[My knowledge of High Medieval period is based mostly on listening to TTC’s audiobook lecture series about it (highly recommended), not on Wikipedia.]
A few random thoughts:
I don’t have one big mathematically pretty theory here. (Short-term) Malthusian theory seems to be widely accepted because it’s mathematically pretty, and something like it works on many animal populations. It’s not obvious from either theoretical or empirical point of view it makes sense for humans, at least after they stopped hunting and gathering own food.
Actual food production must cover actual population no matter if Malthusian hypothesis is true or not—if food production was too low, people would die; if food production was too high, there would be nobody to eat it (unless people do something funny with their food instead of eating it). So that’s the wrong thing to look at. Lower population levels must automatically mean lower land area used, or lower productivity/intensity of agriculture. And we can guess people would use the “best” lands, and leave “worse” lands unused.
I think failure of Medieval Europe to rebound back to Roman population levels is much bigger problem for Malthusian theory than Tuscany’s. Small highly urbanized regions like Tuscany might have simply imported food from other regions. Such explanations won’t work for an entire continent.
TTC lectures present as well-established fact that quality of life increased a lot in High Medieval period, while population roughly doubled. The lecturer finds it quite puzzling, as it conflicts with Malthusian theory.
Wikipedia says that during the entire Medieval period, “land was plentiful while labour to clear and work the land was scarce”. This is highly un-Malthusian scenario. Malthusian theory strongly predicts having large excess of labour.
Obviously there must be something that limits fertility. Malthusian theory says it must be potential food production, and that every land that can produce enough food to support people farming it must be used. If the mechanism is something else, we might have highly non-Malthusian (non-poor) equilibria. Wars, and failure to organize expansion to new lands (what in agricultural societies might require significant up-front investment, it definitely did in Medieval Europe, settlers on new lands were freed from usual taxes for many years) are a few obvious mechanisms.
Wikipedia says position of peasants in Western Europe which had high labour-to-land ratios was much better than in Eastern Europe with high land-to-labour ratios. Malthusian theory predicts otherwise. I can see no differences in agricultural technology, or land productivity, or anything else to explain this away.
Increase in wages after Black Death can as easily be interpreted as inflation, not as increase in gdp per capita, as prices seem to have increased correspondingly. It’s not really surprising, as supply of metal money stayed constant, so supply of money per capita increased proportionally to loss of population.
Wikipedia says that Black Death had negative effects on the economy:
Economic historians like Fernand Braudel have concluded that Black Death exacerbated a recession in the European economy that had been under way since the beginning of the century.
We have really crappy data about economic history.
One issue to keep in mind is measuring wealth in calories and in other terms. People interested in malthusian theories focus on calories, while those interested in the advance of civilization may measure it in, for example, cloth. The malthusian theory predicts that the proportion of salary that goes to food should creep up in peacetime. But the advance of cities in the high medieval period made other products cheaper. When Braudel talks about economic recession, he’s probably talking about abandonment of cities, which is not necessarily relevant to the malthusian question. So quality of life as measured by things other than food may have become high in 1300, but the famine of 1315-1317 suggests that the food situation was precarious. Why didn’t they respond to the famine of 1315 by planting more land the following year? Was the land exhausted, the labor still in short supply (unlikely if they were starving in cities), or it takes too long to start new fields?
I don’t think the failure of rebound from the Roman Empire, in itself, is so bad for the malthusian theory. But then the malthusian theory must predict that the shortfall is due to the lack of pax romana. It predicts that uninhabited areas are difficult to defend; or that farmers in such areas lose productivity by switching to crops that are hard to loot.
I think of Tuscany as an agricultural area. I guess this is evidence that I shouldn’t. But I also think of Florence as important Renaissance city. Yet it was importing more food in 1300 than 1600? This is bizarre regardless of malthusian issues.
I don’t have any direct knowledge of agricultural productivity in Eastern vs Western Europe, but I think the adoption of the high calorie-per-acre potato is correlated with low productivity and I think it was particularly popular in Eastern Europe. It is also a hard to loot crop. Corn and the potato are connected to population growth throughout Europe, suggesting that food limited growth before 1500. But some places (France?) didn’t adopt them and didn’t grow as fast, a rather non-malthusian situation.
Wikipedia says that during the entire Medieval period, “land was plentiful while labour to clear and work the land was scarce”.
No, it just says it about 1000-1250. I think it means that raiders had been expelled from previously uninhabited land, allowing expansion. But at the end of this period, or at least by 1350, the situation was overextended. This is one case where I will grant a concern about speed of expansion. We know that in the right circumstances, such as colonial America, population can double each generation. You might expect the same from this description of this situation. This suggests that there is more to human psychology to switch on “high growth” than just food, which we certainly know from the demographic transition, but I’m reluctant to accept the description. The high initial cost of expansion may be relevant.
