BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-09-05: Back in the 1990s, I decided that someone really ought to write an economic history of the world, but one that started not with… pushing pieces of flint against each other to get sharp edges, or with the Industrial Revolution…. Up until 1870… technology was advancing slowly… [but] in nearly all human societies if you’re a woman… the only way you have any social power in your old age is if you have surviving sons…. Irresistible Malthusian pressures to keep trying to have kids in the hope that one of the sons will survive…. Technology advances, but population advances as well…. People with better technology across the centuries farming smaller and smaller plots… the worldwide standard of living in 1870 was not that different from what it was in -6000. Much, much better technologies on the one hand, but much, much smaller average farm sizes on the other…. 1870 stands out like a sore thumb… [as] the point where things change, and where, whatever history was beforehand, it looks very different afterwards…
You ducked the 'What to Do" question appropriately but at the expenses of its dual, explaining why the Social Democracy/shotgun a marriage of Hayek and Polanyi was unstable.
Hypotheses for those articles:
1. Worked only so long as there was tangible growth in median voter market income.
2. Instruments of redistribution became more costly in terms of growth (Mancur Olsen)
3. The target of redistribution (or perception thereof) shifted to lower income voters.
In terms of the 1870 view, could the story be told in the change in investments going into producing technology. You see I still hanker for an explicitly production function. 2^0.5 is not implausible but I'd like to see it as an explicit parameter.
Does the accumulation wealth of monasteries (whose membership does not increase exponentially) provide evidence/example of the Malthusian Trap?
Do you need an explicit theory of of the Demographic Transition?
You ducked the 'What to Do" question appropriately but at the expenses of its dual, explaining why the Social Democracy/shotgun a marriage of Hayek and Polanyi was unstable.
Hypotheses for those articles:
1. Worked only so long as there was tangible growth in median voter market income.
2. Instruments of redistribution became more costly in terms of growth (Mancur Olsen)
3. The target of redistribution (or perception thereof) shifted to lower income voters.
In terms of the 1870 view, could the story be told in the change in investments going into producing technology. You see I still hanker for an explicitly production function. 2^0.5 is not implausible but I'd like to see it as an explicit parameter.
Does the accumulation wealth of monasteries (whose membership does not increase exponentially) provide evidence/example of the Malthusian Trap?
Do you need an explicit theory of of the Demographic Transition?