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That doesn't make any sense, with a larger population you can just grow more food as long as there's space. One person has been able to farm far more food than

That doesn't make any sense, with a larger population you can just grow more food as long as there's space. One person has been able to farm far more food than they could eat from the early bronze age onwards and population growth has been mostly linear since, up till the last century when it became exponential with mechanization making food ridiculously plentiful. The problem with tech progress is that it's cumulative and you need to figure out the prerequisites first and with a small number of people. After that it just snowballs faster and faster. With a larger population you also get ever increasing chances for someone to invent something new.

mech765 4y ago
IIRC until a couple of centuries ago a super high percentage of the population was employed in agriculture. Like 50 percent or more.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  It was >60% almost everywhere until ~1600: https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture
vkou 4y ago
> That doesn't make any sense, with a larger population you can just grow more food as long as there's space. A smaller population only lives in the most productive parts of their living space. A larger population has a lot more people living in the marginal parts, and if growing food is more difficult in them, the people on the margins will be doing more work all-in-all. Meanwhile, in the more productive parts, some king, despot, warlord, or relative thereof will happily steal all the surplus. > One person has been able to farm far more food than they could eat from the early bronze age onwards Until textile production was mechanized around by the industrial revolution, you also needed something like 3,000 hours of manual labour a year to clothe a family. You needed someone to go do all the work of collecting firewood (As it turns out, all the easily-accessible-to-your-community firewood has been cut down a long, long time ago, so you'll be walking a fair ways to get it.) Oh, and that king, despot and warlord? He will happily take every surplus penny, shirt, and turnip that you have. And the one across the river will happily take what's left.
lkrubner 4y ago
"After that it just snowballs faster and faster." That is the theory. The problem is the actual historical record: the slow down after 1970. If the theory suggests that the process is supposed to snowball faster and faster, why did the theory fail?
- moffkalast 4y ago
  I'm talking about technology progress specifically there which has continued to evolve at a rapid pace since then, even despite the lack of world or cold wars that would cause intense money throwing at problems. And as this post points out, productivity doesn't seem to always scale with technology. Especially when most of that technology is just passive entertainment that expends lots of resources just to make us feel less bored. Regardless it's far too early to say it failed given that we're talking millennium sized scales where a 50 year slowdown or even dip is less than a blip. Of course real life also isn't a magical place where exponential graphs go up into infinity, so it has to plateau somewhere. I'd assume at the very least sometime after the local group of galaxies is colonized.

mech765 4y ago

IIRC until a couple of centuries ago a super high percentage of the population was employed in agriculture. Like 50 percent or more.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
It was >60% almost everywhere until ~1600: https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture

vkou 4y ago

> That doesn't make any sense, with a larger population you can just grow more food as long as there's space. A smaller population only lives in the most productive parts of their living space. A larger population has a lot more people living in the marginal parts, and if growing food is more difficult in them, the people on the margins will be doing more work all-in-all. Meanwhile, in the more productive parts, some king, despot, warlord, or relative thereof will happily steal all the surplus. > One person has been able to farm far more food than they could eat from the early bronze age onwards Until textile production was mechanized around by the industrial revolution, you also needed something like 3,000 hours of manual labour a year to clothe a family. You needed someone to go do all the work of collecting firewood (As it turns out, all the easily-accessible-to-your-community firewood has been cut down a long, long time ago, so you'll be walking a fair ways to get it.) Oh, and that king, despot and warlord? He will happily take every surplus penny, shirt, and turnip that you have. And the one across the river will happily take what's left.

lkrubner 4y ago

"After that it just snowballs faster and faster." That is the theory. The problem is the actual historical record: the slow down after 1970. If the theory suggests that the process is supposed to snowball faster and faster, why did the theory fail?

moffkalast 4y ago
I'm talking about technology progress specifically there which has continued to evolve at a rapid pace since then, even despite the lack of world or cold wars that would cause intense money throwing at problems. And as this post points out, productivity doesn't seem to always scale with technology. Especially when most of that technology is just passive entertainment that expends lots of resources just to make us feel less bored. Regardless it's far too early to say it failed given that we're talking millennium sized scales where a 50 year slowdown or even dip is less than a blip. Of course real life also isn't a magical place where exponential graphs go up into infinity, so it has to plateau somewhere. I'd assume at the very least sometime after the local group of galaxies is colonized.