Historians have debated the microeconomic effects of the Old Poor Law for nearly two centuries. The analysis in Chapters 3 and 4, along with the earlier studies by Blaug (1963; 1964), Baugh (1975), and Digby (1978), has shown that the granting of outdoor relief to able-bodied laborers did not have the disastrous consequences for the rural parish economy that contemporary observers and many historians had claimed. However, revisionist historians have yet to confront a second criticism of the Old Poor Law: that at the macro level outdoor relief caused a reduction in the rate of economic growth by slowing the rate of migration from the agricultural south to London and the industrial northwest. Because the marginal product of labor was significantly higher in industrial cities than in agricultural areas, the Poor Law might have caused the early-nineteenth-century British economy to forgo a large free lunch by fostering an inefficient allocation of labor.

One explanation for the large rural–urban wage gaps that existed during the first half of the nineteenth century was that the payment of outdoor relief to unemployed or underemployed agricultural laborers reduced their incentive to migrate to industrial areas. According to Arthur Redford (1964: 93–4), “the mistaken and lax administration of poor relief in the southern counties” before 1834 was a major cause of “the immobility of the southern agricultural labourer.” Karl Polanyi (1944: 94) agreed that the Poor Law slowed rural–urban migration, but his story differed from that of Redford.By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Polanyi argued, “agriculture could not compete with town wages….