Page 187: Malthusian forces

The source for much of Rhiannon's discussion of Malthusian forces is a book called A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark.

The book starts with a blockbuster statement:
"Before 1800 income per person -- the food, clothing, heat, light, and housing per head -- varied across societies and epochs. But there was no upward trend."

Think about that for a second. For all of human history to 1800, there was no economic progress.  "Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers". Human stature "a measure of both the quality of the diet and of children's exposure to disease, was higher in the stone age than in 1800."

But what about all the progress humanity made? What about the cave paintings and Beowulf and Galileo? We invented art and did some nice things in science, but through all of it we -- as a whole -- were no better off. According to Clark, any "culture" that was created in human history before 1800 was only a result of societal inequality. Inequalities were brought about by the replacement of a hunter-gatherer economy with an agricultural one.

Here's how it worked:

Hunter-gatherers are egalitarian, everyone shares the work. Therefore, nobody really has any free time. Suppose a hunter-gatherer society comes up with an efficiency improvement that frees up 5% of its time. That would mean everybody in the tribe gets about 36 minutes of extra free time in a day. That could result in a picture of a buffalo scratched onto the wall of a cave, but it's not enough time to paint the Mona Lisa or think through General Relativity. As a result of a simple economic reality, hunter-gatherer societies never made much cultural progress.

The shift to agriculture changed the dynamic. First, "collective productivity" went out the window. Because specific production could be tied to specific land, it quickly became clear who was a good farmer and who was a bad one. Next came specialization of labor. Specific agricultural tasks lent themselves to the development of experts ("I've got the plow, get out of my way."). Measurable productivity and demonstrable expertise are the death of egalitarianism. The person that created 1000 ears of corn was clearly more valuable to society than the guy who produced 50 ears. It's as simple as that. One might say the main reason we aren't egalitarian today is not due to some societal flaw but rather that we just aren't equal, but that's another subject. The point is, productivity in an agricultural system tended to create inequality. Inequality creates culture and science. A 5% increase in productivity in an agricultural society of 1000 people doesn't free up 36 minutes for everybody, it frees up 50 people to do other things (or nothing). Those people had enough time to think and to paint. The only reason that we had Archimedes and Newton and Leonardo is that somebody else was suffering through the hard work required to feed them.

But, as Clark amply demonstrates in his book, humanity overall wasn't becoming more productive at all. We were just shifting things around. Leonardo had a nice, cultured life but the flip side was that his luxury was bought by 19 people living less well than they would have as hunter-gatherers. We were caught in the "Malthusian Trap".

Malthus, in a nutshell, observed that population and living standards (wealth) were constantly at war with each other. If there are few people and lots of food, the people are healthy and happy and they make more people. Once there are lots of people, they each get less food and are less healthy and less happy and they die, or their babies die, so there are fewer people. Once there are fewer people, there's more food... That's the trap. For millions of years an increase in population resulted in a lowering of living standards that in turn limited the population. It had always been that way.

Then, suddenly, around 1800, it all changed. But more on that later...