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Comment by tynpeddler | Hacker News Reader

There's a caveat to the rosy picture this article seems to paint of the past. In the 14th century, the black death and The Great Famine Killed a huge number of people but also is believed to have raised the standard of living for lower class survivors (I wonder if this was an inspiration for Thanos' plan).

The article briefly mentions the plague but doesn't really seem to address that this event strongly changed the economic conditions of Europe for 150 years. Coincidentally, that 150 years heavily overlaps with the period of analysis for this article.

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Can you explain how killing people would raise the standard of living? That seems like the lump of labor fallacy.

Because of labour shortage, labour retains bigger share of value vs. aristocracy.

Also, amount of capital per capita increases.

But with fewer laborers, there are fewer consumers. There isn't a fixed amount of work and a variable number of workers, they scale up and down together. Again, this is the lump of labor fallacy.

IIRC these concepts are more relevant in a service-based economy.

In the Middle Ages, _land_ was the primary source of economic value. Fewer people means more land per person, therefore more wealth per person.

Land is still the primary source of economic value. And I don't think land was getting fairly allocated between all the peasants during the late 1300s.

It wasn't but you had the opposite of the effect that you have now. Right now the top 1% are getting a lot of the additional wealth that's being created, while the bottom 99% stay mostly the same, or improve at slower speeds. So yes, this means that we are headed towards a more inequal world, even though the situation improves for everyone.

Turn that now around, and kill a lot of people from the bottom 90% while letting the top 10% survive at higher rates. Suddenly, the world looks way more fair, even though the people at the bottom still have nothing.

When there is fixed amount of capital (crops, land, gold coins in short time scale), the amount of work is fixed.

They don't scale up and down together in lock step, it takes time to adapt to something like a massive plague killing off the working population.

They aren't perfectly in line, but they're perfect enough, and the black plague wasn't instant, it lasted several decades giving ample time to make adjustments. If you planted food to feed x hundred million people and after the plague you're planting food to feed only 60% of that number, you're going to require a lot less labor to plant and harvest those crops. Repeat for all the other occupations like butchers, tailors, blacksmiths, etc...

> after the plague you're planting food to feed only 60%

All land would used as much it could, and if there was surplus after making food and drink of the best produce, it would become feed for animals. They could grow better things like apples, vegetables, and so on.

No one is ever content with what they have.

But more land and fewer workers means less starvation and malnutrition, which were major concerns back then, effectively raising the living standard. When the primary source of wealth is land, you can only have so many workers until all the usable land is gone. In a service and manufacturing based industry, this is far less of a concern.

As you said, workers are also consumers. Each landlord wants to grow his GDP. In a pre-pandemic setting offering higher wages to attract labourers would have been useless to this goal as all of the land was already being farmed and there was nothing the additional workers could do. In a post-pandemic setting, when the lord struggles to get his land farmed, he can suddenly increase his GDP by offering higher wages so that he attracts labourers. This creates a bidding war between lords, increasing wages for labourers.

The english king even passed a law trying to forbid higher wages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Labourers_1351

It’s more complicated as not all land is equivalent. At maximum capacity every bit of land even slightly above break even gets used and quite possibly some that’s a net loss. In such a system more valuable land simply represents a stable income stream to the landowners. Thus fertile land is wealth.

However, after a plague the most productive land is still farmed, but anything close to break even is abandoned. Suddenly with zero changes in technology, skills, or total capital average productivity spikes.

Good point! Picking the low hanging fruit is always going to be more productive :).

If the nobility consumed a disproportionate amount of goods and services, but were less likely to die from the plague, you could see the relative amount of labor per consumer drop.

They could also be trading with areas less effected by the plague. If your village gets 50% wiped out by the plague, but you sell crops to a city, you are still going to want 100% of the crops collected.

Does everything really scale together though? Once land is cleared and known to be arable it's around as supply after people have died. The reverse is not true, you need to put a lot of work in to clear land for organic population growth.

