It is risky to use econometrics as even qualitative data to support a hypothesis about the trajectory of history over millennia because the data doesn't exist.
If you're not extremely careful in analyzing the provenance of your source statistics, it's very easy to fall into a circular argument of "assuming my hypothesis, my hypothesis is true."
Here, just staring at the GDP per capita data, for example, the source paper pretty bluntly says that it can't back-continue the statistics past 1820, so it uses a completely different methodology to try to offer a number. So the author here commenting that the data is quite different pre- and post-Industrial Revolution shouldn't be surprising considering the data is literally based on completely different metrics! Hell, De Long literally shaves a factor of 4 off pre-Industrial Revolution GDP estimates because he feels like it.
Life expectancy absolutely is a good metric for comparing the Industrial Revolution to what came before. GDP per-capita less so to some degree, and even today it's difficult to compare 1st world GDP per-capita to places where it's three orders of magnitude slower because GDP measures generally fail to properly capture the production of subsistence farming and other small-scale (but valuable to the people in question) activities . And yet! it is obvious that GDP per-capita has been flatish throughout history by comparison to post Industrial Revolution times precisely because the vast majority of people do not live off subsistence farming, make their own homes, clothing and footwear, etc.
> it is obvious that GDP per-capita has been flatish throughout history
But is it? That's ostensibly the point of this article--trying to actually use data to establish whether or not this "obvious" principle is true [1]. But if you turn to the actual data, the author of the data is creating the historical data using one of three assumptions: either real GDP per-capita is correlated with population growth, which comes both with and without an arbitrary pre-industrial haircut, or real GDP per-capita is literally flat pre-industrial.
It really isn't clear to me if there really is a step change in per-capita GDP growth around the First (and/or Second) Industrial Revolution, or if it's a one-off jump, or if it's a continuous, consistent per-capita growth rate with no real impact. All of those would look pretty similar in a linear-scale graph at first glance. What we do know from other economic proxies from archaeology is that pre-industrial economies weren't exactly static: you can see a clear trend that highlights the rise and fall of Rome (see, e.g., the data in https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-f...), so you better expect that the econometric statistics you use can replicate that trend.
[1] Let's assume the purposes of discussion that GDP here is something meaningful for economic prosperity in pre-industrial times, something that can capture the productivity enhancements that did occur at that time.
There's no such thing as a "pre-industrial" economy.
Sweden and Russia had a military-industrial complex, in the modern sense of the word, back in the Northern War.
The Bronze Age required global supply chains and massive mining of rare earth minerals to function. (And before that, going back to the Neolithic we have the same for flint or jade.)
Europe's medieval economy was a specific reaction to Rome's supply chain collapse, not a default state of humanity.
The most common reference is the book 1177bc that discusses ancient trade routes and how bronze age collapse disrupted them. It has been mentioned here in HN and the author has a good somewhat academic presentation on youtube
Those two things are not exclusive: one can have near-global supply chains without modern industry. And one can have modern industry without global supply chains.
Yes, tin is a rare earth mineral. (In the sense that it is rare and mined from the earth. Not in the akshually technical sense.)
Prospecting and mining tin was a very serious and complicated business in the 20th century. (Maybe still is, I'm not up to date to current events.)
Copper, tin, gold, flint, jade - this isn't stuff that was just lying there on the ground for the taking. Mining it poses immense technical and social challenges even for today's mining industry.
> this isn't stuff that was just lying there on the ground for the taking.
Bronze age tin mining in Cornwall and Devon literally kicked off 4,500-5 kyears back chasing extensive cassiterite surface deposits on Bodmin Moor.
Neither the element tin nor the mineral tin have been classed as rare earth minerals and while 49 or 50 down the abundancy list they are good examples of highly clumped deposits .. tin regions have plentiful tin and picking it up off the ground lead to trade and to the birth of mining chasing veins.
