& some of my musings on how to teach it. The long agrarian-age Malthusian night of the trap, of the ensorcellment: thugs, patriarchs, & standard-of-living stagnation, that is. For 5,000 years...
I am not qualified to attempt any of your pedagogical questions, but I do have a remark apropos of this sentence: "A typical human in 1500—hell, 1875—had a material standard of living not that much different from that of the typical human back in –3000."
I suspect that many or perhaps most of us do not fully appreciate how close to us in time and space Malthusian conditions have obtained. I recently read this remarkable passage in Nicholas Wright's book "Warhead":
"Starvation and underfeeding matter long before military operations begin. Before World War II, malnutrition associated with the Great Depression took a physical toll on American men. The U. S Army accepted almost anyone sane, over 5 feet tall, 105 pounds in weight, with 12 or more of their own teeth, and free of flat feet, venereal disease, and hernias - yet 40 percent of citizens failed to meet these criteria."
Upon what do you base this statement: "But there was not, or at least there was very little, economic growth as we would term it. A typical human in 1500—hell, 1875—had a material standard of living not that much different from that of the typical human back in –3000"
How did the average citizen of Ugarit, e.g. live in the centuries of the Bronze Age trade flourishing?
Did the average Egyptian never experience a meaningful increase in the standard of living over decades when the priesthood's Nile monitor was working and inter-regional politics were stable?
Did the Mayan civilization never boom?
I know we have no or limited at best data here but I can't help but wonder if economic growth in ways that quite likely were measured did occur regionally, for long periods, when the operating "sense" of the world matched the capital infrastructure and the politics.
Has there ever been in recorded history such a synchronicity of transport, communication and industrialized capital as came together in the 19th C and continues...increasingly haltingly..today?
Two events that have to be fit into your economic history--the ''Plague"--which caused the dearth of 1/3 of Europe 's population and the European discovery of the America's which increased the supply of precious metals and the growth of the slave trade to produce sugar.
I'm working on a full-length critique of pro-natalism and drawing on the points you've made here. One you haven't stressed. It isn't population growth steadily keeping pace with technology. Most of the time population grows faster than productive capacity. But then one of the four horsemen (War, Pestilence, and Famine, led by Death) comes along and kills a huge fraction of the population. From about 1700 to 1850, rapid population growth in Western Europe was driven more an absence of famines (Ireland an exception that proves the rule), pandemics and wars that ravaged the general population like the Thirty Years War than by any change in normal-times fertility and mortality.
Yes: I need to complicate my story—to have post-disaster periods of (relative) prosperity, where normal peasants can expect to have three meat meals a week; and then times of imminent Malthusian crisis, when nourishment is so bad that plagues catch fire, and too many desperate young men pick up their spears:
> John Quiggin: I'm working on a full-length critique of pro-natalism and drawing on the points you've made here. One you haven't stressed. It isn't population growth steadily keeping pace with technology. Most of the time population grows faster than productive capacity. But then one of the four horsemen (War, Pestilence, and Famine, led by Death) comes along and kills a huge fraction of the population. From about 1700 to 1850, rapid population growth in Western Europe was driven more an absence of famines (Ireland an exception that proves the rule), pandemics and wars that ravaged the general population like the Thirty Years War than by any change in normal-times fertility and mortality.
I would suggest giving some consideration to the role of expectations and permissions. I think, for instance, of the Song in China, which for all its political turmoil seems to have made real advances in technology and wealth, all of which slowed greatly with the Yuan (Mongol), Ming, and Qing (Manchu). It seems to have taken the stimulus of the long-nose barbarians to set Chinese minds back on the track of material progress, with the spectacular results we see today.
And what of Japan post-1870. Not to deny the importance of the importation of Western goods and knowledge, it has long seemed to me that the simple recognition of the possibility of prosperity and progress was a very major factor — if THEY can do it, surely WE can too!
In the same vein, it seems to me that expectations and permissions loomed large in the divergence of the southern and northern Europeans. Pace Weber, I see the rise of Protestantism less as a cause and more as a signal; a society that could give itself permission to overthrow the religious order was more likely to be able to give itself permission to follow new intellectual and economic paths.
Perhaps I have been influenced by too much reading of Mokyr but the case seems reasonably strong to me.
Your final question was whether yours were the right questions to ask your students. I would say no. If you really want them to grapple with the material, go to the heart of the matter. 1) If accelerating technological progress really was the reason Malthusian dynamics ceased, what happens if the acceleration stops? 2) What happens if acceleration continues (or even gains) but it no longer involves humans very much? 3) What happens if technological acceleration continues but in an increasingly global network its fruits are almost entirely captured by an elite few? 4) If some catastrophe knocks us back will humanity automatically revert to Malthusian dynamics?
