Brad DeLong: evaluation

Transcript context

…If we take your answer, which I largely agree with, it seems to me strikingly non-Malthusian. In the book, you seem much more a Malthusian, that the problem over the very long run is simply the ebbs and flows of population. Well, say you have technological progress of 5 percent per century worldwide before 1500, which supports maybe an average century in which human population grows at 10 percent. Then after 1500, you can say that that triples, and say one-third from the fact that you actually now get globalization because you now have ships that can actually sail rather than having to break-bulk at eight different spots along the way, and one-third from the Columbian exchange itself, and one-third from the tinkering and innovative and Royal Society culture in Western Europe. So that after 1500, worldwide, it’s not 5 percent per century for technology. It’s more like 15 percent, and so you see population growth rates of maybe 30 percent per century worldwide. But 30 percent per century is still a Malthusian economy. It’s got to be a somewhat richer one. You have to be somewhat richer so that your population can grow at 30 percent rather than 10 percent per century. Still, half your babies die. Still, life expectancy is 30. Still, you’d expect living standards to increase on average by just enough to support the 30 percent per century population growth rate, rather than the 10 percent, but it’s still a more Malthusian economy. The interesting question is, what happens between 1770 and 1870, when it looks like we get our global rate of technological progress up to almost half a percent per year, which means that a 1-percent-per-year population growth rate could eat all that up in terms of smaller farm sizes offsetting better technology? But you do have an upper class whose living standards are being transformed by new inventions, and you do have a doubling of humanity’s technological capacity every 70 years. Even though it is still the Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, “we’re not going to get anywhere unless we get a handle on our population growth” problem. Is that 1770-to-1870 global economy still a Malthusian one? Moving ahead to the 20th century, as you well know, Keynes predicted a kind of leisure society would come to the West reasonably soon, and people still work quite a bit.…

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