Dietz Vollrath has written a new blogpost calling attention to a working paper on measuring economic growth for the most hotly debated time period and region in economic history: early modern Britain. The paper, by Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf, assembles evidence on annual wage contracts (rather than daily wages) to suggest that modern, sustained economic growth began a lot earlier than the “classic” accounts of the Industrial Revolution. They try to solve the contentious matter of how many days in the year people actually worked — if you’re measuring only day wages, it matters how many holidays people took when calculating the annual wage. And this, in turn, matters for how you estimate GDP per capita before the dawn of official statistics.