Lemin is recently out of UC Berkeley, and I have heard that he is on the American market right now.
Here is Lemin’s paper on the Malthusian trap (pdf), one of the most interesting papers of the last few years. The key point is that some kinds of production drive down living standards and other kinds of production do not, therefore enriching and disaggregating Malthus’s theory, some might say overturning it. Here is one excerpt:
It follows that the Romans were rich not because technological progress temporarily exceeded population growth—as Malthusianists claim—but because Rome had a business-friendly legal system and an active market economy. Well-functioning courts and market-places boost industry more than they boost agriculture. Thus biasing production structure to luxury, they raised the average living standards of the whole society. Conversely, the Agricultural Revolution left an unfortunate legacy: the hunter-and-gatherer-turned peasants failed to achieve the level of leisure and nutrition their ancestors once enjoyed (Diamond, 1987). Growth was immiserizing because agriculture biased production structure to subsistence. The same tragedy recurred when potato dominated the Irish diet in the late 18th century.
Lemin then introduces cross-societal migration into the model and shows that “…A tiny bit of bias in migration (say, if people are extremely reluctant to move and slow to learn) can still suppress a strong tendency of growth.” The Industrial Revolutipn did not come to Song China because there were insufficient mechanisms for exclusion.
Here is Lemin Wu’s home page. Here are some of his other papers and ideas.
“Well-functioning courts and marketplaces boost industry more than they boost agriculture”
Citation needed.
If Not Malthusian, Then Why? A Darwinian Explanation of the Malthusian Trap (Wu, 2015)
If I had been in a less taciturn mood I would have written: I read the paper and found very little evidence undergirding a great deal of ratiocination. In this specific case, there was no evidence presented.
Huge amounts of Roman economic growth/wealth (agriculture, gold, slaves, natural resources, markets, tax base, etc.) were obtained through conquest. If I remember correctly, Rome seized sufficient amounts of gold from the conquest of Iberia to pay off its debt.
Plus, how about commenting on “bread and circuses” and the experience of the Roman Republic quite different from the Imperial regimes?
Are we going to see a review of “The Big Short”?, Steve Sailer has done one for Taki Mag already.
“The Industrial Revolutipn did not come to Song China because …”: oh I dunno. Because God is an Englishman? I don’t think I’ve ever seen an explanation offered for the IR that was both persuasive and revelatory.
I always thought that having pre-industrial capitalism and good perspectives for foreign trade was the key to being the first to industrialize.
On the other hand, it’s not like the Romans and the Greeks did not know about steam power and they had pretty sophisticated economies, but they also did not have a scarcity of labor because of slavery.
After all the math, there’s a reader’s reward from here and on section 5.4
“The ancient thinkers thought differently than Adam Smith, not because they were blind to the benefits of commerce, but because they cared about the country’s survival more than about the subjects’ welfare”
However, could “country survival” be described more precisely as “ruling group survival”?. Today, losing power is caused by losing an election that yields early retirement. In the past losing power was caused by losing a war and it meant the loss of honor, wealth, even death. Perhaps, the cost of losing power is one of the factors that drove past leaders (economic) decisions.
“the hunter-and-gatherer-turned peasants failed to achieve the level of leisure and nutrition their ancestors once enjoyed (Diamond, 1987). Growth was immiserizing because agriculture biased production structure to subsistence.”
The whole ” hunter gatherers had it so good” thinking is so very speculative i find this whole bit hard to swallow. If hunter gatherer is so superior to agriculture, then why did nearly every population switch, even ones that had no contact with one another chose independently to switch. All of them made a bad choice? I really doubt that.
Comparisons of the remains of hunter gatherers and neolithic farmers tend to show that the hunter gatherers were taller, healthier and longer lived. Agriculture was an advantageous invention for populations, even if the individuals in those populations were less well-off than individuals in hunter gather societies. An individual hunter gatherer might be stronger, healthier and happier than his farming cousin, but agricultural societies could scale and easily out-compete hunter gatherer societies.
Thats assuming that the remains that were studied were representative of the whole. Could be that when it works, H/G is great, but it can fail and wipe out your whole tribe. I dont think that sort of disadvantage would show up in a study of the remains.
Hunter gathering is brutal. What was the survival rate for hunters over a year vs. a farmer? Of course the hunter gatherer in graves would be tall and strong, the shorter and slower ones were killed and dismembered while hunting, their bodies left wherever from the exigency of getting the meat home to feed the kids. A good more modern example is blue water fishing off the east coast. Extraordinarily dangerous and it was said that when you ate fish you were eating the blood of dead men. Examining the graves would not give a representative sample of the population.
