It is the time of the year for reflection so let me share with you a problem which is puzzling me.

It arises from the book, In Open Seas, I am writing about our future prospects. The problem may be summarised that while I can write easily about the evolution of the economy and hence can say a little about its future, it is much harder to write about the development of society and so predict its future.

Historians do write about society and politics evolving but it is usually one damn thing after another (perhaps adding at the end opinions about the future which have little to do with the story they have been telling). A minor stream is the grand narrative in which Procrustes forces the story to fit a framework with reality overruling the confidence of their predictions.

Reflecting, I can see this in my Not in Narrow Seas, which differs from a conventional history not only because it sees the economy as an integral part of the evolution of New Zealand but because I use the economist’s tools – of theory and data analysis – so that every so often in the book I have to divert from the narrative to explain the economic framework. I was much less likely to do so on social and political matters.

It did not matter for that book because I was telling a story. It does matter with In Open Seas because I want to establish a base from which we can think systematically about the future.

In the new book I mull over the issue by comparing contemporary New Zealand with Southern England of 200 years ago. The latter choice is because it is well documented and it is whence most of the English migrants of the nineteenth century came. A particular advantage is that one of the sources are the novels of Jane Austen, published in the narrow window of seven years. (She wrote them over a longer period, but most were revised close to their publication date.)

They are of course only a part of the world that existed then. Even England was divided as Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South illustrates. There is no reference in Austen’s novels to the already looming industrial unrest only a hundred miles to the north despite her being an avid reader of newspapers.

A scholar can write much about Austen’s world even though it was a pre-industrial society. Austen is conveniently alert to wealth because it was as much about status as purchasing power. The annual income of Fitzwilliam Darcy, the (eventual) hero of Pride and Prejudice is 100,000 pounds; it puts him in the top 400 households of the Regency Era or about 0.1 percent of the total. The income of the family of the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, is 20,000 pounds puts them in the top 2.5 percent. (Their economic problem was that they would lose most of their income when the father died, as the estate would go to a male relative.)

How many people were in the Bennet household? There were seven in the family but there were at least five servants: butler, cook, housekeeper, maid and scullery maid (plus someone who looked after the horses?). Servants were ubiquitous but hardly alluded to. Even the financially struggling Dashwood family in Sense and Sensibility had one servant. (They were substitutes for household durables which hardly appear in today’s novels.)

It was a very different world from ours. Austen goes to considerable trouble to describe the various forms of horse transport: barouche, carriage, cart, chaise, curricle, dogcart, gig, hackney, landau, mail coach, phaeton, stage coach. She is telling us something instantly recognisable to a Regency reader, but almost incomprehensible to a modern one.

But when we move from the tangible things which economists deal with into social relationships, we become more uncertain. Were people two centuries ago less happy than today? On the basis of the available systematic evidence – which only goes back about eighty years – they were, on average, probably as happy as today. That is the way Austen presents those of 120 years further back. So how were they different?

An important difference is that in the early 21st century we live longer and have even longer periods of good health. (The research evidence says the sick are less happy.) Austen died at 41; all the Brontes of Charlotte’s generation died before they were 40.

The other big difference is opportunity. It is a parlour game to guess what the very able Elizabeth Bennet might have done today were she alive; 200 years ago her choices were confined to marriage or becoming a governess. (That said, I bet Elizabeth Darcy was a terrific and fulfilled mistress of Pemberly, even if she was not paid.)

So health and opportunity are key differences and one could write a systematic, rather than anecdotal, account of how they changed and are likely to change in the future.

But they do not cover social relations. Let’s focus on marriage. (The evidence says a quality marriage contributes to happiness.)

Were she alive today, Austen would be astonished at the differences described above. But would she have the slightest comprehension of today’s marriage arrangements? (Even so, she would have been very perceptive.)

Will we have much comprehension of what may happen in the future? Sure, we can trace some of the changes like the introduction of efficient contraception and the rising productivity of the nonmarket household which enabled women to work in the market and have their own income. (Longevity has been another factor; I should not be surprised if formal marriages lasted only as long in Regency times as they do today; different prime terminus though – death rather than divorce.) What next and how will it shape marriage in the future?

It is salutary that less than a decade ago we fought bitterly over same-sex marriages. Now they are part of social normality. Most New Zealanders were not alive during the acrimonious changes to divorce law in the 1960s. The role of the state in formalising marriage relations has been there through the two and more centuries but its role has been constantly changing, perhaps becoming more permissive and facilitative.

The speed of change can be astonishing. Shirley Smith told me the difficulties she faced in the 1950s when she kept her maiden name following marriage. Suddenly, many woman joined her in about 1970.

I guess the lesson is that there are some things we can think about systematically enough to provide some foundation for pondering about the future. Some things we cant. Not least in attempting to predict which of the novelists published today will be read as avidly in two hundred years’ time as we read Austen today.