The Income and Wealth of Jane Austen Characters

Up until the recent modern economic miracle in which the Industrial Revolution and capitalism combined to create a tsunami of personal household wealth that is unprecedented in all of recorded human history, there were two primary forms of capital that were considered respectable for generating a private income:

• Land, rented to others or put to work in agriculture; and
• Sovereign bonds that generated interest.

Furthermore, there were primarily three mechanisms through which wealth, and thus passive income, could be attained and considered culturally legitimate (i.e., granting the corresponding social capital). Those three mechanisms were:

• Inheritance;
• Marriage; and
• Largesse granted by a monarch, often as a result of the spoils of war or some distinct service to the realm.

Self-made fortunes, which were much more difficult to achieve and rarer in those days, could be amassed by exceptional individuals in fields as diverse as commerce, banking, trade, and retail. However, the money would be considered unseemly until it had been recycled into one of the two aforementioned categories at lower rates of return (typically 4% to 5%), including through marriage into a titled family in exchange for a cash infusion to support the landed estate. This absurd, if not outright immoral, contradiction helps explain why the United States blew past the United Kingdom with such force that, broadly speaking and with a few caveats involving transfer payments and benefits, the median income in the U.K. today is lower than the median income in America’s poorest state, Mississippi.

These facts, combined with general price levels that were remarkably stable despite what were often violent short-term shocks caused by banking crises, wartime scarcity, etc., have allowed modern economists to incorporate references to works of fictional literature as illustrative case studies to demonstrate certain conditions or relationships within social and economic structures; e.g., French economist Thomas Piketty references the characters in works from both Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac in his tomes.

Stated more plainly, since “respectable” productive wealth generated income at a rate of return that was so consistent (4% to 5%), it was unnecessary for authors to even identify the assumption. To know someone’s capital base was to know their passive income, and to know someone’s passive income was to know their capital base. It was a two-way street. To illustrate: In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, it is asked regarding Mr. Henry Crawford, “What is his property?” [wealth] and the response is, “Four thousand a year” [income]. We therefore infer that Mr. Crawford’s property is somewhere between £80,000 and £100,000. Austen doesn’t have to state it.

For my own reference, I have a chart detailing the amount, source, CPI equivalent, and multiple of household income figures for Austen’s major characters throughout her body of work. In case it is helpful to anyone else, here it is:

Reviewing this really drives home the exceptional nature of what has happened over the past century or two. I mean, think about yesterday. I made the post on Ray Kroc’s seventeen-year period during which he sold paper cups, so it is top of mind. The fortunes that the McDonald’s system alone has created across tens of thousands of families at minimum make Austen’s richest characters look like paupers in comparison. It wasn’t that long ago that an average person could only hope to eat small amounts of meat throughout the year. Now, folks can gorge themselves on unhealthy amounts in even small towns that otherwise have no major economic base.

Why am I writing this? I’m working on a post detailing some new economic data that came out about American household wealth accumulation. The figures are wild. The disparity between us and the rest of the planet continues to be stark. Austen could not comprehend a system as affluent as the United States when she was penning her works. Today’s reality puts to shame even that which was already extreme in 2009 or 2010 when I used to write about it. In the same way a fish living in an ocean can’t appreciate the water, I don’t think the typical person has any comprehension of how the current system ranks against all historical systems. Even compared to, say, 1970, the United States in 2026 is vastly more prosperous in every conceivable way.

The things people rightfully complain about, such as companies making it impossible to repair products, movies, games, and software only being available as a subscription, the concentration of ownership in television and media, the throwaway nature of modern appliances, the erosion of personal autonomy and privacy rights, the cost of healthcare, are political problems, not economic ones. That is, these problems are not consequences of taxes being too low, inequality being too high, or society lacking sufficient resources to fix them. Rather, they could be solved today. We, as a civilization, do not have to accept them. Worse, many of the solutions proposed will attack the wrong root cause and thus exacerbate the problems, making life more miserable. To add insult to injury, society suffered from these mistakes in the past but now seems determined to repeat them. With the older generations now gone to the grave, we’re far enough removed that younger cohorts are determined to discard the lessons of history. “This time it will work” might as well be engraved on the cobblestone path to economic hell.