Farming permitted the weaker to survive and be buried in marked graves.
Bingo, classic survivor bias.
OK, you have an argument for men. Now do one for women, you know, the gatherers. Which is not very dangerous.
ps. hunter gatherers still exist and are widely studied. The !kung don’t work all that much and they live in a desert, for example.
Same survivor bias comes into play when you study H/G cultures that still exist. They most likely still exist because the conditions they live in favor Hunter gather over anything else.
Without looking at the studies, it would be hard for me to say much. Did they find that the women were also taller, healthier and longer lived? Do we even know why those remains are the ones that still exist? If a culture only takes pains to preserve its most treasured members, then studying those remains would lead you to believe that the whole society was just like the most treasured members.
The broader point here is that you should be skeptical about claims that we deeply understand cultures that existed 10,000 years ago and left no written record, heck, left little record at all.
Farmers remains show deformities evidences of iron-deficiencies. http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html At the very least, it seems H/G did a better job providing a decent supply of food for the whole group (or those who returned from the hunt). Having said this, I agree it is somewhat speculative, I don’t think we have knowledge of sufficiently representative remains to be sure.
Interesting link, i think its got all the same problems that have been mentioned here. Im not saying that there are no disadvantages to farming as opposed to HG, what i am saying is that i find it highly dubious that HG cultures universally had it better and then all just spontaneously made a choice to switch to a worse way of life.
His analysis assumes away most of the disadvantages of HG culture because the ones that remain dont have those disadvantages. Consider this “One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”” Hmm, maybe he is still a bushman *because* he lives in a place with a reliable, boundless supply of mongongo nuts. Maybe, those that didnt have a reliable, boundless source of mongongo nuts preferred a more reliable source of food. Maybe the hunter gatherers that didnt have a reliable source of food had to suffer through bouts of starvation and elected to change to a system that had a lot less of that.
In the end, i think that Diamond is following the path of a lot of modern scholars, that its better to make dramatic, head turning claims than claims that are well supported by the facts.
Maybe. As John said, we probably don’t have enough representative remains, but the evidences Diamond mentions are thought-provoking. Evidently, he is not the first intellectual annoyed with the road Mankind chose. Pathological things like the Khmer Rouge aside, the cultured propagonist of James Hilton’s Lost Horizont said the Romans were fortunate for having known hot baths, but not advanced machines. Brazilian writer Monteiro Lobato thought (or at
last, some of the more important characters he created) that discovering the fire was what put Manking on the wrong way. Plato’s Socrates was skeptical on writing.
I agree that its interesting. I also think its thesis driven. I think you are right that he is annoyed at the course humanity has taken, and is casting about for facts that support his view.
This actually sounds even more speculative. That the weak died hunting and were left in unmarked graves and so never discovered? Hunter-gatherer societies have persisted to the recent past and the present day. The mongols were nomadic horse-herders and they had way better nutrition than China. Even if the !Kung live in a place where agriculture is not practical, their lifestyle is still enlightening. If you can live in the desert (THE DESERT!) and hunt and gather with high nutrition and leisure time, why the heck not elsewhere?
Maybe they are hunter gatherers in those places because they cant be farmers. Again, most cultures independently decided to give up HG lifestyle and go to agriculture so farming must have had something going for it and studying the ones that didnt can be extremely misleading.
Did the Mongols who invaded China stay nomadic horse-herders?
Mongolia 1.76 / km^2
China 144.
What do you mean healthier? More likely to be fertile and that your children reach maturity?
I live in a place that was populated by hunter gatherers. There were vanishingly few, they didn’t stay in one place for long and travelled to locations where game and fish were available. It required arduous travel and the gathering was dangerous. Anyone who was able and strong could do it, if you couldn’t you died. The population was small because few survived to maturity.
Farmers had no easy time either, but more survived and the food supplies permitted a higher population density. Yes there were health problems, lack of vitamins and things like that, but compared to the ‘heathy’ hunter gatherers that didn’t seem to reproduce equally or as vigorously, they seemed to do better.
Do you know the boundaries of historical Mongolia? Because I do not think that anybody else does.
It was not possible for the Mongols in China to remain horse nomads because the population density was too high.
