Very true in that "living standards" is very subjective. When I wrote that I was thinking of London's population loss, not achieving a similar population until the 1300s. And I was thinking of claims that European literacy rates likewise took a long time to recover.

I don't think it is right to say that population loss usually results in higher living standards due to more land per capita. For one, in a pre-industrial society agriculture is labor intensive and the amount of land that can be worked by a person does not scale with land availability. The Black Death [1] economic section works out some of the less than positive impacts.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Londinium

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death