1. Guesstimating Typical Living Standards in the Agrarian Age
For Econ 210a S 2024; time to apply all the lessons I have learned in the past decade to rejiggering how "Introduction to Economic History for Graduate Students" works; the key question is: how...
For Econ 210a S 2024; time to apply all the lessons I have learned in the past decade to rejiggering how "Introduction to Economic History for Graduate Students" works; the key questions are: how much time to spend on each topic? and which topics belong on day 1, when reading will have been hit-or-miss?
REQUIRED READINGS:
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2023. “Ensorcelled by the Devil of Malthus.” Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/ensorcelled-by-e-devil-of-malthus>.
Steckel, Richard H. 2008. “Biological Measures of the Standard of Living.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 22 (1): 129–52 <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.22.1.129>
Clark, Gregory. 2004. “The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004.” Journal of Political Economy 113 (6): 1307–34 <https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Working%20Class.pdf>
FOR REFERENCE:
Lee, Ronald. 2003. “The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17 (4): 167–190 <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/089533003772034943>.
Livi-Bacci, Massimo. 2017. A Concise History of World Population. 6th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell <https://archive.org/details/concisehistoryof0000livi_d6o3>
INTRODUCTION: Guesstimating Typical Living Standards in the Agrarian Age:
What can we say about typical labor productivity levels, and thus typical human living standards, over the past, say, 10,000 years?
For years since 1800 we actually have official and semi-official economic statistics—although with all the problems of interpreting them and correcting them for biases outlined by William Nordhaus (1997). Before 1800 our information is much more scattered. But I think that it is, in the end, equally compelling. We have at least the broad features of labor productivity, and thus of typical living standards, nailed down.
Start with the fact the we have the long-run demography at least guesstimated.
Global human populations grew from perhaps 5 million at the time of the Neolithic Revolution—the discovery of settled agriculture and animal husbandry—some ten thousand years ago, to perhaps 200 million in year 150 (an annual rate of population growth of 0.04% per year). It then roughly tripled between the year 150 and 1500 (an annual rate of population growth of 0.07% per year). Population grew by perhaps fifty percent in the commercial-imperial age to 1770 (an annual rate of population growth of 0.14% per year); nearly doubled over the next century to 1870 (a rate of growth of 0.65% per year); and since 1870 has more than sextupled, growing to our current population of roughly 8.4 billion (an annual rate of population growth of 1.3% per year).
That we know what a nutritionally, unstressed pre-artificial birth control population does under conditions of patriarchy. It doubles every 50 years. Sometimes it grows faster. 1.4% per year. Or more. But in the long agrarian age from -8000 to 1500 the rate of population growth was only 1/140 of that. And in the 1500 to 1770 commercial-imperial age it was only 1/10. And even in the 1770 to 1870 British industrial-revolution century it was less than half.
What conclusions follow from slow—very slow—agrarian-age rates of human population growth? Were people only moderately nutritionally stressed in the present, but looking forward to a future in which if they multiplied their numbers and their children multiplied their numbers that society would be resource-short, and their grandchildren would be seriously nutritionally stressed? Were they consequently and consciously limiting their reproduction to give their descendants a better quality of life?
Perhaps they were in France in the 1700s and 1800s. Perhaps then and there having many daughters survive to adulthood was a great burden, and having two sons survive to adulthood each claiming a share of the farm was a potential family catastrophe. France in the 1700s and 1800s is a very interesting case—its population doubled, from 20 to 40 million, in those two centuries while England’s population grew sixfold, from 5 to 30 million.
But France seems to have been pretty much alone back then.
Elsewhere and elsewhen, not.
There is a story told about a man named Eli’sha (“Father God Is My Salvation”), Prophet in Israel in the first half of the -800s:
[In] Shunem… a wealthy woman lived…. And she said unto her husband, “Behold now, I perceive that this [Eli’sha] is an holy man…. Let us make a small roof chamber… so that whenever he comes to us, he can go in there.” One day he came there… turned into the chamber and rested there And he said to Geha’zi his servant… “What then is to be done for her?” Geha’zi answered, “Well, she has no son, and her husband is old.” He said, “Call her.” And when he had called her, she stood in the doorway. And he said, “At this season, when the time comes round, you shall embrace a son”… (2 Kings 4:8-16 RSV)
And when the son died, the story goes:
[Eli’sha] went up and lay upon the child, putting his mouth upon his mouth, his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands; and as he stretched himself upon him, the flesh of the child became warm. Then he got up again, and walked once to and fro in the house, and went up, and stretched himself upon him; the child sneezed seven times, and the child opened his eyes. Then he summoned Geha′zi and said, “Call this Shu′nammite.” So he called her. And when she came to him, he said, “Take up your son.” She came and fell at his feet, bowing to the ground; then she took up her son and went out… (2 Kings 4:34-36 RSV)
The question is: What can a prophet with mighty and magical powers do for this wealthy woman who has assisted him?