I imagine the reason HG switch to agriculture is the short run huge increase in calories, followed by the population explosion, at which point it is too late to switch back. Obviously farming is vastly superior in an evolutionary sense of reproduction. The question is whether HG in equilibrium are healthier and have more pleasant lives.
It might also have something to do with a weak vs strong concept of property. Farmers have land and it’s theirs they need it year round but hunter gatherers move from area to area so I would guess you would need a smaller proportion of the population to switch to farming that would result in a lot of land being claimed and no longer usable for hunter gathers. So it might have become a race to the bottom.
I second what CM wrote, and further point out there’s a difference between success in an evolutionary sense and success on a personal level. Hunter-gatherers had meager population densities (you cannot build a large population with slash-and-burn) hence from an evolutionary point of view they had fewer children than farmers. Cain killed Abel because he had more kids that crowded out Abel (who ended up on a reservation). Also innovation is a function of population density (non-rival goods come from those 1 in a million geniuses that only large populations can produce).
Nothing about that implies that H/G had a high level of leisure and nutrition. If H/G had meager population densities, that implies that the excess most certainly did not have it very good, death being the opposite of success in most peoples estimation.
Hunter/gatherers, for example the American Indians 150-300 years ago, exhibited lower levels of fertility. They were also in the main extremely violent with almost all male members being warriors. American Indian men often had a lot of free time, but we know the women worked quite hard. Still, most captives of American Indians did not try to escape while most American Indians captured by whites did. In fact captured whites who were taken back to white settlements frequently tried to escape back.
Farmers had bigger armies.
One theory is that people did not want to switch from hunter-gathering; they were forced to switch.
Hunter-gatherer cultures can only survive below certain population densities. When the density becomes too high, and they run out of unpopulated land to migrate to, and the prey animals and freely gathered plants have been over-hunted and over-harvested, and they decide that they’re not good enough at warfare to destroy or drive off their neighbors, they turn to the labor-intensive, disease-ridden, lower nutrition (maybe) existence of farmers in settled villages. They don’t want to do that, but it’s the only way to produce enough calories to survive as a people.
Or to put it another way: when the price of land becomes high, economies have to switch to techniques which make the land more productive: hence agriculture rather than hunter-gathering. More food per acre — but lower welfare due to land being scarcer.
I’m not saying that the theory is right, but it could explain why societies made massive shifts to agriculture despite that lifestyle being worse (initially that is, and this is assuming that the agricultural lifestyle actually was worse).
I have several criticisms of this paper. How could Rome expand demographically if it had more luxury rather than agricultural production. If ancient societies entered a trade-off between agricultural production (and population growth) vs luxury (and therefore high culture) how is it that Rome had both, then lost both? Ancient Rome’s population is estimated to be near 1 million. How were all these people fed if not through agriculture? How does that explain the decline of the population Rome, and of old Roman provinces in feudal Europe.
Also, like many Americans, he fundamentally misunderstands the Irish “famine” and black ’47.
They traded for grain or took over Sicily and Egypt.
Benny, you asked a very good question. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. My current understanding is that subsistence cannot be simply interpreted as food; neither should luxury be understood as “everything else”. Take weapon for example. Used in civil war, it is luxury for the country; used against other peoples, it is subsistence – yet on an even larger scale, say, continent, it is still luxury. Whether a certain commodity (akin to culture, institution and etc.) is luxury or subsistence depends on the group of interest – are you talking about a lineage, a village, a county, a country, or perhaps the whole human race? and it depends on the particular point of time at which you observe the world. The Roman luxuries, as far as its military organization, political system, education are concerned, could be more of a subsistence in the beginning phase of the civilization, but later slipped into a luxurious role. All this sounds like tautology, I admit. But what I present here is exactly a tautology, a tautology that could still serve as a new way to think about history. Actually, the whole “luxury explosion” section in the paper was exactly devoted to answering your question.
It is an interesting argument because it is similar to the argument that agricultural civilizations have better cultures than nomadic ones. Nomadic cultures are better at fighting because theirs is a harder way of life. So the nomdic barbarians will conquer the civilized agriculturalists but will eventually be annexed into that culture. Like the Aryans in India or the Mongols in China. To some extent the Germanic peoples that invaded Rome.
Personally I prefer the epidemic explanation of the collapse of Rome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome
The imperial city of Rome was the largest urban center of its time, with a population of about one million people (about the size of London in the early 19th century, when London was the largest city in the world), with a low-end estimate of 450,000.[157][158][159]
Did people not live outside the walls?