Serfs in the Age of Catherine the Great and Minimum Wage Today

From Catherine the Great:

At the time of Catherine’s accession, the Russian population included ten million serfs, most of them peasants who furnished the overwhelming majority of the agricultural laborers in an overwhelmingly agricultural state. From the beginning of her reign, Catherine wanted to deal with the fundamental problem of serfdom, but the institution was too deeply interwoven into the economic and social fabric of Russian life for her to approach in her first months. Nevertheless, if a permanent, overall solution must be postponed, she could not put off the question of the church’s extensive lands and the one million male serfs who, with their families, worked these lands.

The price of a serf, even one highly skilled, was often less than that of a prize hunting dog. In general, a male serf could be bought for between two hundred and five hundred rubles; a girl or woman would cost between fifty and two hundred rubles, depending on her age, talents, and comeliness. Serfs sometimes changed owners for no price at all. He or she could be bartered against a horse or a dog, and a whole family could be gambled away in a night of cards.

In many ways, the condition of Russian serfs resembled that of black slaves in America. They were considered a human subspecies by their owners, and this chasm between serfs and masters was believed to be sanctioned by God. They were bought and sold like animals. They were subject to arbitrary treatment, hardship, and, all too often, cruelty. In Russia, however, there was no color barrier between master and slave. Russian serfs were not aliens in a foreign land; they had not been violently abducted from their homelands, languages, and religions, and carried thousands of miles across an ocean. Serfs in Russia were the descendants of impoverished, uneducated people of the same race, the same blood, and the same language as their owners.

The only limit on a nobleman’s power was that he was not permitted to execute a serf; he was, however, allowed to inflict punishment likely to cause death.

If the market-clearing price for a serf was low in the 18th century, a time when crops had to be harvested by hand, why do we expect that minimum wage can be raised to $15/hour without leading to substantial layoffs? Education levels are higher today than in Catherine the Great’s time, of course, but local human labor has to compete with (1) machines, and (2) global labor.

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15 thoughts on “Serfs in the Age of Catherine the Great and Minimum Wage Today

  1. The serfs got their revenge, though… Not a lot of Russian noblemen running around these days. (even the Kulaks were liquidated)

  2. >If the market-clearing price for a serf was
    >low in the 18th century, a time when
    >crops had to be harvested by hand,
    >why do we expect that minimum wage
    >can be raised to $15/hour without
    >leading to substantial layoffs?

    If the value add for all jobs is well above $15/hour then we could quite possibly expect to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour without leading to substantial layoffs. I’m not claiming it is so, only that this factor (perhaps among others) is what counts and not the price of serfs in 18th century Russia.

  3. You could argue both ways here. OTOH, in many areas in the US, the market clearing price of (more or less) unskilled labor is already more than current minimum wages (although usually less than $15). The problem in places like Ohio is not that those laid off from factory jobs can’t get ANY work, it’s that the work that is available pays less than before – instead of $24 plus benefits at the Carrier factory, it’s $12/hr at WalMart and maybe 30 hrs/week instead of 40 plus overtime. This means the difference between a middle class American lifestyle and barely getting by.

    BUT any big push toward higher minimum wages is likely to result in more self checkout schemes in stores and fast food restaurants, etc. Amazon is experimenting with stores where you just grab your stuff and go. My local Giant supermarket now has a system where you are given a handheld barcode scanner and shopping bags when you enter the store and scan and bag your items as you collect them from the shelf – to check out you download all the data at the usual self checkout kiosk and pay in the usual way, so you only have to spend a few seconds there (meaning more people can use the same # of kiosks). It wouldn’t take much to link your purchase to Google Pay so you could just walk out of the store. And RFID tags on each item (similar to the shoplifting tags that are already on each high value item) would be a game changer. The current barcode system is now 40+ years old.

