Cross-country comparisons of material living standards aren’t easy to do well, and especially for earlier historical periods when data are often patchy, to say the least.
But Professor Angus Maddison made the effort of compiling estimates for a range of a countries – in some cases going back (with estimates every few centuries) as far as the year 1AD. He used the best estimates he could find from other researchers where they were available, and did his own estimates to fill in some of the gaps. As one gets further into the 20th century, more official or semi-official estimates could be used.
His fullest set of estimates for the last couple of hundred years was for a group of 16 Western European countries and the four advanced “offshoots” – New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States. The estimates have to be taken with a considerable pinch of salt, but in…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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