Tuesday Economic Growth Blogging: The Pre‑Modern Treadmill Was Real on Necessities, Not on Technology, or Luxuries, or Culture, or Means of Domination
Greg Clark’s “Farewell to Alms” still tempts with one big, clean story: pre‑modern humanity stuck on a Malthusian treadmill until cultural-bio selection on “bourgeois” traits breaks the chains, and...
Greg Clark’s “Farewell to Alms” still tempts with one big, clean story: pre‑modern humanity stuck on a Malthusian treadmill until cultural-bio selection on “bourgeois” traits breaks the chains, and growth escapes. Tempting—and partly right. But, I think, substantially wrong. However, today let me talk pretty much only about the parts in which it is right…
Living standards from -3000 up to close to +1900 were indeed close to flat with respect to necessities and conveniences that map to reproductive fitness. World population crawls from ~15 million to ~500 million: an average ~0.08%/year. An unstressed pre‑industrial patriarchy does ~1.4%/year; we plainly weren’t there. Skeletons report four inches of stunting. That’s dire poverty speaking. And dire biophysical poverty without any substantial upward trend.
But biophysical reproductive fitness is not wealth. And biophysical reproductive fitness is not technology, but, rather, technology balanced against resource scarcity.
Angus Bylsma has a very nice review of Greg Clark’s now-nearly twenty-years old A Farewell to Alms. A key paragraph or so in Angus’s review:
Angus Bylsma: Downstream <https://unevenandcombinedthoughts.substack.com/p/downstream>: ‘It is… a book about… why it took so long… [for] long-run growth…. Clark’s… idiosyncratic views… [(1)] a Malthusian framing of the pre-modern world, and… [(2)] the emergence of sustained growth… [as] the culmination of a Darwinian process of selection…. In a Malthusian world… technology… lead[s] to a short-run improvement in incomes… [and then] population growth which… whittle[s] it back down…. In [Clark’s] Malthusian world poor people died young and childless while the rich went and multiplied. The traits of the successful… were passed on…. Eventually, a tipping point was reached, where technological development reached a rate sufficient to break from the Malthusian chains.… Clark argues that “the development of cultural forms—in terms of work inputs, time preference, and family formation—[is what] facilitated modern economic growth”… slow-moving social changes that predate industrialisation by centuries…
So what do I think? I think that there are two big issues:
first, the claim that typical human living standards between -3000 and 1500 were more-or-less stagnant;
second, the claim that the modern post-1770 breakthrough to wealth was the result of “[in a] Malthusian world poor people die[ing] young and childless while the rich… multiplied [with] the traits of the successful… passed on… [and so] a tipping point was reached, where technological development reached a rate sufficient to break from the Malthusian chains…”
Let me reserve the second for some future date. And let me focus on the first. There I see four further subparts: (i) In terms of the production and consumption of necessities and conveniences that affect reproductive fitness, the argument that the world between -3000 and 1900 (the beginning of the population explosion) was near-subsistence—that argument is, I think, rock solid.
Almost nothing else is.
Briefly: there are three other things in play here:
(ii) The invention and production of luxuries, and their value.
(iii) The invention and production of culture and its value—the happiness, utility, and meaning that flows therefrom.
(iv) The disvalue from the development and deployment of technologies of domination that have allowed, since -3000, for an élite gang to take 1/3 of the crops and 1/3 of the crafts via an exploitation-and-domination force-and-fraud game.
Valuing, in any sense, (ii), (iii), and (iv), and balancing them—well, I quail. And I am not yet ready to put out any numbers whatsoever. So let me drop those for some future date, especially as I am not sure I can distinguish them properly yet. Luxuries-consumption shades into cultural-participation. Culture is both a source of entertainment, value, and meaning and also a brainwashing machine. Consider The Man Who Saw the Abyss…, usually called The Epic of Gilgamesh. Starting at line 45 we have:
Who can compete with him in kingship, and claim, like Gilgamesh, “I am the king”? From the day that Gilgamesh was born and named, he was two-thirds god and only one-third human…
Is it a good thing to have a culture that tells you to stay in your subservient place? in The Magnificent Seven the bandit chief Calvera says of the farmers: “If God didn’t want them sheared, He would not have made them sheep.” But it was not God but men, men using bronze, writing, bureaucracy, and cultural ideology, who made them think and calculate that they had no good option other than to accept being sheared.
And are we trying to calculate the value of (ii), (iii), and (iv) in the sense of providing humanity with powers to command nature to do our bidding and to organize ourselves productively and cooperatively (were we to choose to do so)? Or are we trying to calculate the value of (ii), (iii), and (iv) in the sense of enabling humanity to live wisely and well?
However (i) is, very roughly, and with heroic guesswork and assumptions, knowable. Thus we know:
From -3000 to 1500 we guess that human populations grew from 15 to 500 million—an average rate of human population growth of 0.08%/year.
A pre-industrial human population under patriarchy that is nutritionally unstressed grows at about 1.4%/year or more: infant mortality is high enough that, given the value to a middle-aged widow of having a surviving son, it is worth spending extra resources to try to have another kid; and so we expect two parents to on average have not a hair more than two but rather three (or more) reproducing descendants in the next generation.
Therefore typical populations from -3000 to 1500 were under grave nutritional stress, hence very poor; maybe they were not what the World Bank today would call “in dire poverty'“, but they were close.
We check this by looking at what skeletons tell us about heights:
If parents were not desperately poor, would they have fed their children diets to stunt them by four inches? Nope.
