ABSTRACT
Population change and living standards are deeply inter-related. Narrowly defined, living standards refer to the purchasing power of the general population, that is, the daily consumer goods the people could afford, such as the quantity and quality of food, clothing and shelter. Living standards can encompass a range of aspects of a population’s life, from consumption of basic necessities through health status to measures of opportunities for self-realization and even self-reported happiness. Both in the case of living standards and the population change, the factor that contributed in a major way to the difference between the modernizers and the laggards was the existence and extent of industrial wage labour. Vienna worked a powerful attraction on workers from Bohemia and Moravia and coupled with migration from other parts of the empire, the immigration contributed to Vienna’s increase in population from 232,000 in 1800 to 2 million in 1910.
