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 a few suggestions on ""Measuring economic worth over time"" 

I fully realize that this is a work in progress but thought a few suggestions could be useful. I'll post some specific ones on the talk page but more generally:

 Please don't take it the wrong way but I think quite often your writing style reflects academia too much - as if you were writing for an academic journal. However the intended target audience of the Wikipedia is different than that of a bunch of academics so care should be taken to avoid unnecessary nomenclature and jargon, as well as to avoid ""academic phrasing"" in favor of simple formulations. More importantly I think one should be careful with introducing terms and concepts into the text that have not been defined previously and that a lay reader may be unfamiliar with, for example ""social cost"" or ""social production"".
 Speaking of ""social production"" it'd be useful to standardize the terminology when it is being used. For example it seems like by ""proportions of social production"" you refer to income shares of various classes (workers, capitalists, landlords etc) - if so, then that should be stated clearly, if not, the difference should be clarified. Likewise comparing the article title and the lead I think you're equivocating between ""economic worth"" and ""social worth"" which could be/are distinct concepts. Also because I'm probably coming at this from a different background I'm wondering what exactly is the relationship between ""social product"" and more standard measures of production like GDP, income, etc.
 ""Both contemporary and historical wage price series are inherently controversial, as they speak to the standard of living of working class people."" - I'm not sure if contemporary wage and price series are really ""inherently"" controversial in the sense of being outright rejected by many researchers; at least that doesn't seem like the appropriate word here. Likewise, I don't think the reason why they are controversial/deemed important is because they concern ""working class people"". They obviously concern all members of society whatever their class status. In a similar way the idea of ""economic worth"" can refer to entities such as firms, charities, nations or even physical objects such as machinery and equipment.
 Proportion of gdp and the questions given as examples aren't really related. For example the question ""what was the opportunity cost of a £50,000 investment in 1840?"" is not obviously or directly related to the question ""what was the social power of capital in 1840?"".
 Some ideas for expansion: ""Theoretical problems"" sections should link and perhaps briefly mention things like the LTV and marginalism, maybe something like the aggregation problem (though that article needs some serious work). ""Wage price series"" can be expanded to include discussion of how these kind of data are generally collected (btw, I'm not sure what a ""real price"" is here. An individual good price divided by a price index?). For historical wage price series there's also a good bit of data available for the Netherlands and to a lesser extent France and Germany. There's also sporadic data for a wide number of different societies which don't really constitute a series but do provide ""snapshot"" views of the economy/society in time (all the way back to ancient Sumer). The main difficulty of comparing aggregates across time is the changing nature of a consumption basket and time usage, in particular introduction of new goods and disappearance of old ones (like Malleus alludes to above) - this should also be elaborated upon and made more explicit.

I'd really hate to barge in and edit a new article while it is still being written so I thought bringing up some suggestions here would be better. Thanks.  "