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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6495809" data-attributes="member: 4937">Almost all the big gains in standard of living are owed to the increased productivity of labor.  As an hour of labor generates more goods, the price of goods relative to an hour of labor goes down, and consequently the standard of living goes up.   Fiddling with the customary minimum wage only changes the price of 'coin', and not the value of labor.   Valuation of labor in coin changed in the middle ages only when it became clear the value of coin was falling, though I don't think it was necessarily understood that coin was falling in value because coin was more plentiful.  The discussion of purchasing power parity in 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Author's Court' is as brutal as it is cynical, but it's also tragically very believable.  However, aside from correcting for inflation, there has been numerous studies showing that the actual standard of living barely shifts when wage controls are introduced, precisely because the value of coin quickly adjusts.  However, this discussion touches on modern opinions and will quickly get as political as discussing the actual effects on giving tax credits for mortgage interest.Compared to the poor, medieval artisans were very well off.  There was a huge wage gap between the lower class and the middle class, into which fit only by a comparatively small number of relatively wealthy tenants and free landholders.  The main cause of that was the guild system, which allowed medieval craftsman to collude to set prices and have a legal monopoly on the sale and transport of goods.   The result was that a carpenter or whitesmith could sale a days worth of his labor for many days worth of labor of a farmer - who lacked the same legal protections.  And the result of that is that the government subsidization of the middle class drastically decreased the standard of living of the lower class.  And the result of that was the Guilds were probably more hated by the farmers than even the tax collectors.   I wish I could discuss that in more depth as well, but again, there is a surprisingly direct connection to modern economic theorems, and as someone noted, most people's opinions are still guided by the dead hands of 19th century philosophers of one stripe or another.</blockquote>

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