Before 1870, the Malthusian Devil Comes Back the Very Next... Half Millennium, at Best

Was ancient Greece truly an escape from the Malthusian trap? No! Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that classical Greece defied Malthusian dynamics, with real incomes rising without being...

Was ancient Greece truly an escape from the Malthusian trap? No! Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that classical Greece defied Malthusian dynamics, with real incomes rising without being dragged back down by population growth. But I see it very differently. The Devil of Malthus, back before 1870, would always arrive in the long run. And 200 years is, in this context, only a medium run. Greek "efflorescence" was very real—a huge 1200-year boost in the population of those calling themselves Hellenes, substantial improvements in capital intensity and in the commercial division of labor, boosts in conveniences and luxuries production that elude the Malthusian logic, a softer and more equal distribution of ill-gotten wealth within an élite that (for once) was not entirely predatory, and transitory but multi-hundred-year periods of lower-class prosperity driving the demographic expansion of Hellenes. But it was not an escape…

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An interesting exchange between Ilari Mäkelä and Daron Acemoglu over on Ilari’s “On Humans” podcast:

Ilari Mäkelä: [DeLong and Galor] would say is that in a patriarchal society before birth control… extra technology… can improve your living conditions for a while, but with the pressure to create male offspring… you’re… going to start having population increase, and… you might get GDP growth, but you don’t get GDP per capita growth….

Daron Acemoglu: If you look at taking a really macro perspective… working people’s income… might look flat. But if you look at specific episodes, especially institutionally diverse environments, you will see very different changes…. Take ancient Greece. There was a period of about 200 years in which real incomes grew, and there is no sign of Malthusian dynamics reversing that. If it was reversed, it was reversed thanks to Alexander the Great… <https://on-humans.podcastpage.io/episode/the-birth-of-modern-prosperity-part-3-power-to-the-people-with-daron-acemoglu>

This is, to my mind, a substantial misreading of the Hellenic efflorescence:

• The Hellenic Efflorescence was not -500 to -300: it was -1000 to 200.

• The Devil of Malthus was always active: from -1000 to 200 the number of people calling themselves “Hellenes” and living off the Hellenic resource base grew from 300 thousand to 15 million or so; but for half a millennium the growth of the resource base and of the intensity with which it was used outran

• Living standards did not, primarily, rise from -1000 to -300 because of an increase in the social power of hoi polloi—of “the many”; rather, they increased because investment, resources controlled by the Hellenes, and technologies of manipulating nature and coöperatively organizing humans outran Malthusian forces.

• Living standards of Hellenic hoi polloi did not fall after -300 because the rise of Alexander the Great and his successor kings diminished the social power of hoi polloi; rather, living standards fell because the Malthusian long run arrived.

• Did the Gini coefficient move? Was the inequality-measuring Gini coefficient in the “democratic” Athenian formal and informal empire in -435 noticeably less than in the “oligarchic” Spartan formal and informal empire in -435? I suspect not, or not by much.

In short, everything is much more complicated. Before the post-1870 modern economic growth escape from the Malthusian trap, you cannot map any concept of the social power of hoi polloi onto hoi polloi typical living standards in any clean and coherent way. (And, I would argue, after the post-1870 modern economic growth escape from the Malthusian trap, you cannot map any concept of the social power of hoi polloi onto hoi polloi typical living standards without holding a huge number of things ceteris paribus—unless you want to take the society’s Gini coefficient as a measure of hoi polloi social power. But that is for another time than this.)

Now, of course also:

• There are very interesting things going on the Archaic Hellenic, Classical Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Roman periods with respect to

  • how vicious the élite of the few—hoi oligoi—were to each other,

  • and to hoi polloi on whom they ran their domination-and-exploitation scheme,

  • the size and societal position of the “middle classes”,

  • the degree to which the ruling régime was “developmental” or “extractive”,

• The ideas that underpinned Athenian democracy in particular and polis democracy in general are of enormous value to us.

Let me expand: