Counting the Missing Poor in Pre-Industrial Societies

Under income-di¤erentiated mortality, poverty measures su¤er from a
selection bias: they do not count the missing poor (i.e. persons who would
have been counted as poor provided they did not die prematurely). The
Pre-Industrial period being characterized by an evolutionary advantage
(i.e. a higher number of surviving children per household) of the non-poor
over the poor, one may expect that the missing poor bias is substantial
during that period. This paper quanti es the missing poor bias in Pre-
Industrial societies, by computing the hypothetical headcount poverty
rates that would have prevailed provided the non-poor did not bene t from
an evolutionary advantage over the poor. Using data on Pre-Industrial
England and France, we show that the sign and size of the missing poor
bias is sensitive to the degree of downward social mobility.