Brad DeLong’s History of Economic Growth Catechism, Part II
I have not put enough work into this to call it a dialogue...
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What was life like for the typical human back in the Agrarian Age?
Pretty awful. A life expectancy of less than thirty. Ferocious mortality meaning that in the typical couple the woman spent nearly two decades eating for two—eight pregnances for six live births to get three chidren surviving to age ten, and barely more than two surviving to reproduce.
But why was infant and other mortality so high?
Because the typical person was undernourished and stunted: human population was too large relative to our low (and slowly improving) level of technology and our limited ability to harvest natural resources.
But why was population pressing so hard upon the limits of subsistence?
Because patriarchy meant that women’s durable social power came pretty much only from being mothers of surviving sons. Slowly-improving technology meant that there was only room for the next generation to be a bit more numerous than the last: pre-1870 population growth rate of about 10% per century, or less. Thus about one woman in three was left without surviving sons. Hence even if you already had a son or sons, the pressure to try to have another just in case your current sons died was immense was immense. Thus whenever any technological headroom to support higher productivity and grant a household greater resources emerged, the overwhelming pressure was to use those resources to boost the population. That was the force that kept humanity poor. thus before 1870 it was Thomas Robert Malthus’s world: humanity ensorcelled by and under the spell of the Malthusian devil.
This sounds circular: mortality was high because people were malnourished; people were malnourished because resources were scarce; resources were scarce because people kept trying to have more sons as insurance; and people kept trying to raise more sons as insurance because mortality was high. How can something so circular be an explanation?
Yes. It is a very vicious circle. Once you are in it, there is no way out of it.
But why was Agrarian Age humanity in it?
Only one local geographic group has to fall into it. That group is then under immense population and resource pressure to expand. And, because of its higher population density and bias toward more reproduction, it then has the resources to expand and crowd out other populations. The Fall of Man into the Agrarian Age, the ensorcellment by the Devil of Malthus, only has to take place once. Then it spreads over the world.
So the poverty and the malnutrition were the big things wrong with humanity in the Agrarian Age, right?
No. There were more big things wrong: the thuggishness, the violence, the theft, and the exploitation.
Tell me more…?
In a poor world, with limited technology and upward pressure on the population creating resource scarcity, it was only possible for a few to have enough. Moreover, the way those few could get enough for themselves and their children was for them, through force and fraud, to run an exploitation-and-extraction machine against the bulk of humanity. Hence, as I said: the thuggishness, the violence, the theft, and the exploitation.
But how can an élite create and run such an exploitation-and-extraction machine?
Once again, the incentives push those who control society’s resources in that direction. If you become a thug-with-a-spear (or one of their accountants or publicists), it works: not only do you take stuff, but you then can defend the stuff you have taken from others. And taking stuff is much more rewarding than trying to invent better and more productive ways of doing things?
Why isn’t trying to invent better and more productive ways of doing things the more rewarding option?
How do you get others who copy your techniques to pay you? Even if you are lucky enough to discover a good idea, how do you develop and deploy it? There need to be societal systems built to strongly encourage such, and they did not exist.
But human knowledge did advance in the Agrarian Age, didn’t it?
Yes, but it advanced very slowly. In the world of the exploitation-and-extraction machines, those ideas that were promoted and thus flourished were not those that made humanity capable of doing more things more efficiently and effectively. They were, instead, the ideas that shored-up the force-and-fraud exploitation-and-extraction system. Thus the rate of technological advance was slow indeed: figure 5% per century.
Thus my crude guess is that there has been as much proportional technological progress—useful ideas discovered, developed, deployed, and then diffused throughout the global economy—making humanity more productive in the 150-year span since 1870 as there were in the entire nearly 10,000-year span since the beginnings of the creation of agriculture around the year -8000.
But technology did advance?
