Thread by @paulkrugman

As they say in the Patrick O'Brian novels, I give you joy of your victory! A few FRED-based thoughts on one of Brad's big insights: that the world didn't really break out of the Malthusian trap until 1870 1/

https://twitter.com/delong/status/1570429435870060544

As it happens, my friend FRED includes the Bank of England dataset with estimates of some UK variables going back to the Middle Ages. And it allows me to make a few pictures of real wages versus population 2/

Up through 1600 the world was Malthusian pure and simple. Real wage in 2015 pounds versus population (inverted): just sliding up and down the curve with the rise and fall of plagues 3/

Fast forward to 1870, and real wages were no higher than they had been in the 15th century — but the population was much larger, so evidence of technological progress 4/

Only after 1870 do we see a huge improvement in working-class living standards 5/

The question is how we should think about the century or so before 1870 when real wages were rising moderately despite a growing population. Brad argues that the pace of technological progress was still glacial by modern standards 6/

And there had been previous eras of significant economic growth — the Dutch Republic? The early Roman Empire? — that never achieved escape velocity. So maybe the real break didn't come until 1870. By the numbers, this looks right 7/

But maybe the economic numbers don't tell the whole story? It seems to me that between 1600 and 1870 there was a revolution in how people thought — a rise in systematic thinkers from Newton to Darwin, including, yes, Malthus himself — that had no previous counterpart 8/

Not just scientists, either. I'm kind of a Civil War buff, and it has always seemed to be that people like Grant and Lincoln were modern in a way you couldn't find in earlier eras. For that matter, did the ancient world have an Alexander Hamilton? 9/

I guess my point is that I suspect that the intellectual and maybe social foundations for the big break were laid well before the big uptick in total factor productivity. 10/

This isn't a critique of Brad's work: It's an important and novel observation that the trends didn't really break until circa 1870. And maybe it's just hindsight that makes the squishier changes seem so important. But maybe not 11/