    OTOH, if you look at the millions of people who are no longer in the workforce at all, many of these people could not even get hired by WalMart. It’s hard to say what the market clearing price is for their labor since government benefits (maybe even more than the current minimum wage) in effect set a floor on the price. We are not really in a position, given the difficulty of “reforming entitlements” of knowing what a real market clearing wage would be for those folks. Given NAFTA, you could say that it might be similar to Mexican minimum wage levels ($4 – oops that’s $4 per DAY) but that’s not politically supportable here even if we had President Hillary Goldman Sachs.

  4. No layoffs if you redefine job.

    SSDI for men.

    Blow jobs and spit into cervical cap or Softcup for women. Collect child support or welfare or both.

    @Neal value add for all current American workers above $15/hour? ROFL

  5. interesting that serfdom in Western Europe came to an end after the black death – the survivors were in demand so that they had a stronger bargaining position; (also wages were relatively high for about fifty years); The black death didn’t come to Eastern Europe so that’s where the institution was more entrenched – and here it was abolished much later.

  6. Pretty sure the American version of a serf is a republican. Only republicans can’t afford $8400/year for an insurance plan.

  7. @michael: I wonder if mass immigration is good for the bottom 15% of workers from a supply and demand perspective?

  8. Mike: It’s bad, as you’d expect. From what I remember in Borjas’ We Wanted Workers, a 10% increase in a population at a particular skill level reduces wages by 3%.

  9. @StationaryFeast I think the details matter there – didn’t US wages rise in real terms from the days of the Pilgrims, through the rebellion and the industrial revolution, even as immigration soared? You may a good argument for restricting family sizes, too – maybe China got rich because they had so few children?

    Adding more people increases the supply, but it changes the demand side of the equation also.

  10. Ed: U.S. wages did rise from the 17th century through the 19th, but wasn’t there a simultaneous process of Europeans grabbing up additional productive land? How is that a blueprint for 21st century America if there is no new land to settle? Maybe if the U.S. were to colonize Mars (and Mars turned out to be an awesome place for producing timber, minerals, and crops that were in demand back here on Earth) I would want to look at what happened since the Pilgrims.

  11. Good point @PhilG, but didn’t American living standards also rise during the 20th century, when there was no new productive land to acquire?

    Something else happened too, that allowed you to increase per-capita productivity and per-capita earnings too – even though 20th-century America say a significant increase in population went from 76 million in 1900 to about 282 million in 2000.

    It’s hard to look at your 20th century and say that adding people made you poorer.

  12. Ed: There was an expanding frontier in the 20th century as well, albeit not one of land. Automobiles, electronics, telecommunications, etc. There was also an improvement in human capital. Academic achievement and attainment improved during the 20th century in the U.S. Legal immigration for most of the 20th century was restricted to people from countries with comparatively high levels of academic achievement.

    We can’t predict whether or not new non-land frontiers will open up in the 21st century (greatly improved batteries?), but it doesn’t seem as though educational achievement or attainment is going up in the U.S.

    But remember that the original posting is not about the market-clearing wage for the average American. It is about the market-clearing wage for Americans with the lowest levels of skills and education. We’ve been reminded by the media and various politicians that American has become a profoundly unequal society with people at the bottom having nothing but their SSDI checks, Xboxes, and black tar heroin or Medicaid-funded OxyContin. That suggests that there are already a lot of Americans who aren’t readily employable under the current regime of minimum-wage laws.

  13. > The serfs got their revenge, though

    Imperial Russia was an agricultural superpower. The farming system there was extremely productive, both in terms of financial and net energy. Arguably, the sector never recovered from the revolution.

  14. The problem in the US is not really low wages. It’s that the cost of living is made very artificially high because the entire economy is riddled with cartels and rackets and taxes that are effectively poured down the drain. It should be perfectly feasible to live comfortably on $12 an hour for 40 per week in the USA without taxpayer subsidy. That it’s not is all about how riddled with rent seekers and parasites the system is.

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