Slides for Day 2 of þe Graduate Economic History Course...
Econ 210a: Technological roots of economic growth; major features of eagle's-eye human economic history; near-stasis; ice-breaking; explosion; what next?; Kremer, Finley, Henderson et al....
I very much hope that the class will not get through all, or even most of these. Think of them as supports for the discussion I hope the class will have, rather than the skeleton of and an aide mémoire for a lecture. But you never know how a class will go: time and chance happeneth to us all
Technological Roots of Growth
Measurement: √
Major features
Importance of “robots”
Glacially-frozen with “efflorescences”
Ice-breaking
Explosion
What comes next?
Key Processes
Demographic transition
Impediments to discovery, development, deployment, and diffusion before 1870
Kremer: One Million B.C.
Two heads are better than one
How is this insufficient?
Finley: Technical Innovation
Very much a “substantivist”
Civilizational effort in other directions
But not in pushing forward deployed-and-diffused productive technology
How to understand the Antikythera Mechanism?
Henderson: Measuring Economic Growth
Night lights!
Nordhaus: Real Output and Real Wage Measures
The lighting budget of Thomas Jefferson
