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.
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.