Several people have asked me for the answers to yesterday’s pop quiz. Here they are, with some comments on how my students did.

  1. To the nearest 50 million, about 287 million people live in the United States today, and about 187 million people lived in Europe around 1800.

My students tended to overestimate the current U.S. population quite substantially, and underestimate the European population in 1800. The populations aren’t enormously different (especially when you consider relative land area), which tends to surprise the class. Given that, the next two questions are designed to focus attention on the huge differences in where those people were living.

  1. To the nearest 250,000, about 1,320,000 people live within Phoenix’s city limits today, and about 500,000 people lived in Paris around 1800.

Students tended to underestimate the size of Phoenix (most were sure it had a million people or less) even though it’s only a few hours up the road, but weren’t too far off on Paris. London had about twice the population of Paris in 1800, incidentally, and was the largest city in Europe.

  1. To the nearest 25, there are about 243 cities in the U.S. today with a popuation of more than 100,000. In Europe around 1800, there were about 20 cities of this size.

The overwhelmingly rural nature of pre-industrial life is hard for students to grasp. London and Paris were the only two really large cities in Europe. Besides those, the biggest European cities in 1800 were about the size of, say, Santa Clara, South Bend, or Provo. Most students seriously underestimated the number of large U.S. cities, while guessing fairly close to the European number. U.S. city population rankings can be found at the Census Bureau.

  1. To the nearest five inches, the average height of recruits to the British Royal Navy in 1800 was 4 feet 3 inches.

This is my favorite question. Pretty much nobody gets the right answer, with c. 5'0" being the lowest estimate anyone risks. These data (thanks to Chris Bertram for inquiring) are for “fourteen-year-old recruits for naval service via London’s Marine Society” and represent “the healthier portion of the city’s jobless poor”. By contrast, entrants of the same age to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, drawn from the gentry and artistocracy, avderaged about 5'1". (All quotations are from pp1-2 of Chuck Tilly’s excellent Durable Inequality.) Tilly comments:

An average beginning military cadet stood some 10 inches taller than a newly recruited mariner. Because poor youths matured later than rich ones, their heights converged an inch or two by adulthood. Nevertheless, we can imagine their counterparts in the army: aristocratic officers glowering down half a foot or more at their plebian troops. Such an image vivifies the phrases “high and mighty,” “haughty,” and “look down on someone.”

Differences in height are due to differences in quality of diet and living conditions, and are one of the best proxy measures of comparative inequality.

  1. In 1800, the journey from London to Glasgow (about 350 miles) took at least 62 hours.

The time-space compression question. Speed of travel is one of the most distinctive features of modernity. Students underestimate the time, generally thinking it couldn’t have taken more than 36 hours. In fact, the 62 hour journey was itself a big improvement from the 1760s, when it took about 12 days.

  1. In 1800 a typical American General Store carried about ? separate products. In 1985, a typical American supermarket carried about 12,000 separate products. In 2000, a typical American supermarket carried about 45,000 separate products.

Two good measures of social differentiation and complexity are, (1) How many distinct roles are there? and (2) How many distinct goods are produced? Unfortunately, I don’t have a number for the 1800 general store—- if anyone knows of some data, please let me know. The other two estimates come from a marketing report, and I’m not certain how accurate they are. They line up with the intutition that niche marketing and global product availability (e.g., in the market for exotic fruits and vegetables) have both increased dramatically even in the last 20 years. Students underestimated the figures for 1985 and 2000 by about an order of magnitude.

The historical data come mainly from surveys by Fernand Braudel and Eric Hobsbawm—- The Structures of Everyday Life and The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 as far as I remember.