If you are willing—as I am—to guess that resource-scarcity is half as salient as technology to command nature and organize humans (at a constant capital-output ratio) in fueling productivity, you can back out a level of technology-in-necessities-production as roughly proportional to potential necessities consumption per capita times the square-root of population. That gives us a level of our index H for Human Technological Competence of 27 today, 1 in 1870, 0.3 at the peak efflorescence of the Han-Parthian-Roman ekumene around 150, and 0.08 back in the year -3000 at the start of the Bronze Age. That is a 12.5-fold multiplication of human technological capabilities from -3000 up to 1870, and a 27-fold multiplication since.
But this is measured along the necessities-and-conveniences dimension only. There are also the luxuries, cultural, and domination dimensions. Where once again I quail.
DeLong. J. Bradford. 2025. “The False Calm Before Steam: The Index H, Malthus, & the Long Slog, for Growth Was Very Real Before It Became Visible in Average Living Standards”. DeLong Grasping Reality. November 11. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-false-calm-before-steam-the-index>.
Sturges, John, dir. 1960. “The Magnificent Seven”. Film. Beverly Hills, CA: The Mirisch Company; distributed by United Artists. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58abXibG768>
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“ In [Clark’s] Malthusian world poor people died young and childless while the rich went and multiplied. The traits of the successful… were passed on…. “
Yikes, more self serving tech bro ideology. Throw in some skin color and the tech bros will lap it up.
I am unclear what these other "improvements" - luxuries, cultural, and domination dimensions buy the population at large?
Luxuries include what - decorated shells, a metal ornament, perhaps some stick furniture, glass windows? Who benefited from these? Just a small minority.
Cultural changes. Organized armies to support an aristocracy that then conquered other lands and returned with slaves? Hereditary leadership to stymie social mobility? Invention of money. Class structure and mobility? Again, a minority benefited.
Domination. Well, the dominated lost out.
In terms of improving the lot of the greater population, it isn't clear to me what the benefits were.
Jared Diamond once claimed that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was better for humanity than the invention of agriculture. It shows up in the diminished size of bodies, brain-to-body ratios, and the emergence of new diseases. Even today, we can see that agriculture, now including aquaculture, is hugely damaging to the local ecosystems, and more generally to the biosphere. We could do a lot better, but we don't.
I don't deny that humanity's lot, at least in some parts of the world, has vastly improved. I can be sure that food is always available to eat so that I don't experience lasting hunger. I have powerful toys like computers at my beck and call. My home is warm and dry. My bed is soft. Aches and pains have a number of remedies to alleviate any slight suffering. Generally, I feel safe (even here in gun-crazy USA). But if we look at the longer time frame, humanity may prove remarkably ephemeral. Just 40-80 millennia since the "cultural explosion", a tiny 4-8% of a 1 million year non-technological, non-cultural species survival, and 1/10th of that for species lasting 10 my. We are causing the 6th extinction of all other species on the planet. We have come close to devastating nuclear war at least twice in the 20th century. Our technology helps create pandemics. [It is just as well there is no "judgement day" for humanity]
You wrote an excellent book on how we might have used our technological gains to create a much better world...but we didn't. Right now, we are surely making things a lot worse, with just a few taking most of the surplus wealth and resources for themselves, and ensuring they benefit greatly while everyone else, including the species we share the planet with, does not. We may dream of starships in our future, but we may not have much of a future unless we can really remake our global culture to benefit all of humanity and the planet, too.
“ In [Clark’s] Malthusian world poor people died young and childless while the rich went and multiplied. The traits of the successful… were passed on…. “
Yikes, more self serving tech bro ideology. Throw in some skin color and the tech bros will lap it up.
I am unclear what these other "improvements" - luxuries, cultural, and domination dimensions buy the population at large?
Luxuries include what - decorated shells, a metal ornament, perhaps some stick furniture, glass windows? Who benefited from these? Just a small minority.
Cultural changes. Organized armies to support an aristocracy that then conquered other lands and returned with slaves? Hereditary leadership to stymie social mobility? Invention of money. Class structure and mobility? Again, a minority benefited.
Domination. Well, the dominated lost out.
In terms of improving the lot of the greater population, it isn't clear to me what the benefits were.
Jared Diamond once claimed that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was better for humanity than the invention of agriculture. It shows up in the diminished size of bodies, brain-to-body ratios, and the emergence of new diseases. Even today, we can see that agriculture, now including aquaculture, is hugely damaging to the local ecosystems, and more generally to the biosphere. We could do a lot better, but we don't.
I don't deny that humanity's lot, at least in some parts of the world, has vastly improved. I can be sure that food is always available to eat so that I don't experience lasting hunger. I have powerful toys like computers at my beck and call. My home is warm and dry. My bed is soft. Aches and pains have a number of remedies to alleviate any slight suffering. Generally, I feel safe (even here in gun-crazy USA). But if we look at the longer time frame, humanity may prove remarkably ephemeral. Just 40-80 millennia since the "cultural explosion", a tiny 4-8% of a 1 million year non-technological, non-cultural species survival, and 1/10th of that for species lasting 10 my. We are causing the 6th extinction of all other species on the planet. We have come close to devastating nuclear war at least twice in the 20th century. Our technology helps create pandemics. [It is just as well there is no "judgement day" for humanity]
You wrote an excellent book on how we might have used our technological gains to create a much better world...but we didn't. Right now, we are surely making things a lot worse, with just a few taking most of the surplus wealth and resources for themselves, and ensuring they benefit greatly while everyone else, including the species we share the planet with, does not. We may dream of starships in our future, but we may not have much of a future unless we can really remake our global culture to benefit all of humanity and the planet, too.