Clark's Malthusian World

Malthus had the insight, which also proved crucial for Darwin, that Man and other creatures produce more offspring than can survive to adulthood if the population is to maintain a steady, or nearly steady state. Scarcity of resources ultimately limit the population by increasing the death rate until it matches the birth rate. Gregory Clark, in his book A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, argues that the vast bulk of the human race has lived in Malthusian equilibrium for all its long history before 1800 and the onset of the industrial revolution.

Modern humans may have numbered no more than 10,000 individuals 70,000 years ago, when the population apparently passed through a major bottleneck, and probably never exceeded a few million during our long careers as hunter gatherers. (This and other population estimates from Wikepedia) Over the next seventy thousand years, our geographic range, technology, and numbers expanded dramatically. By 1800 there were some one billion of us - 100,000 times as many as at the bottleneck and some hundreds of times more than the planet could support as hunter gatherers. Technology was the key factor that made this possible, especially agriculture.

So what did an average individual get out of all this progress? Clark presents the evidence in a plethora of tables, charts, and explanations, and his anwer is unequivocal: nothing much, zero, nada, nichevo. Compared to their stone age ancestors, the average person of of 1800 worked much harder, ate less well, and lived no longer. Malthusian economics had done its work and reduced most to the subsistence level, and that subsistence level was in many ways meaner than that of his stone age ancestor. A few at the top of society did better, of course, and some of them had the leisure to write novels about each other.

Thus economic progress had the ironic effect of allowing more people to live rather worse than the much smaller populations of prehistory. This is what Clark calls the "Malthusian Trap." A few exceptional periods, events, and cultures that temporarily escape the grip both test and illustrate the paradigm. After the Black Death devastated Europe, wiping out a substantial fraction of the population, wages for ordinary workers rose sharply and didn't fall again until population caught up with its pre-plague levels. Certain Polynesian groups maintained high standards of living until the Europeans arrived, mainly because they practiced infanticide on a massive scale and otherwise achieved high death rates through war and violence. The devastating toll of tropical disease gave equatorial Africans relatively large incomes until European medicine arrived to save and impoverish them.

Thus peace, healing the sick, and reducing violence all have counterproductive effects downstream. Ditto charity. More people survive to adulthood, but are poorer because there are more of them competing for the same resources. If you measure economic progress based on the benefit to a median individual in the society, there isn't any, except possibly temporarily.

Clark argues that the industrial revolution changed everything. He has many interesting arguments there, but I will save them for later. A key point though, is that in industrial nations technology progressed so rapidly and peoples incomes rose so much that a demographic transition took place - women started having many fewer children. That seems to be a way out of the Malthusian Trap that's less problematic than war, pestilence, infanticide and murder.