Well, that’s true, but at some level, what else could it possibly be? What other cause could be behind the long-run expansion in the first place, so many millennia after humans spanned every continent but Antarctica?
Technological progress being responsible for the long-run trend doesn’t mean you can attribute local reversals to humans hitting limits to technological progress. Just as a silly example, the emergence of a new strain of plague could have led to the depopulation of urban centers, which lowers R&D efficiency because you lose concentrations of people working together, and thus lowers the rate of technological progress. I’m not saying this is what actually happened, but it seems like a possible story to me.
I’m very skeptical about explanations involving wars and plagues, except insofar as those impact technological development and infrastructure, because a handful of generations is plenty to get back to the Malthusian limit even if a majority of the population dies in some major event (especially regional events where you can then also get migration or invasion from less affected regions).
I agree, but why would you assume wars and plagues can’t impact technological development and infrastructure?
Yes, it’s a possible story. And yes, wars and plagues impact tech development and infrastructure all the time. But I find it hard to think about how to draw a principled distinction between local growth slowdowns and hitting local limits to technological growth.
For example, in medieval Europe the Black Plague definitely depopulated the continent in ways that affected lots and lots of things, and there was no way they could reasonably have known how to do better. Resolving the plague wasn’t possible because the solutions were beyond the local limits of technological growth. If the same plague struck today, that wouldn’t happen, because we have the tools to deal with it. We understand sanitation, and disease vectors, and we can develop vaccines. It would be a blip of a decade and a few percent GDP growth, rather than half the population and centuries of recovery.
Technological progress being responsible for the long-run trend doesn’t mean you can attribute local reversals to humans hitting limits to technological progress. Just as a silly example, the emergence of a new strain of plague could have led to the depopulation of urban centers, which lowers R&D efficiency because you lose concentrations of people working together, and thus lowers the rate of technological progress. I’m not saying this is what actually happened, but it seems like a possible story to me.
I agree, but why would you assume wars and plagues can’t impact technological development and infrastructure?
Yes, it’s a possible story. And yes, wars and plagues impact tech development and infrastructure all the time. But I find it hard to think about how to draw a principled distinction between local growth slowdowns and hitting local limits to technological growth.
For example, in medieval Europe the Black Plague definitely depopulated the continent in ways that affected lots and lots of things, and there was no way they could reasonably have known how to do better. Resolving the plague wasn’t possible because the solutions were beyond the local limits of technological growth. If the same plague struck today, that wouldn’t happen, because we have the tools to deal with it. We understand sanitation, and disease vectors, and we can develop vaccines. It would be a blip of a decade and a few percent GDP growth, rather than half the population and centuries of recovery.