhaps. I suspect it's because the relative position of a laborer in 1300 was middle of society and today it's not. Consider how valuable a strong, healthy, reliable worker would have been then compared to today.

There's also a labor figure on that page, which would amount to £27,656/yr, which seems inline (perhaps slightly low) for a laborer today.

There's other things you need to think about to make sense of the relationship between the average wage of a labourer and the price of a house.

First of all, in many places with less expensive land (driven by lower population densities) a 2.5 multiplier between an annual income and a property wouldn't be uncommon even now.

You need to consider the relative social position of a labourer. Today that would be very low, almost all employed people would make more and the role of pure physical labour in our society is marginal. That wasn't the case at the time and a labourer in good health would be higher up on the income scale (of people who were wage paid, which wasn't everyone by a long shot) than they would be today.

The relationship between the cost of capital stocks and income flows depends on the effective perceived discount rate which is driven by people's perception of risk and the structure of the financial system. Remember that at this time, no-one (and certainly not labourers) had bank accounts. It may be easy today for someone living in England to get a mortgage on residential property at 2.5 their income, it would not have been easy at the time. (Mortgaging income producing farmland would have been much easier)

You're also probably implicitly assuming that the cost of housing was the highest cost in most households as it is today. That certainly was not true at the time! Food was a much higher proportion of an average person's income, even for clerics it would be as much as 50% and it wouldn't surprise me if a labourer's household would spend as much as 75% of their income on food.

Other manufactured goods (especially clothes) were also vastly more expensive relative to income. We have records of wills from this period which specifically list individual shirts as well as items of land. No-one in the 21st century simultaneously owns land and thinks of their shirts as valuable long term assets to be willed to their heirs.

After providing for these necessities of life, the amount left to save up to buy property was much less.

> What's going on? It looks like that 1300's little folk was better off than we are

Not really. Your standard of living went up by a lot. The apartment you have today has air-conditioning, electricity, refrigerator, internet access, cable, indoor plumbing, R-30 insulation, etc. Then you have all your neighborhood/government amenities that you didn't have in the 1300's...

And you can buy houses in plenty of US cities for the price of 2 year's salary.

Well £2 is about £1,322 today. I am willing to bet there aren't many laborers in Britain making that.

It's probably more constructive to compare the price of a property in York today to the median wage today (since medieval laborers were middle class). It's still probably more than 2.5x, but to imply that we're worse off because you can't buy a home for £3,534 is pretty ridiculous.

The very same page puts it at £69k in "labour cost". Which is a bit low for any kind of house in York, but certainly not for a small but well built row house in Burnley. A well built row house in Burnley which will have running water, electricity, glass in the windows and central heating.

The figure also appears to confirm your point about the indicative "labourer" wage - doubtless a semi-skilled person not indebted by any obligations to a manorial landlord - being middle class in relative terms.

> I don't think I can rent a house in York for a year for that kind of money.

> God I despise this world so much.

The opportunity/better-living delta between big cities and other smaller ones have risen a lot over decades and centuries. There is much greater affordability of food, healthcare, basic education and better employment. But with the rise in population there limits on housing. Everyone wants a piece of same pie and there are economic consequences of that.

The next big disruption would be to break this trend. Use technology with a social/political movement to get the benefit of affordable food, healthcare, education and employment while living in non urban areas.

Well the website you link to has several different calculations for £5 1300 in modern money. The "real price" is £3,534 but the "labour earnings" is £69,140 which would certainly enable you rent/buy a property in York.

That's over 2.5 years, not per year.

There are a lot of good replies here regarding the economics, but they've all missed a rather simple and glaring cause of the disparate price: a house was a far simpler construction back then. In 1300, most houses were single story, single room buildings. The walls were simple wattle and daub (i.e. mud and sticks) supported by a frame consisting of a few rough hewn beams of timber. Metal tools were scarce and expensive, so the timber would be split using wedges and sunk directly into the ground (no foundations or basement). There were no chimneys or fireplaces, perhaps only a hole in the thatched roof above a simple stone hearth. The floors would be packed dirt covered in rushes.

A house like that wouldn't meet any of the minimum legal requirements for fire code or habitability in any modern society. Not by a long shot. They're much less comfortable, safe, fire resistant, well lit, large, insulated, private, secure against intruders, and hygienic than modern homes. There's no plumbing or electricity.

All of the raw materials were freely available from the land within half a day's walk of the house. No need to mine iron ore from Australia, ship it to China to refine into steel and shape into hinges. Just tie a rough board over the doorway with a leather thong. And this kind of house could be thrown up in a day or two by a relatively small group of laborers who wouldn't need any specialized skills not generally shared by all members of the peasant classes.

They would also hold up less well to harsh weather, requiring more frequent repair and replacement than a modern house. You could expect near total depreciation on the order of 5-10 years, much more comparable to a modern car than a modern home.

Lastly, demand for urban housing and land was significantly lower in the 14th century. This era far precedes the development of native British textile manufacturing, the first urbanized large scale industry in England that created a demand for centralized labor pools. Most large cities were cathedral or market towns, meaning they were centers for intermittent trading or religious activities, not fixed industrial production areas requiring large warehouses or factory buildings or large labor pools. Thus the populations were extremely small, only amounting to perhaps 10% of the total population of medieval England. York, for example, had a population of around 20,000 in 1300. Land and housing was correspondingly cheaper.

So: (1) significantly lower quality product, (2) much lower raw material and labor costs, (3) faster depreciation of value, and (4) lower demand all contributed to a significantly lower price than in the modern era.

You may hate this world, but believe me, if you knew how people lived in 1300 in York, you wouldn't want to buy a house there.