The increase in affluence came in the nineteenth century with the Industrial Revolution.

Test whether a sustained rise in material living standards (GDP per capita or real wages) began in the nineteenth century and is associated with industrialisation. Use standard long-run economic history data, such as the Maddison Project. True: the data show income per head broadly stagnant before about 1800, with sustained growth beginning in the 1800s in industrialising countries. Mostly true: the onset is in the late eighteenth century in Britain but the rise becomes substantial in the nineteenth century, or the timing is right but scholars weight causes other than the Industrial Revolution more heavily. Mixed: there was substantial and sustained growth in some leading economies well before 1800, for example the Netherlands or England in the 1600s, alongside the nineteenth-century take-off. Mostly false: the main rise in affluence is dated well before or well after the nineteenth century, though industrialisation contributed. False: the data show no rise in affluence in the nineteenth century.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 A Tale of Two Transitions: The European Growth Experience, 1270-1900 Maddison-Project Working Paper WP-14 (de Pleijt and van Zanden, Utrecht University) · February 2020

   “Modern economic growth, with GDP per capita increasing at a much higher rate than before the 1820s, set in.”

2. E2 Seven centuries of European economic growth and decline Grantham Research Institute / CCCEP, LSE (Fouquet and Broadberry) · September 2015

   “In the second section, the paper tentatively identifies that the likelihood of being in a phase of growth increased and the risk of being in a phase of decline decreased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

3. E3 The Industrial Revolution in Theory and in History Gregory Clark, University of California, Davis

   “Incomes per capita began a sustained growth in a favored group of countries around 1820.”

4. E4 Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution The Journal of Economic History (Charles H. Feinstein) · September 1998

   “improved by less than 15 percent between the 1780s and 1850s.”

E3 says incomes per capita began sustained growth in a favoured group of countries around 1820. E1, a Maddison Project paper, likewise dates modern economic growth from the 1820s, with GDP per capita rising "at a much higher rate than before". That wording implies some growth before then, so incomes were not entirely flat earlier. E2 finds that growth phases became more likely and declines less likely in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. E4 reports that British living standards improved by less than 15 percent between the 1780s and 1850s, so the nineteenth-century timing is broadly right, though gains in the early part of the century were modest and E1's wording ('a much higher rate than before the 1820s') implies some growth came earlier.