Once you have shuffled off this pre-emeritus coil, will you be teaching this course for the grayheads at OLLI? I don’t think they see much realworld econ.
I think you make two judgments here that I would question. One is that you project a modern cost-benefit type of decision making back into the past e.g. on fertility and striving for a surviving son. Many historians would argue that people did not think in such terms or that they thought in many other ways (e.g. astrology, superstition, magic, fate, salvation). The other is that you exaggerate technological innovation. What inventions before 1400, apart from the mold board made much difference? Until the scientific revolution started to work through a peasant from year 0 landing in 1500 would see little difference, *even in the 'Dover circle'*.
Regarding inventions, I assume your early cutoff date is Brad's 3000 BCE; if we go back to the dawn of the neolithic, there would be many obvious choices. Here are some candidates after 3000 BCE that occur to me.
1) domestication of the horse, contested but mostly agreed to be around 2000 BCE
2) the substitution of durum for emmer, allowing wheat cultivation in poorer soils
3) technologies for manufacturing more arable land, such as poldering (I don't think poldering was common in Europe until after 1400 but it was practiced in China long before)
4) the development of the 3-field system; it did not replace the 2-field system in Europe until the 9th-11th centuries
5) a steady progression of loom technologies: 2-beam vertical, draw loom, counterbalance loom
6) windmills developed substantially after antiquity and did not reach a ubiquitous practical form in Europe until the 11th century.
These developments may not seem very impressive, but that seems consistent with the slow rate of technological growth that Brad describes. And my list is certainly not exhaustive, as I am not knowledgeable in this area.
ETA: oops, I missed iron, I guess that one is pretty important!
All significant. I might add that while Fe is one element its technology developed in multiple branches, each with dramatic effects, coming at various times in different places. It should also be borne in mind that waterwheels and similar devices remained the chief source of power for most industrial processes in Europe from about 100 CE to about 1830 CE. (They were known in Asia but not nearly so widely employed.)
I don’t think I would disagree with your descriptions but would disagree that they had much impact. Smil estimates the contribution of water and wind power (compared to animal and human muscle) at one or two per cent.
My main point is that we assume too readily that people were trying to innovate and failing, when there are good reasons to suppose that they were not trying.
I do find it interesting you are prepping students about Malthusian demographics. Will your students be prepping their students on the anti-Malthusian night of the trap?
I am not qualified to attempt any of your pedagogical questions, but I do have a remark apropos of this sentence: "A typical human in 1500—hell, 1875—had a material standard of living not that much different from that of the typical human back in –3000."
I suspect that many or perhaps most of us do not fully appreciate how close to us in time and space Malthusian conditions have obtained. I recently read this remarkable passage in Nicholas Wright's book "Warhead":
"Starvation and underfeeding matter long before military operations begin. Before World War II, malnutrition associated with the Great Depression took a physical toll on American men. The U. S Army accepted almost anyone sane, over 5 feet tall, 105 pounds in weight, with 12 or more of their own teeth, and free of flat feet, venereal disease, and hernias - yet 40 percent of citizens failed to meet these criteria."
I'm asking, not critiquing here.
Upon what do you base this statement: "But there was not, or at least there was very little, economic growth as we would term it. A typical human in 1500—hell, 1875—had a material standard of living not that much different from that of the typical human back in –3000"
How did the average citizen of Ugarit, e.g. live in the centuries of the Bronze Age trade flourishing?
Did the average Egyptian never experience a meaningful increase in the standard of living over decades when the priesthood's Nile monitor was working and inter-regional politics were stable?
Did the Mayan civilization never boom?
I know we have no or limited at best data here but I can't help but wonder if economic growth in ways that quite likely were measured did occur regionally, for long periods, when the operating "sense" of the world matched the capital infrastructure and the politics.
Has there ever been in recorded history such a synchronicity of transport, communication and industrialized capital as came together in the 19th C and continues...increasingly haltingly..today?
Two events that have to be fit into your economic history--the ''Plague"--which caused the dearth of 1/3 of Europe 's population and the European discovery of the America's which increased the supply of precious metals and the growth of the slave trade to produce sugar.
Allen Kamp
I'm working on a full-length critique of pro-natalism and drawing on the points you've made here. One you haven't stressed. It isn't population growth steadily keeping pace with technology. Most of the time population grows faster than productive capacity. But then one of the four horsemen (War, Pestilence, and Famine, led by Death) comes along and kills a huge fraction of the population. From about 1700 to 1850, rapid population growth in Western Europe was driven more an absence of famines (Ireland an exception that proves the rule), pandemics and wars that ravaged the general population like the Thirty Years War than by any change in normal-times fertility and mortality.