People interested in malthusian theories focus on calories
Which is of course total nonsense, as number of calories consumer per capita varies extremely little over huge differences in GDP. some data
So quality of life as measured by things other than food may have become high in 1300, but the famine of 1315-1317 suggests that the food situation was precarious.
Not at all. Even if there’s plenty of unused land lying around, if you get unusually low yields, you can get famine. Few civilizations farmed spare land and threw away food, just in case the spare food might be useful, so food margins have nothing to do with availability of free land or lack of it. It takes some time to get new land into use, one year at the very least, more realistically many years to cut forests, build settlements, gather people, animals, and seed and move there, make agricultural tools etc. It’s a major project, and conditions of famine do not help at all.
I think the adoption of the high calorie-per-acre potato is correlated with low productivity
Potato was widely adopted in 18th century, the Eastern vs Western divide refers to Late Middle ages/Early Modern period, which took place long before it. During that time Poland and other countries became major exporters of wheat to Western Europe, using particularly nasty forms of serf labour.
No, it just says it about 1000-1250.
That’s not what I meant about 1350. Clearly if land was plentiful in 1000-1250, it must have been even more plentiful in 400-1000, and yet population wasn’t expanding back to its Roman levels.
Raiders were Vikings / Muslim / Hungarians / etc. and they were raiding entire Europe. There was no distinction between raidable and not raidable lands. Here’s map of Viking raids. Other groups raided other regions. Most of Europe, especially coastal areas were repeatedly raided, these lands were definitely inhabited all the time.
We know that in the right circumstances, such as colonial America, population can double each generation.
It can, and also GDP/capita was increasing while population was increasing. For pretty much any country you try. Malthusian theory suggests ridiculously high starting GDP/capita, which would then gradually go down as population increased, which is completely wrong.
People interested in malthusian theories focus on calories
Which is of course total nonsense, as number of calories consumer per capita varies extremely little over huge differences in GDP. some data
I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear, but I reject GDP for this purpose. I suspect that Braudel and the conventional wisdom about 1300 are like saying that people today are as kings, for they have the greatest musicians of the century at their beck and call on youtube. GDP tells how nice are the luxuries, but it doesn’t tell if someone is starving.
Malthusians claim that percent of income spent on food is a good inverse predictor of number of calories, that people eat few calories when they can’t afford more. GDP, whether in the 13th century or especially in the 20 century can mask this, because what can be bought with the remaining income is quite variable. Greg Clark claims that the poor in England in 1800 were getting 1500 calories per day, which is off the chart you link to.
I can’t find him giving calorie estimates for other years, but he and his predecessors Phelps-Brown-Hopkins and Steffens claim that English labor income peaked in 1450, that the black death raised wages in a malthusian manner, in contrast to the claims you quote. This could be special to England or could be a result of measuring wages in necessities (calories), or could be a result of malthusians putting a finger on the scales. (Clark is a malthusian. I don’t know about PB, H, or S.)
I can’t find him giving calorie estimates for other years, but he and his predecessors Phelps-Brown-Hopkins and Steffens claim that English labor income peaked in 1450, that the black death raised wages in a malthusian manner, in contrast to the claims you quote.
How is it measured? If you use nominal wages, you will see this effect, Malthusian or not, because amount of metal money per capita is inversely proportional to population. You need some sort of GDP estimates to adequately measure wages.
Malthusians claim that percent of income spent on food
Do we at least have this data?
It isn’t a terribly useful indicator, as prices are by their nature marginal, and just recently wheat prices varied from 287.75 $/bu in February 2005 to 1280 $/bu in February 2008, 4.4:1. This doesn’t mean people got four times poorer just because food got four times more expensive.
But then, with economic history we rarely have the kind of data we want.
How is it measured? If you use nominal wages, you will see this effect, Malthusian or not, because amount of metal money per capita is inversely proportional to population. You need some sort of GDP estimates to adequately measure wages.
They use baskets of goods. But if the basket weights food heavily, it may see different effects than if it weights manufactured goods heavily. You can call it GDP, but 20th century GDP is definitely measuring the wrong thing. PPP deals with some of these issues, but for each purpose you need a different basket.
Malthusians claim that percent of income spent on food
Do we at least have this data?
This is Engel’s law. He had contemporary (19th century) cross-sectional data, not historical. I have heard people claim to have some historical data like this, but I haven’t run across it recently. Clark seems to claim to have better knowledge of the basket consumed than PHB, so he ought to be able to graph calories, but I haven’t seen him do it. Or rather, he claims to have better knowledge of meat consumed, so he should be able to graph protein, which is another part of Engel’s law. Protein consumption changed much more across the 20th century than calories, but I’d be nervous about cross-cultural comparisons.