Yes. But typical living standards did not, or not by much. Recall that, from -8000 to 1870, poverty, patriarchy, and slow technological progress kept humanity ensorcelled by the Devil of Malthus, with nearly all of the potential benefits of better technology being eaten up by population growth and resulting resource scarcity. Think of something like $900/year—the living standard of the poorest half-billion of our eight billion today—as the living standards of a typical human back before 1870. Then, after 1870, everything changed.
I cannot believe that: surely technological progress made life better off over time?
For the élite who benefit from the exploitation-and-extraction machine, yes. But for the rest? Perhaps: to the extent that the taste for “luxuries”—production and consumption that does not raise your biological fitness to reproduce but that makes you happier—grows over time, yes. And to the extent that society develops patterns that keep women chaste throughout large chunks of their fertile period, or that promo female infanticide, yes.
Otherwise?
Otherwise the benefits of technological advance show up as greater human numbers—and hence the benefits of technology in raising living standards are offset by greater resource scarcity—or are restricted to the élite of thugs-with spears (plus their accountants and their propagandists).
You have painted a picture of two unbreakable vicious circles—one of poverty enforced by Malthusian fertility, and one of mass poverty enforced by exploitation-and-extraction. How did we escape?
Ah! We economic historians debate and will debate as long as there is a human species and perhaps longer exactly what the change was, and why we see the change having major effects starting in 1870 and not at some other time!
Is that what you debate?
It is indeed! And we also debate whether the change—whatever it was—could have come earlier. Perhaps it could have come starting in Alexandria, Egypt back in the year 170 when Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus ruled in Rome,. Perhaps it could have come in the year 1170 when Emperor Gaozong ruled in Hangzhou. Or we might have missed the bus that arrived in 1870 and still, today, be trapped in a Malthusian steampunk, gunpowder-empire, or neo-mediæval world.
Can you characterize the change?
Indeed I can! We, after all, did not miss the bus that I think arrived around 1870, when the last three elements—modern science and the industrial research lab to discover and develop useful technologies, the modern corporation to develop and deploy them, and the globalized market economy to deploy and diffuse them throughout the world—fell into place.
Ever since, advancing science, turned into technology by industrial research labs, deployed at scale by modern corporations, and then diffused throughout the world by that magnificent crowdsourcing mechanism that is the global market economy have taken us on a wild ride. That triple has taken us into high gear, and taken our rate of global technological progress—a rate that was perhaps 0.05%/year before 1500, 0.15%/year over 1500-1770, and perhaps 0.45%/year over 1770-1870—up to its post-1870 average of 2.1%/year.
Can you make an abstract number like “2.1% per year” more concrete?
Think of it like this: On average, since 1870, worldwide, the deployed-and-diffused technological capabilities of humanity has roughly doubled every generation since 1870. And remember the “at least”: that 2.1%/year is doubtful because increasingly we live not in a physical-commodity or even a service but rather than in an attention economy, and the numbers underlying the 2.1%/year estimate barely register that very important fact about today.
As usual, I appreciate your insights and clear prose. I'm wondering if the grindstone of Malthusian necessity was always quite so binding as you suggest. Surely a significant technical innovation improves the living conditions of the bulk of the population in the short run. There would be a lag, perhaps as long as a generation, before population bumped up to the Malthusian limits.. There were also external factors which might have elevated living standards above the level of bare subsistence.
I'm thinking of the Medieval Climate Optimum. This coincides with the construction of Gothic cathedrals throughout Europe. That suggests to me a per capita level of resources above bare subsistence. This is, of course, not inconsistent with your story of elite extraction of surpluses for their own pleasure. They simply employed ideology rather than physical coercion to extract resources.
Well I quite liked Economic Growth Catechism, part the 2nd; it fills some of what I had wrongly supposed to be lacunae in your thinking about Malthusianism.
But I do not yet see reason to believe that our disenchantment is durable. There's nothing to worry about for anyone alive today, but at multi-generational horizons, the Encorcellment of Malthus seems to be an inevitable consequence of the Encorcellment of Darwin. One could interpret our present period as merely a longer reversal of the sort referred to below by John Howard Brown.