4 ms·

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

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.

mr_toad 2y ago
> 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!
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Not forgetting the social and legal structures of these activities. The joint-stock company for instance. Also just the terminology: water-mills, windmills and sailing ships are definitely industrial equipment, even if they're not steam-powered.
jcranmer 2y ago
> 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-fall-part-iii-things/ 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.
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  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.
  - Joker_vD 2y ago
    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.
    - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
      Commodity labor is not a necessary characteristic of industrialization. In fact, most cases of industrialization in history involve forced labor. The standard definition of "industrial revolution" is about the switch to steam from hydropower. (I don't agree with the standard definition, but what you're saying here is even more "out there".)
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    >The Bronze Age required global supply chains and massive mining of rare earth minerals to function. I want to see your source or citation for this claim. (Unless you're using "rare earth minerals" to mean something other than the current meaning.)
    - jcranmer 2y ago
      Strictly speaking, tin is less abundant than many rare earths, although rare earths isn't meant to refer to their abundance in Earth's crust.
nradov 2y ago
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.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Which makes sense if you think about it. 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.
    - michaelt 2y ago
      > 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. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18192607/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18192607/
sofixa 2y ago
> 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?
_yb2s 2y ago
Life expectancy is mostly dominated by medical techniques that change infant mortality
- pineaux 2y ago
  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.
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    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.
    - sdwr 2y ago
      > What do they imagine it is about modernity that is doubling our life span? If you take away the knowledge and the medical advances and the social technology, the big difference is food acquisition. Pre-industrial revolution, most people were subsistence farmers, and city dwellers lived on their backs. Now our food needs are met by a much smaller % of the population
csomar 2y ago
> Life expectancy 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.

mr_toad 2y ago

> 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!

HPsquared 2y ago
Not forgetting the social and legal structures of these activities. The joint-stock company for instance. Also just the terminology: water-mills, windmills and sailing ships are definitely industrial equipment, even if they're not steam-powered.

jcranmer 2y ago

> 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-fall-part-iii-things/ 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.

otabdeveloper4 2y ago
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.
- Joker_vD 2y ago
  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.
  - otabdeveloper4 2y ago
    Commodity labor is not a necessary characteristic of industrialization. In fact, most cases of industrialization in history involve forced labor. The standard definition of "industrial revolution" is about the switch to steam from hydropower. (I don't agree with the standard definition, but what you're saying here is even more "out there".)
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  >The Bronze Age required global supply chains and massive mining of rare earth minerals to function. I want to see your source or citation for this claim. (Unless you're using "rare earth minerals" to mean something other than the current meaning.)
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    Strictly speaking, tin is less abundant than many rare earths, although rare earths isn't meant to refer to their abundance in Earth's crust.

nradov 2y ago

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.

inglor_cz 2y ago
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.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Which makes sense if you think about it. 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.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    > 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. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18192607/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18192607/

sofixa 2y ago

> 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?

_yb2s 2y ago

Life expectancy is mostly dominated by medical techniques that change infant mortality

pineaux 2y ago
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.
- _yb2s 2y ago
  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.
  - sdwr 2y ago
    > What do they imagine it is about modernity that is doubling our life span? If you take away the knowledge and the medical advances and the social technology, the big difference is food acquisition. Pre-industrial revolution, most people were subsistence farmers, and city dwellers lived on their backs. Now our food needs are met by a much smaller % of the population

csomar 2y ago

> Life expectancy 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.