Growth Recurring

[erudito]

Historically, mass poverty is the normal human condition. This has naturally led to attempt to explain those historically rare instances of sustained economic growth leading to mass prosperity as being somehow special. Not merely in being, before 1900, rare but also involving some very particular human motivations, institutions or discoveries. A

Comments

[taavi]

Fascinating.
Does he give more detail about how those particular principalities hit upon the right combination of public goods (I'm guessing low customs duties + a sewage system) to produce growth per capita?
I take your point about growth in technology only being Malthusian (the population expands to match) in nature. I was always under the impression that the Black Plague was a major driver in Europe - reducing population pressure on the land (hence leading to the abolishment of serfdom) at the same time as certain technical innovations (padded collars and heavy ploughs) led to increased production and the low populations led to competition between cities to gain tradesmen.

[taavi]

Just looked at your earlier history book review and saw they concur about the Plague. Well well.
I am a bit surprised at the absence of mention of the enclosure movement created by the "private property" revolution. I always understood that as a key driver - enclosure leads to creation of landless proletariat in the cities, which produces all the economies of scale, specialisation, etc, necessary to start industrial production and increase productivity so fast that (in the long run) growth outruns population (and in the short run produces mass misery and suffering). Eg Britain's cities built the ships that enabled them to fish the north sea, turn ireland into a depopulated potato farm, grow sugar in the jamaicas and import wheat (corn), thus producing the staples of the british industrial proletariat diet: fish, chips, bread and treacle/jam, which gives you malnutrition but not malnourishment.

Longer term

[erudito]

The pattern of increasing definition of land in property is a very long term trend. As population rises, land becomes relatively more valuable, creating greater value in more precise definition of property rights. Hence it is a very long-term pattern.

The processes start way before, for example, 1848, even though the real "industrial revolution" take off is actually second half of the C19th, as Jones makes clear. As Macfarlane points out, folk were commenting how notably richer the English were certainly by the C16th or even earlier. The classic English medieval pattern was to leave home in your teens, work as a labourer, save money, become tenant farmer. Landlessness to tenancy was life cycle pattern, not social layer-cake

Re: Longer term

[taavi]

Whether everyday britishers became, on average, poorer or richer during the early IR is something economic historians have argued over for 100 years. It is a controversy, but not an unwarranted assumption. However, from studying processes of urbanisation, nothing is more certain than that a lot of people live in hellish conditions which are worse than those they left. There may not be enough of them to depress the mean average, given that the mean includes the nouveau riche

[claidheamhmor]

Very interesting - thanks for the post! Off to add the book to my Amazon wishlist...