Comments on: Less productive at what?

By: pushmedia1

pushmedia1 — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 06:57:16 +0000

Malthusian is a particular social environment where there’s a stable relationship between the number of deaths and the income per person. Basically, the higher the income, the lower the number of deaths. Because the birth rate is more or less fixed (women can only have so many babies), when incomes increase the number of deaths is less than the number of births and the population increases. When the population increases income per person goes down.

Equilibrium is a state the economy is in. In the Malthusian environment, equilibrium is the level of income where the death rate equals the birth rate. Small deviations away from the equilibrium (a bumper crop of babies or something) result in the economy just returning to the equilibrium.

In this Malthusian economy, technology advances or declines don’t effect the standard of living in equilibrium. Its this feature that makes a Malthusian equilibrium different than a modern one.

By: swong

swong — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 05:55:42 +0000

So “Malthusian” (yeah I get the reference) is another way of saying that a society has reached a dynamic equilibrium for their environment and social structure?

I guess, considered over a few generations, the loss of skilled artisans is negligible unless the society was on the edge of collapse anyway.

Amazing what you can learn from a few games of Civ =)

By: pushmedia1

pushmedia1 — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 01:18:02 +0000

Yeah it takes a while, maybe 3-4 generations, for these transitions to take place. See Clark’s discussion of the plague in post I linked to in the update.

Your second paragraph makes a good point. That said, dead blacksmiths or the loss of the blacksmithing skill in a Malthusian society reduces the level of technology in society. The net effect of technology shifts in these societies is zero after a couple generations. Income levels go back to their original levels.

This is exactly why Malthusian economies are so damned weird…

By: swong

swong — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:16:40 +0000

Is this phenomenon something that shows up on the longer run (like on the scale of decades or centuries), or is it visible in the short term? Is there a minimum population threshold for this effect?

This argument has probably been brought up, but this effect seems simplistic in the face of job specialization. Lose an unskilled laborer or a child to the plague, and the productivity of your settlement goes down a little. Lose your skilled blacksmith or carpenter, and you’re in much more trouble. I guess that isn’t as much of a problem in a larger settlement with some built-in redundancy. It still seems as though there’s a maximum number of losses that a group can absorb before they wind up in a death spiral.