No, Russia certainly did not "had a military-industrial complex, in the modern sense of the word" back then because back then, labour was not a commodity (that's the main innovation of the capitalism, after all). The Demidovs' manufakturs in the Ural mountains were using state-provided serfs as the workers. Industrialization, in the modern sense of the world, hasn't happen in Russia until the very late of the XIX century.
> And yet! it is obvious that GDP per-capita has been flatish throughout history by comparison to post Industrial Revolution times
The early part of exponential growth always looks flat compared to the last part, it’s the proverbial hockey stick.
There are actually continuous developments in agriculture through the Iron Age. off the top of my head there are windmills, more and better iron tools, heavy iron plows, improved crop rotation, more advanced irrigation etc. The Arab agricultural revolution changed a lot of farming technology, and facilitated exchanges between east and west. Then there was the post Columbian trade with the new world. Imagine a world without potatoes!
> it is obvious that GDP per-capita has been flatish throughout history by comparison to post Industrial Revolution times precisely because the vast majority of people do not live off subsistence farming, make their own homes, clothing and footwear, etc.
I mean obviously that's not true. You mean that the GDP per capita of Venice and the other trade republics stayed flat throughout their rise and fall as trading with the whole known world, becoming absurdly rich and their currency being used as the reserve currency for the whole of Europe? Or that Spain's colonisation of 2/3s of the Americas and the vast riches there such as mountains of silver, didn't impact their GDP per capita? Or that the Ottomans' stayed flat throughout their rise from a backwater band of mercenaries to an empire spanning three continents to a failed state?
Life expectancy is a bad measure because infant mortality was pretty high. This skewed the averages down considerably. Humans don't live 50 years longer but only 10 year or so.
Do we even have good measures of life expectancy? In pre-modern times, infants often died with no official government or church records to record that they ever existed.
You can tell quite a lot from anthropological studies of bones excavated in old burial grounds.
For example, contrary to what people think, old people over 70 are really rare in European medieval cemeteries, around 1 per 100-200 burials. A random peasant had a good chance to see their 50th birthday in the High Middle Ages, but 60 was already uncommon. In the Early Middle Ages, with their raids and more primitive agriculture, even 50 was an admirable age to live to.
I hear the line "once you survived childhood, you had good chance to grow old" very often on social networks, but it is basically never supported by concrete data. Anthropological studies of real old bones certainly don't support that.
The only profession where living to be 70 was somewhat more frequent was the high clergy (cardinals, popes) - a mostly safe career with good hygiene and guaranteed supply of food.
Even the vast majority of medieval kings died before reaching 70.
Sure, but I'm not convinced that those old burial grounds actually contain a representative population sample. It seems that some infants who died very young were buried more informally in other places. This would skew the results.
Well, yeah. Complete representation is likely impossible.
Tiny bones of infants often get absorbed entirely over centuries, erasing the very last trace of their short life.
Suicides were buried like dogs, away from Christian cemeteries. Enemy soldiers fallen in battle might have been left to the carrion birds. Executed criminals were buried on the place of execution, gibbetted or dissected. People who died in plagues were buried in plague pits. Jewish people were buried in Jewish cemeteries. A lot of exceptions all around.
Still, a "normal" burial ground is by far the most comprehensive record of the local Christian non-noble population that we can hope for.
Once you get past the age of fairly widespread deaths from childhood diseases (often prevented by vaccines), a lot of people in modern society don't get a lot of critical medical care from maybe their 20s through 40s. Sure, some do, but tons of younger people don't routinely see doctors--even when doing so is free.
As people get into what we now consider about late middle age, modern healthcare for a variety of things becomes more and more important.
> a lot of people in modern society don't get a lot of critical medical care from maybe their 20s through 40s.
Did you know that in England, 40% of middle aged men have had a fracture? [1]
Personally I haven't seen the inside of a hospital in over 20 years. So I agree with you to that extent. But oh boy have I benefited from sterile surgical techniques, titanium plates and screws, and antibiotics since that one week 20 years ago.