No, we shouldn’t say that the people became 4 times poorer from 2005 to 2008, but we should say that poor people who use wheat as a staple and didn’t have (flexible) subsidies did become poorer, while I doubt that’s visible in the GDP per capita. Just saying that they became poorer, without quantifying it, is a crude measure, but we’re only interested in the sign of the change: did the Black Death make people poorer or richer? It may have had opposite effects on the rich and the poor because they consumed different baskets of goods.
[My knowledge of High Medieval period is based mostly on listening to TTC’s audiobook lecture series about it (highly recommended), not on Wikipedia.]
A few random thoughts:
I don’t have one big mathematically pretty theory here. (Short-term) Malthusian theory seems to be widely accepted because it’s mathematically pretty, and something like it works on many animal populations. It’s not obvious from either theoretical or empirical point of view it makes sense for humans, at least after they stopped hunting and gathering own food.
Actual food production must cover actual population no matter if Malthusian hypothesis is true or not—if food production was too low, people would die; if food production was too high, there would be nobody to eat it (unless people do something funny with their food instead of eating it). So that’s the wrong thing to look at. Lower population levels must automatically mean lower land area used, or lower productivity/intensity of agriculture. And we can guess people would use the “best” lands, and leave “worse” lands unused.
I think failure of Medieval Europe to rebound back to Roman population levels is much bigger problem for Malthusian theory than Tuscany’s. Small highly urbanized regions like Tuscany might have simply imported food from other regions. Such explanations won’t work for an entire continent.
TTC lectures present as well-established fact that quality of life increased a lot in High Medieval period, while population roughly doubled. The lecturer finds it quite puzzling, as it conflicts with Malthusian theory.
Wikipedia says that during the entire Medieval period, “land was plentiful while labour to clear and work the land was scarce”. This is highly un-Malthusian scenario. Malthusian theory strongly predicts having large excess of labour.
Obviously there must be something that limits fertility. Malthusian theory says it must be potential food production, and that every land that can produce enough food to support people farming it must be used. If the mechanism is something else, we might have highly non-Malthusian (non-poor) equilibria. Wars, and failure to organize expansion to new lands (what in agricultural societies might require significant up-front investment, it definitely did in Medieval Europe, settlers on new lands were freed from usual taxes for many years) are a few obvious mechanisms.
Wikipedia says position of peasants in Western Europe which had high labour-to-land ratios was much better than in Eastern Europe with high land-to-labour ratios. Malthusian theory predicts otherwise. I can see no differences in agricultural technology, or land productivity, or anything else to explain this away.
Increase in wages after Black Death can as easily be interpreted as inflation, not as increase in gdp per capita, as prices seem to have increased correspondingly. It’s not really surprising, as supply of metal money stayed constant, so supply of money per capita increased proportionally to loss of population.
Wikipedia says that Black Death had negative effects on the economy:
We have really crappy data about economic history.
One issue to keep in mind is measuring wealth in calories and in other terms. People interested in malthusian theories focus on calories, while those interested in the advance of civilization may measure it in, for example, cloth. The malthusian theory predicts that the proportion of salary that goes to food should creep up in peacetime. But the advance of cities in the high medieval period made other products cheaper. When Braudel talks about economic recession, he’s probably talking about abandonment of cities, which is not necessarily relevant to the malthusian question. So quality of life as measured by things other than food may have become high in 1300, but the famine of 1315-1317 suggests that the food situation was precarious. Why didn’t they respond to the famine of 1315 by planting more land the following year? Was the land exhausted, the labor still in short supply (unlikely if they were starving in cities), or it takes too long to start new fields?
I don’t think the failure of rebound from the Roman Empire, in itself, is so bad for the malthusian theory. But then the malthusian theory must predict that the shortfall is due to the lack of pax romana. It predicts that uninhabited areas are difficult to defend; or that farmers in such areas lose productivity by switching to crops that are hard to loot.
I think of Tuscany as an agricultural area. I guess this is evidence that I shouldn’t. But I also think of Florence as important Renaissance city. Yet it was importing more food in 1300 than 1600? This is bizarre regardless of malthusian issues.
I don’t have any direct knowledge of agricultural productivity in Eastern vs Western Europe, but I think the adoption of the high calorie-per-acre potato is correlated with low productivity and I think it was particularly popular in Eastern Europe. It is also a hard to loot crop. Corn and the potato are connected to population growth throughout Europe, suggesting that food limited growth before 1500. But some places (France?) didn’t adopt them and didn’t grow as fast, a rather non-malthusian situation.