Yes: I need to complicate my story—to have post-disaster periods of (relative) prosperity, where normal peasants can expect to have three meat meals a week; and then times of imminent Malthusian crisis, when nourishment is so bad that plagues catch fire, and too many desperate young men pick up their spears:
> John Quiggin: I'm working on a full-length critique of pro-natalism and drawing on the points you've made here. One you haven't stressed. It isn't population growth steadily keeping pace with technology. Most of the time population grows faster than productive capacity. But then one of the four horsemen (War, Pestilence, and Famine, led by Death) comes along and kills a huge fraction of the population. From about 1700 to 1850, rapid population growth in Western Europe was driven more an absence of famines (Ireland an exception that proves the rule), pandemics and wars that ravaged the general population like the Thirty Years War than by any change in normal-times fertility and mortality.
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/a-brief-note-on-the-near-absence/comment/210170880>
I would suggest giving some consideration to the role of expectations and permissions. I think, for instance, of the Song in China, which for all its political turmoil seems to have made real advances in technology and wealth, all of which slowed greatly with the Yuan (Mongol), Ming, and Qing (Manchu). It seems to have taken the stimulus of the long-nose barbarians to set Chinese minds back on the track of material progress, with the spectacular results we see today.
And what of Japan post-1870. Not to deny the importance of the importation of Western goods and knowledge, it has long seemed to me that the simple recognition of the possibility of prosperity and progress was a very major factor — if THEY can do it, surely WE can too!
In the same vein, it seems to me that expectations and permissions loomed large in the divergence of the southern and northern Europeans. Pace Weber, I see the rise of Protestantism less as a cause and more as a signal; a society that could give itself permission to overthrow the religious order was more likely to be able to give itself permission to follow new intellectual and economic paths.
Perhaps I have been influenced by too much reading of Mokyr but the case seems reasonably strong to me.
Your final question was whether yours were the right questions to ask your students. I would say no. If you really want them to grapple with the material, go to the heart of the matter. 1) If accelerating technological progress really was the reason Malthusian dynamics ceased, what happens if the acceleration stops? 2) What happens if acceleration continues (or even gains) but it no longer involves humans very much? 3) What happens if technological acceleration continues but in an increasingly global network its fruits are almost entirely captured by an elite few? 4) If some catastrophe knocks us back will humanity automatically revert to Malthusian dynamics?
Once you have shuffled off this pre-emeritus coil, will you be teaching this course for the grayheads at OLLI? I don’t think they see much realworld econ.
Pre-read, I ask, where is the @BradGrok? (Since it is unkind to ask a duplicate question, which otherwise I probably do.)
It strikes me that there was no culture supporting the use and development of machinery for economic use. Machinery was for novelty (or war).
Patricia Crone?
reading: Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men
I'd be a little cautious, recognizing the political purposes for which Bush wrote it.
I think you make two judgments here that I would question. One is that you project a modern cost-benefit type of decision making back into the past e.g. on fertility and striving for a surviving son. Many historians would argue that people did not think in such terms or that they thought in many other ways (e.g. astrology, superstition, magic, fate, salvation). The other is that you exaggerate technological innovation. What inventions before 1400, apart from the mold board made much difference? Until the scientific revolution started to work through a peasant from year 0 landing in 1500 would see little difference, *even in the 'Dover circle'*.
Regarding inventions, I assume your early cutoff date is Brad's 3000 BCE; if we go back to the dawn of the neolithic, there would be many obvious choices. Here are some candidates after 3000 BCE that occur to me.
1) domestication of the horse, contested but mostly agreed to be around 2000 BCE
2) the substitution of durum for emmer, allowing wheat cultivation in poorer soils
3) technologies for manufacturing more arable land, such as poldering (I don't think poldering was common in Europe until after 1400 but it was practiced in China long before)
4) the development of the 3-field system; it did not replace the 2-field system in Europe until the 9th-11th centuries
5) a steady progression of loom technologies: 2-beam vertical, draw loom, counterbalance loom
6) windmills developed substantially after antiquity and did not reach a ubiquitous practical form in Europe until the 11th century.
These developments may not seem very impressive, but that seems consistent with the slow rate of technological growth that Brad describes. And my list is certainly not exhaustive, as I am not knowledgeable in this area.
ETA: oops, I missed iron, I guess that one is pretty important!
All significant. I might add that while Fe is one element its technology developed in multiple branches, each with dramatic effects, coming at various times in different places. It should also be borne in mind that waterwheels and similar devices remained the chief source of power for most industrial processes in Europe from about 100 CE to about 1830 CE. (They were known in Asia but not nearly so widely employed.)
I don’t think I would disagree with your descriptions but would disagree that they had much impact. Smil estimates the contribution of water and wind power (compared to animal and human muscle) at one or two per cent.
My main point is that we assume too readily that people were trying to innovate and failing, when there are good reasons to suppose that they were not trying.
I do find it interesting you are prepping students about Malthusian demographics. Will your students be prepping their students on the anti-Malthusian night of the trap?