Oh I don't disagree. I'm sure there were a ton of people who had fractures that didn't heal properly on their own or with non-invasive care, infections that would be fairly straightforward with antibiotics today, etc. Certainly I've depended on modern medical care many times and probably benefited overall many others.
I've had serious fractures and taken antibiotics on a number of occasions. So I violently agree. But there's probably an age window when modern medicine is less important (outside of war and other especially dangerous activities).
This. The claim that ancient lives were brutish and short, is just a hobbesian concept. That he used to strut his shakey theory.
A significant amount of people reached old age even in the middle ages.
It’s a pet peeve of mine that so many people believe humans used to die of old age at a young age when it’s obviously untrue just from thinking about our modern day experience. Most people hit at least 60-70 before needing any critical medical care, even if they just eat junk food and watch TV all day. What do they imagine it is about modernity that is doubling our life span? The cable TV? The pre-packaged snack foods?
We need to teach people that averages are generally not a meaningful way to compare things, except in the very rare case of them both being normally distributed and also about the same standard deviation. People are taught to think day to day by comparison of averages and it really harms our ability to reason about basic things in daily life.
Where I live (SF Bay) it is extremely windy all summer, and nearly dead calm all winter except when a big storm comes through. Average wind speeds are about the same year round.
I don’t think long-term GDP measures are meaningful. What point is there in comparing an economy that produces horseshoes and wooden ships with one that has trains and steamships? A pre-industrial economy can’t produce X% of an industrial economy, because it can’t produce large chunks of that economy at all.
At best you can compare the parts of the economy that remain relatively unchanged - like food, or textiles, and use those as rough and incomplete proxies.
Great post. Worthwhile reading. The industrial revolution was indeed a big deal.
I have one suggestion for the author: Please also show plots with a logarithmic scale on the vertical axis, instead of only a linear scale. The logarithmic scale does a good job of showing how growth rates change over time; the linear scale doesn't. When you plot a quantity growing exponentially on a linear scale, the past will always looks like a nearly flat line.
> Life expectancy at birth is a pretty good proxy for how physically healthy people are in general [...] (Note also that improvements to life expectancy at birth are not entirely due to falling rates of childhood mortality: see here.)
Not entirely but it is enough of a factor that naively comparing life-expectancy stats without accounting for it is probably a bad idea.
IMO infant mortality improvements underlie so much of the demographic changes involved in a country's industrialization, economic development, and then cultural shifts.
Skeletal records also suggest higher levels of health vs post-agriculture, IIUC. (Although it's pretty hard to be confident about much from such a long time ago, of course.)
I think part of the mechanism is that sickly hunter-gatherers die and do so early-ish, but agricultural societies can keep those people around.
Also if you have too many hunter gatherers around for a given area (and assuming they can't leave), some of them will die within perhaps a few years of starvation.
There's a much wider band of population densities for agricultural societies where they can produce enough calories to keep people from starving, but many will be miserable from malnutrition.
As an aside: in our over-populated hunter-gatherer scenario the average amount of food available might still be plenty, but there might be the occasional bottleneck during the harshest parts of winter.
Thanks to that bottleneck keeping numbers low, the typical day of life experience for your typical hunter-gatherer might be pretty nice. And thus you can get 70+ healthy years for many of them.
>some of them will die within perhaps a few years of starvation.
We can be fairly sure that before a group of humans die of starvation, they die of violence. Either from another desperate band of humans also starving, or trying to take those humans' land. This is certainly the pattern for hunter-gatherers living on marginal land in the last millennium. Presumably, this was also the case when they were hunter gatherers on prime land too - before they were forced out of it by more numerous, and better organized, agriculturalists.
There's no _good_ way of ever going back to a hunter-gatherer society, unless you want to kill 99/100 people (or tell those 99 they can never have children - and enforce it through child murder or sterilization). There's no _good_ way of going back to a pre-industrial society, unless you want to kill/sterilize 9 out of 10 people. Not saying you suggested these - but it should be pointed out.
> We can be fairly sure that before a group of humans die of starvation, they die of violence.
