WEEK 2: The Practice & Scope of Economic History: Graduate Economic History :: Spring 2026 :: Econ 210a
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…
Main DeLong segment course page: <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/graduate-economic-history-spring>:
The Practice & Scope of Economic History (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>.
The Longest-Run Take at Human History
Start with some extremely rough numbers, guesstimates, and guesses: