Comment by jmalicki

21 hours ago

There was a very marked change in the growth rate, which is why economic historians focus on that.

Yes, there were multiple further steps that needed to happen, as you note. But the black plague got the population "unstuck" from a local minimum that they could not grow from, to being able to have cattle plow the fields and eat meat that allowed them to have some surplus to capture the further gains.

It's not that the later gains were inevitable, but that they never would have otherwise happened, and the growth rate started with the plague.

It's like saying the current AI boom started recently, there's no way the steam engine was related. It is a clear causal chain, even though many things had to happen in between.

But before the black plague, at least the "western world" was stuck in Malthusian dynamics where there was no growth in technology or income.

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jmalicki

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watwut  21 hours ago

If "multiple steps" take 400 years, then the cause is something else.

  • jmalicki  20 hours ago

    The economy went from 0% growth for 100s of years to 3% growth that lasted many hundreds of years.

    Yes, at each step keeping the 3% growth needed things to keep going, but the big thing was unleashing the nonzero growth rate, to get unstuck from the local minimum.

  • cortesoft  20 hours ago

    What makes that a rule? Can causal chains not last more than X amount of time? What is the cutoff?

    • jmalicki  19 hours ago

      I will try to steelman watwut, a lot of people presume compound exponential economic growth is basically inevitable as a law, so you can always go back to some point in time.

      However, economic growth was basically flat before the Black Plague, and increases were basically random events that went back to Malthusian dynamics.

      Only since the Black Plague has the world enjoyed exponential economic growth.

      Most people talk about the industrial revolution, a lot of other comments talk about the british agricultural revolution before that, but economic historians have identified the inflection point at the black plague - that's where compound interest really started to be a driver of growth, it barely existed before that, at least on long time scales.

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