I'm not completely sure about that, but that doesn't alter the argument in my comment. It's just that violence would be the short-term trigger of their death, with a lack of calories being the underlying cause.
I know it's anecdotal but my grand-parents lived 80+ and my grand-mothers had only half the kids they gave birth to. Also trying to squeeze 2-3 more years out of a 80 year old is torture.
That's not to say that medicine didn't improve and it's genial. I do certainly like my spectacles and diabetes medicine is life changing for the people affected. But the measure of life expectancy is crap. A better measure should be comfort/pain during your 70 years.
For thousands of years the economic level of humanity was basically a straight line with a very slow upward trend. then in the late 1700's things changed the economic graph went exponential and has not slowed down since.
There is this concept of a technological singularity, Some days I feel it has already happened. And collectively we all are in a sort of tech time dilation, caught up in them, we barely notice the exponential tides.
There's a mind-blowing moment when you realize that pretty much everything about modern life has been made in the last 100-150 years. Medicine stopped being voodoo and became reliably useful in that time. All scientific fields graduated from goofing around to serious discovery machines in that time. Meanwhile, half the items you see and use for fun and work and chores, exist because of petrochemical industry that developed in the past century. At least in the western world, the last 100-150 years have been a step change in human experience, so when someone questions if this time it's different, my answer is: yes, this time is really different.
I never thought about it in terms of being past the singularity event horizon, but the more I ponder on what you wrote, the more I feel you may be right: we're already experiencing what technological singularity feels from inside. We're riding the exponents already, but are still early enough that we don't notice.
(Or at least didn't notice. I thought progress of technology got boring in the past decade or two, but last couple years made me feel things are changing again, and faster than I can keep track of.)
At times, I have thought about trying to explain the modern world to someone from 1920. "Well, we've got automobiles, but they're much faster and require less maintenance, and we have better roads for them. And we've got airplanes, but they're much bigger, and they crash far less often. And we've got better machines for farming, and better medicines..." You could explain television. You could explain transistors - they had vacuum tubes. Computers would be harder - they had mechanical adding machines, but the many-order-of-magnitude-faster computers is a qualitative change that makes them not "like" anything that existed in 1920.
But when I think about trying to explain to someone from 1820, you can't explain anything. They were 40 years before Maxwell's Equations, so no electricity, no radio, no telegraph, no telephone. They were before the first common-carrier railroad. The first internal combustion powered automobile was 1808, but they were not yet practical in any sense. The precursors aren't there. (Yes, the industrial revolution is starting. The products of the industrial revolution that will change how we live aren't there yet, though.)
Most modern tech I can explain in terms of what it does, what it's like to live with. I think this is how I'd explain TV to someone from 1920, but it would be just as easy as explaining it to someone from 1820:
"It's a sheet of glass, and moving pictures with sounds appear on it."
"How does it work?"
"I don't know. It involves several dozen separate inventions, of which I understand perhaps three individual ones well enough to discuss."
--
Of course, to really blow the minds of people from 1920, you can either show them anything related to space travel (especially the Apollo missions, but also GPS); or tell them about basically any organ transplant; or show them a 3D printer (you know Bakelite? We found better plastics, and we made a machine that can, without ongoing intervention, use that make any shaped structure we ask it to… and those machines can also do metal, and yes that includes the engines of those spaceships we showed you earlier. Also houses).
I'd say the 1920s (so 100 years ago) is the earliest time someone from today could go back to and still be able to live more or less the life they have today. In the 1920s, at least in urbanized areas in the developed world, you had access to electricity, indoor plumbing, the modern appliances (vacuum cleaners and refrigerators became common in this decade), cars had stopped being luxuries and were rapidly becoming essentials, movies (even with sound towards the end of the decade), and radio (which also served as a forerunner for TV as there were a lot of dramas in addition to music on it)
You could if you were rich and urbanised (and didn't mind all those examples being much worse), but from what I heard, indoor plumbing was a luxury even in 1930.
