In recent decades, economic historians have increasingly debated Jan de Vries’s concept of the "industrious revolution"—a proposed period preceding the Industrial Revolution wherein European households purposefully reallocated their time away from leisure and toward wage labor. According to de Vries, this behavioral shift was driven by a new desire to purchase market-supplied consumer goods. The primary evidence for this surge in consumer appetite rests on the quantitative analysis of probate inventories, which itemize individuals' possessions at the time of death. However, using these inventories as the foundational metric for changing societal attitudes toward consumption is deeply problematic. Probate records were not compiled for all deceased individuals; they were typically generated only for those who held sufficient wealth to warrant taxation or who were embedded in formal credit networks that necessitated asset valuation. Consequently, the reliance on such documents inevitably skews the historical picture. Because the surviving evidence of increased consumption is overwhelmingly drawn from the upper and proto-middle classes, it is highly likely that the "industrious revolution" was merely a localized phenomenon restricted to the affluent, rather than the sweeping, society-wide transformation that de Vries envisions.
Evaluate whether the following statement is true or false based on the passage:
The author's conclusion regarding the scope of the "industrious revolution" requires the underlying assumption that the demographic groups systematically excluded from probate records did not independently increase their labor output in order to participate in undocumented barter or informal consumer economies.
Answer: Answer