One of my big beliefs about the world is that humans are equipped with deeply embedded Malthusian intuitions that are poorly suited to the modern world but do, in fact, reflect the vast majority of human experience.
The industrial era is approximately 250 years old, and only a minority of people benefitted from it for most of that run. Agriculture is roughly 12,000 years old, which is a much longer time frame but still small compared to the 300,000 years of Homo sapiens’ existence, to say nothing of the 3 million years since the emergence of tool-using hominins.
If you’re hunting and gathering, enjoying a prosperous life with a varied diet and good access to big game, and then other people show up, that’s bad news, even if they’re nice people. You’re going to have to work harder on the hunt, or settle for smaller animals. Someone else might pick the low-hanging fruit before you. A fixed quantity of land can support more people if you switch to agriculture, but that means longer hours of toil and often a less varied diet. In a farming paradigm, if land is plentiful, you can raise livestock for milk and meat alongside your staple grains, and there’s room for vegetable gardens and orchards. As things get more crowded, though, you’re increasingly reliant on staple grains — the most land-efficient way to generate calories — and living standards fall.
Modern economies don’t function like this, and I think a lot of bad political tendencies — from eco-doomerism to xenophobia — reflect a pre-modern paranoia about transcending the carrying capacity of the land.
One of my go-to examples about this, used in two of my books, is the Black Death, which killed a third of the European population in the 14th Century. In modern times, that kind of catastrophe would leave a much poorer world in its wake, because it would disrupt the complex divisions of labor on which modern prosperity rests. Even a superficial upside like “housing gets cheaper” would be pretty illusory. Construction demand would collapse and hundreds of thousands of skilled tradespeople would see the value of their training evaporate as they’re forced to take entry-level roles in other fields. Nominal wages for workers in labor-intensive services would rise, but so would the price of many of these services. Surgeons and managers in the top one percent of the skill distribution would be replaced in crucial roles by less-skilled people. Productivity would drop across the board.
The actual historical Black Death occurred in a Malthusian era, though, and as I’ve written in the past, actually did produce higher living standards for the survivors — there was more land to go around, so tillers and toilers had an easier time earning their daily bread.
Or so I thought. But new research casts serious doubt on this story. It seems that while there was an economic dividend from the plague, it took time to materialize and was significantly mediated by political institutions.
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