I also don't think many of us can even undo mobile phones and the internet, so even going back half that far to 1970, even with unlimited money, it would no longer be possible to have the life we have today. To be always connected to everyone; to be unable to get lost; to always have more than most libraries at your fingertips, able to show you the step-by-step basics of any task you've never seen before at any time… it's a very different way of living.
I learned C and the basics of MacOS (classic) programming from books I took out of the library. I wasn't allowed to take out more than 4 at a time.
We are on a slow down. The first nuclear power plant was back in 1954. That's roughly 70 years ago. Except for tech/computers, not much has really happened in the world.
I don't agree. I think things flatten off a bit in some areas -- power production, transportation. But I also think we might be on the cusp of things going hockey stick vertical before the end of the decade.
Medicine is radically better: some diseases eliminated entirely (smallpox), others reduced to manageable conditions (HIV), even novel pandemics get multiple vaccines within a few years; the first successful transplant was 1954, a kidney between two identical twins, because they didn't have a good way to do immunosuppression until 1970.
PV and batteries weren't impressive until suddenly each was a revolution.
Long-distance travel became cheap, widely accessible. My uncle moved to Australia (from the UK) to get away from his mum, my first trip abroad (aged, I think, 8) was to visit him.
Tech and computers enabled so many other things that I don't think it's reasonable to prefix them with an "except for". Even just going from 1954 to 2000 was approximately my Dad's career, and that included "we're sending you on a two day training course on this new thing called 'software'" (he worked for a UK defence contractor, writing simulation software for IFF radar systems).
Look at the Morris, DeLong, etc. data in the article and it basically boils down to nothing pre-industrial revolution really mattered much including the Roman Empire, European declines post-Roman Empire, and the ups and downs in China over the millenia.
It's unfortunate that subjective well-being was left out of this, because that's the one that looks like it might be getting worse. Arguably, it's also the most important.
The study that looked at subjective well-being in 16th century Spain concluded that subjective well-being mirrors subjective economic inequality. Without going too deep, it seems that relationship continues to hold in the modern time period of which you speak. Subjective economic inequality has increased, and subjective well-being has declined.
But that does question just how important subjective well-being is if all it is is your perception of how much better off someone else is.
I'm not sure this so much shows the significance of the IR period, as the fact that progress is exponential. All these graphs appear to be long term exponentials plus noise.
Yes, but every exponential will have a region in which it begins rapidly increasing. Perhaps we just call that period "the Industrial Revolution".
The reason it's relevant is that the premise of the article is basically that some events in history are so positively transformative, like the IR, that we should focus on how to being about those events. But if the IR is just an inevitable region along a centuries (or millenia) long exponential curve, that premise may not hold.
Exponential graphs do not have "a region in which it begins rapidly increasing." The differential of e^x is e^x! Across any range of x values, it's possible to choose a scale of y values that shows the classic shape of the exponential graph (ie, the hockey stick). If you then zoom into the flat part of the graph, and choose a different y scale, you'll see a bend there. If you zoom out and choose a different y scale, you'll see your previous bend as part of the flat part.
Unless there is a natural and obviously significant range of y values that, independent of the mathematical properties of the graph, is clearly what you actually care about, you can just make the "bend" in an exponential graph be anywhere you want it to be.
Let me rephrase. Any exponential with a defined beginning and end point - ie any that we are considering over a particular time series - will have a region at which it appears to rapidly increase, before which it appeared relatively flat. For technological progress of humanity up to present day, that region was around the IR.
I mean, sure, as long as the operational term is appears to rapidly increase and appears relatively flat.
If per capital income roughly doubles every 30 years or so, and that's an iron law of nature throughout history, and you make a graph that ends at 1700 and puts the income of someone in 1700 in the upper right, you'd be saying, "Oh man, what weird thing happened in the 1500s/1600s that led to a big change in incomes then?"
And if you make that same graph in 2200, the Industrial Revolution will be part of the "appears flat" graph.
