Top names of the 1880s

In seventeenth-century England, 150 out of every 1,000 newborns died during their first year, and a third of all children were dead before they reached fifteen.9 Today, only five out of 1,000 English babies die during their first year, and only seven out of 1,000 die before age fifteen.10

The graph shows that over this twenty-year period real incomes improved substantially, often by more than 50 percent, for almost everyone around the world (keep in mind that, as we saw in chapter 1, it took eight centuries for real incomes to grow by 50 percent across the world prior to the start of the Industrial Era).