The answer is: Get her a son! And keep him alive! Raise him from the dead, if you need to!
Given typical rates of population growth in the agrarian age, an average woman would have 1.02 sons who themselves survive to reproductive age Do the Poisson-distribution math. Only two women in three have sons who survive into their mothers’ middle age.
What did it mean back then to be in the other one-third of women—those without surviving adult sons?
Well, under conditions of strong patriarchy, indeed, not having a surviving son was close to—not quite, but close to—social death. If you don’t have a surviving adult son, then when your—perhaps older—husband is dead, who is going to speak up for you, and make sure you get any resources at all? Your daughters? Only if you have very good relationships with your sons-in-law. Your nephews? Perhaps. Wherever patriarchy was sufficiently strong—and that was lots of places—the consequence of winding up sonless were dire. And the chance of winding up sonless was high: 1/3.
Hence the greatest gift the Prophet Eli’sha can give to the wealthy Shunemite is a healthy, surviving son.
The result was that whenever, wherever there were extra resources, the pressure to use those resources to try to have more sons as insurance was immense. Thus whenever, wherever we gained the ability to grow more food, we would simply try to have more children. Figure, typically, eight or nine pregnancies and six or seven live births—with lifetime maternal childbed mortality between 1/10 and ⅕. And yet children would be so malnourished and public health conditions so bad that there would be only three or four children surviving to age 5 and two or three surviving to adulthood, leaving just over two surviving and reproducing.
Parents wanted surviving sons as insurance. Yet they did not have the resources to obtain them for more than ⅔ of parents. That is the first sign that in the agrarian-age humans were, typically, desperately poor.
We have some direct long-term data about income levels across long reaches of time. One such was compiled by Greg Clark, and is shown in the figure above. Prolonged periods of near-stasis in real wages around a level that we would characterize as very, very low, followed by a wealth explosion since 1850. That is the second sign that in the agrarian-age humans were, typically, desperately poor.
Real Wages of Construction Workers as Estimated by Greg Clark, 1200-Present:
Third, we have the long-run biomedical studies of Rick Steckel and many others. We can use Steckel’s estimates of the relationship between height and income found in a cross-section of people alive today and evidence from past burials to infer what real incomes were in the past.
Rick Steckel’s Estimates of the Relationship Between Height & Income:
The conclusion is, I think, inescapable: People in the preindustrial past were short—very short—with adult males averaging perhaps 64 inches compared to 69 inches either in the pre-agricultural Mesolithic or today. Therefore people in the pre-industrial past were poor—very poor. If they weren’t very poor, they would have fed their children more and better and their children would have grown taller and healthier and more likely to survive. And they were malnourished compared to us or to their pre-agricultural predecessors: defects in their teeth enamel, iron-deficient, skeletal markers of severe cases of infectious disease, and crippled backs.
Pre-industrial poverty lasted late. Even as of 1750 people in Britain, Sweden, and Norway were four full inches shorter than people are today—consistent with an average caloric intake of only some 2000 calories per person per day, many of whom were or were attempting to be engaged in heavy physical labor.
And societies in the preindustrial past were stunningly unequal: the upper classes were high and mighty indeed, upper class children growing more than three inches taller than their working-class peers. Moreover, there are no consistent trends in heights between the invention of agriculture and the coming of the industrial age. Up until the eve of the industrial revolution itself, the dominant human experience since the invention of agriculture had been one of poverty so severe as to produce substantial malnutrition and stunted growth.
If you have Wrigley and Schofield's The Population History of England 1541-1871 at hand, it has a life expectancy at birth series over that period. Connect it with the series since 1871 from Berkeley Demography database (or so it was called years ago). Natural log the series. It displays the discontinuity in the late nineteenth century very nicely.
This looks good!