75,000 years to go from 10,000 foragers to 200 million farmers to 10 billion post-industrialists. But from -5000 to 1500 life for the overwhelming majority was truly nasty, brutish, and short; with better technology leading to more people, not good and not better lives, in the Malthusian agrarian age. When our ancestors traded hunting and gathering for wheat, rice, and maize, they got shorter, sicker, and more unequal…

Share

Share DeLong’s Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before

Main DeLong segment course page: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/graduate-economic-history-spring>:

MALTHUSIAN ECONOMICS (January 28)

• Solow, Robert M. 1985. “Economic History & Economics.” American Economic Review 75 (May): 328-331. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/pdf/1805620.pdf>.

• Steckel, Richard. 2008. “Biological Measures of the Standard of Living” Journal of Economic Perspectives 22 (Winter): 129-152. <http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.22.1.129>.

• Clark, Gregory. 2005. “The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1209–2004.” Journal of Political Economy 112 (December): 1307-1340. <https://www-jstor-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/stable/10.1086/498123>.

• Diamond, Jared. 1999. “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” Discover Magazine (May). <https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/Diamond-TheWorstMistakeInTheHistoryOfTheHumanRace.pdf>.

• Morris, Ian. 2010. Social Development. Palo Alto: Stanford. Pp. 39-74, 83-106, 109-28, 148-55, 164-71. Skim. <https://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~lyamane/ianmorris.pdf>

The Longest-Run Take at Human History

Start with some extremely rough numbers, guesstimates, and guesses:

Read more