Measuring living standards. Some caveats concerning salary elements in pre-modern Rio de la Plata region, 1770-1830

MARTIRÉN, JUAN LUIS; DJENDEREDJIAN, JULIO

Lisboa

Congreso; International Conference Old and New Worlds: the Global Challenges of Rural History; 2016

Sociedad Española de Historia Agraria

Abstract: Through data from various sources, this paper focuses on the deep contrasts between unskilled worker?s salaries in nearby rural areas of the Rio de la Plata region at the end of the colonial period. Those differences were not only due to a productivity gap (although it existed and mattered a lot) but also to differences in a wide range of phenomena: quality and quantity of available cash currency, gains expected in trading highly mobile goods received as part of the payroll, additional salary elements, and access to credit for extended family groups, secured through a salary-linked debt account.Therefore, the paper seeks to stress some concerns that must be take into account to use the salaries as a comparative variable. Workers were usually part of family groups, more or less extended, not necessarily located in or nearby their workplace. Salaries were so only part of family income. But the rest weighted very differently in each place, due to distinct cultural traditions or economic reasons. This determined very different features for salaries, and huge contrasts in nominal amounts, or in the part paid out in cash, despite the relatively similar cost of living in this space. Those contrasts, also, warn us on the quality and usefulness of living standard comparisons, when dealing with distant past societies: if even in nearby areas of the same region salary differences as expressed in cash payments were huge, what can be expected when confronting far away countries? How different would be the buying power of an individual if we consider all those supposedly side matters? Are we able to accept that cash wage (or salary) would be a universally useful expression of purchasing power, or income?