No, it just says it about 1000-1250. I think it means that raiders had been expelled from previously uninhabited land, allowing expansion. But at the end of this period, or at least by 1350, the situation was overextended. This is one case where I will grant a concern about speed of expansion. We know that in the right circumstances, such as colonial America, population can double each generation. You might expect the same from this description of this situation. This suggests that there is more to human psychology to switch on “high growth” than just food, which we certainly know from the demographic transition, but I’m reluctant to accept the description. The high initial cost of expansion may be relevant.
Which is of course total nonsense, as number of calories consumer per capita varies extremely little over huge differences in GDP. some data
Not at all. Even if there’s plenty of unused land lying around, if you get unusually low yields, you can get famine. Few civilizations farmed spare land and threw away food, just in case the spare food might be useful, so food margins have nothing to do with availability of free land or lack of it. It takes some time to get new land into use, one year at the very least, more realistically many years to cut forests, build settlements, gather people, animals, and seed and move there, make agricultural tools etc. It’s a major project, and conditions of famine do not help at all.
Potato was widely adopted in 18th century, the Eastern vs Western divide refers to Late Middle ages/Early Modern period, which took place long before it. During that time Poland and other countries became major exporters of wheat to Western Europe, using particularly nasty forms of serf labour.
That’s not what I meant about 1350. Clearly if land was plentiful in 1000-1250, it must have been even more plentiful in 400-1000, and yet population wasn’t expanding back to its Roman levels.
Raiders were Vikings / Muslim / Hungarians / etc. and they were raiding entire Europe. There was no distinction between raidable and not raidable lands. Here’s map of Viking raids. Other groups raided other regions. Most of Europe, especially coastal areas were repeatedly raided, these lands were definitely inhabited all the time.
It can, and also GDP/capita was increasing while population was increasing. For pretty much any country you try. Malthusian theory suggests ridiculously high starting GDP/capita, which would then gradually go down as population increased, which is completely wrong.
I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear, but I reject GDP for this purpose. I suspect that Braudel and the conventional wisdom about 1300 are like saying that people today are as kings, for they have the greatest musicians of the century at their beck and call on youtube. GDP tells how nice are the luxuries, but it doesn’t tell if someone is starving.
Malthusians claim that percent of income spent on food is a good inverse predictor of number of calories, that people eat few calories when they can’t afford more. GDP, whether in the 13th century or especially in the 20 century can mask this, because what can be bought with the remaining income is quite variable. Greg Clark claims that the poor in England in 1800 were getting 1500 calories per day, which is off the chart you link to.
I can’t find him giving calorie estimates for other years, but he and his predecessors Phelps-Brown-Hopkins and Steffens claim that English labor income peaked in 1450, that the black death raised wages in a malthusian manner, in contrast to the claims you quote. This could be special to England or could be a result of measuring wages in necessities (calories), or could be a result of malthusians putting a finger on the scales. (Clark is a malthusian. I don’t know about PB, H, or S.)
How is it measured? If you use nominal wages, you will see this effect, Malthusian or not, because amount of metal money per capita is inversely proportional to population. You need some sort of GDP estimates to adequately measure wages.
Do we at least have this data?
It isn’t a terribly useful indicator, as prices are by their nature marginal, and just recently wheat prices varied from 287.75 $/bu in February 2005 to 1280 $/bu in February 2008, 4.4:1. This doesn’t mean people got four times poorer just because food got four times more expensive.
But then, with economic history we rarely have the kind of data we want.
They use baskets of goods. But if the basket weights food heavily, it may see different effects than if it weights manufactured goods heavily. You can call it GDP, but 20th century GDP is definitely measuring the wrong thing. PPP deals with some of these issues, but for each purpose you need a different basket.
This is Engel’s law. He had contemporary (19th century) cross-sectional data, not historical. I have heard people claim to have some historical data like this, but I haven’t run across it recently. Clark seems to claim to have better knowledge of the basket consumed than PHB, so he ought to be able to graph calories, but I haven’t seen him do it. Or rather, he claims to have better knowledge of meat consumed, so he should be able to graph protein, which is another part of Engel’s law. Protein consumption changed much more across the 20th century than calories, but I’d be nervous about cross-cultural comparisons.
No, we shouldn’t say that the people became 4 times poorer from 2005 to 2008, but we should say that poor people who use wheat as a staple and didn’t have (flexible) subsidies did become poorer, while I doubt that’s visible in the GDP per capita. Just saying that they became poorer, without quantifying it, is a crude measure, but we’re only interested in the sign of the change: did the Black Death make people poorer or richer? It may have had opposite effects on the rich and the poor because they consumed different baskets of goods.