Yes, agreed. That was actually my original point, that maybe the Industrial Revolution looks like a special period in history from the perspective of today, for that reason, but in reality it's just a period along a long-term exponential.
From the standpoint of the life expectancy chart, the fact that the computer revolution continues the upwards trend despite sharply diminishing returns is probably as significant.
The Industrial Revolution was doing the "low hanging fruit" of that. Still unbelievable significant, but the information age (which the medical revolutions are attached to) is doing some unbelievable lifting there.
If/when they make serious strides in addressing aging, that will probably be the third (or fourth, the chart doesn't show Hunt+Gather -> Cultivation) major economic revolution.
Keep in mind our life expectancy will probably drop without some biotech revolution. Climate change and demographic bombs are fueling dangerous wars, and we haven't even had to deal with really bad climate change impacts from heat and mass population movements/drought on the scale of billions.
The Industrial Revolution was a major leap in energy tech, especially with the steam engine. This was the first time we efficiently converted thermal energy into kinetic energy, leading to mechanization and rapid growth. It’s akin to how the internet revolutionized information exchange. Just as the steam engine transformed industries and transportation, the internet has revolutionized communication and access to knowledge. Both innovations mark clear turning points, driving exponential technological and economic progress, and reshaping society in profound ways.
One of the very weirdest things about this article is that it takes absolutely no account of how many people were alive. It is couched entirely in averages.
In fact, the author is so serious about this that he can write "it doesn’t seem that any of the deadliest events in recorded history had a transformative negative impact". This includes the Black Death which he thinks killed 10% of all humans! Killing 10% of humans is a transformative negative impact.
You must at least have an opinion of whether and when human life is better or worse than death. It matters whether there are 10 million people on earth or 10 billion!
If you think only in averages, then anything before the end of the Malthusian regime is going to have only a short-run impact on welfare: any increase in GDP per capita gets dissipated by the resulting population growth.
Not thinking in averages would make the flat line before the Industrial Revolution a lot less flat (though the IR would still show a big hockey stick). The human population 12000 years ago was about 4 million. Around 0 AD it was 200 million.[1]
This weirdness is almost invisible to people because they have been trained so hard to think in averages. The same mistake is made by people who argue that the coming of agriculture was a disaster. (People got shorter and less healthy! Sure, but one reason for that is there are many, many more people. Again, if you think they would have been better off dead, then fine, but at least make the argument.) I blame Rawls and Harsanyi.
Anyone interested in a statistical approach to the history of the industrial revolution should read The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 by Eric Hobsbawm. It's the first in an excellently written series on the history of the 18th century, written for the interested layperson.
IIRC, James Lovelock as part of his Gaia Hypothesis argues that the price of energy is the fundamental input in how much “work” we can do, and subsequently causes both economic growth and environmental impact, because we do more stuff. The Industrial Revolution was a step change in how much work we could do, and stuff we could create.
Looking forward then, something like solving nuclear fusion might unlock a new Industrial Revolution, and hence cause an environmental disaster, because we will be able to do a massively increased amount of “work” for less cost. So more infra, more building, more production.
Ergo, clean energy is perhaps not the answer to a clean world. The only green future is one with “expensive” energy.
I'd never heard of this. For those who are time-pressed it's "Cultural materialism as a literary critical practice—this article will not address its anthropological namesake—is a Marxist-inspired and mostly British approach to in particular Shakespeare and early modern English literature that emerged and became prominent in the 1980s. Its emphasis on the historical and material conditions of the production and reception of texts has remained influential, even if its political commitment and interventionist purposes have largely been abandoned and increasingly ignored."
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-97...
Here, just staring at the GDP per capita data, for example, the source paper pretty bluntly says that it can't back-continue the statistics past 1820, so it uses a completely different methodology to try to offer a number. So the author here commenting that the data is quite different pre- and post-Industrial Revolution shouldn't be surprising considering the data is literally based on completely different metrics! Hell, De Long literally shaves a factor of 4 off pre-Industrial Revolution GDP estimates because he feels like it.