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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Super interesting. One point about living standards: at this point the world is in the Malthusian equilibrium, so living standards are rather decoupled from technology. (Whenever technology raises your living standards, you have more children, and average GDP per head returns to subsistence level.)

Malthus has had a big comeback in the theory of economic growth over the past couple of decades.

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However, people in many countries around the globe are having fewer children and not due to reaching "subsistence level". Some of the biggest impacts in birth rates are education, particularly for women, and birth control, both things are the product of technology raising living standards. Birth rates are not declining today because of Malthusian cycles.

Right, that's correct. "At this point" was in reference to the article, i.e. in ancient and medieval Europe. I should have been clearer.

> Whenever technology raises your living standards, you have more children, and average GDP per head returns to subsistence level.

I thought it was 1. people have lots of kids because lots of them die, 2. progress in terms of stopping babies and children dying means more adults than expected survive to adulthood, 3. Those adults then adjust to the new reality and start having less kids.

That's the post-Malthusian world where there's effective birth control. Now, how exactly you get from Malthus to post-Malthus is a very tricky question.

Have several plagues and an economic crash, while retaining your technology levels?

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