Toby Wilkinson: belief

Transcript context

…Do they have living standards sustainably above subsistence, or is this a Malthusian equilibrium, where they get some wealth and then more people survive and the wage falls again, and it doesn’t get much above what is required to keep people alive? Depended on where you lived, I think. If you were an urban dweller of Alexandria, you were living significantly above subsistence levels. You were a merchant, you were a trader, you were an artisan, you were manufacturing objects or trading objects. Yes, you had a decent standard of living by the standards of the ancient world. If you were a peasant laboring in the fields of Upper Egypt, it was a pretty hand-to-mouth existence, as it always had been. What stops the living standards from being equalized? Is there a barrier to entering the city, or why don’t people flow in, as they do, say, in modern India, until the living standards are roughly equal?…

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