So when the population declines you have a bunch of landlords who have land supporting X people that they want the surplus on. But X/2 people can pick their landlord, so the landlord has to offer something in the deal, like better terms. This works even if the landlord class has halved, there's only one landlord regardless of how many of his family passed.

Note the acoup guy says peasants didn't store profits in the normal way, they preferred to buy social capital by throwing a party.

Hypothesis: laborers weren't consumers. Peasants consumed what they produced with most, if not all, of the surplus going to feudal taxes. The landed nobility were the consumers and commanded most of the economy.

Indeed, and to some extent this still applies today.

Exactly. People here seem to be trying to apply the logic of a global capitalist system to a feudal one and assuming they work the same

The consumers in those times were mainly the aristocracy. Lords needed their land worked and they had to compete with other lords as there weren't enough serfs to go around. Now you can argue that the cost of food would rise too negating their wage increase but I believe part of their payment was a section of the land to farm so they were able to have excess wages that weren't eat up by inflation.

The wages rose so high that the king had to put a ceiling on the wages so the competition would stop.

I say king vaguely because I read into this years ago but I can't remember which country it was. My guess is that it was England or France but my brain is failing me.

It completely changed the balance of power between landholders and peasants. Peasants started being able to actually negotiate on wages (to a degree that was revolutionary at the time), which also drove a market for capital and artisan goods. The merchant class exploded.

Landlords also started dumping money into development of labor-saving tools, which happens when most of your supply of free bonded labor suddenly dies off.

Pretty huge multi-faceted impacts.

What notable labor saving tools and implements were invented during this time period? (1350-1400 AD)

They didn't have to be invented during this time. It became economically beneficial (even necessary) to use them at this time, when it wasn't before.

So which tools were these?

To name a few, heavy plows, padded horse collars, fresh water carp farming, water mill improvements, and ships changed in design. Ships became larger but adapted in shape and rigging to e operated by fewer sailors. I think the stern post rudder came to Europe around this time (not sure of the date range though).

Lynn White's classic study, "Medieval technology and social change", looks at three broad innovations: the stirrup, which led to mounted knights as shock troops and the feudal reorganization of society to support them; the agricultural revolution driven by iron horse-drawn plows and three-field rotation; and the development and exploration of medical mechanical power and devices.

you're the best kind of conversationalist.

lol, yeah, the ones that rake your balls over minute details. A PITA contrarian.

The most important was the horse collar, which was like turbocharging a tractor. The use of horses to farm also exemplified the class changes. Horses didnt die of plague. Thier owners sure did. So the horse became cheaper and lesser classes of people put them to uses that previously would have been benieth thier dignity.

> Second, and to some extent as a result of its depopulating impact, the Black Death encouraged both the widespread adoption of existing labor-saving technologies and practices and the development of new ones. In the agrarian economy, this resulted in the widespread adoption of the iron plow, the three-field crop rotation system, and fertilization with manure, all of which significantly increased productivity.

https://www.medievalists.net/2021/08/the-black-death-and-the...

> It completely changed the balance of power between landholders and peasants. Peasants started being able to actually negotiate on wages ...

... for the peasants who survived and whose breadwinners survived.

I think it's more that, if you need multiple inputs for your output, you'll pay more for the input that's in shortest supply.

I'm a noble. I own this land. I have peasants who work the land, who grow crops for me. The limiting factor on my wealth is how much land I have.

Now the plague comes, and a bunch of peasants die. I have the same land, but my income goes down because there are fewer peasants working it. The limiting factor on my wealth is now the number of peasants I have working my land. So, rationally, I'll pay more for peasants than I would before.

See that orange slice of the pie chart?

When a huge chunk of the productive people are dead the ones who aren't have much more leverage to push back on the usurious mill fee, market fee, ferry/bridge fee, etc. etc. etc. and suddenly your average peasant (farmer) suddenly has a lot smaller cut of their productivity being taken by the local lords and whatnot. That frees them to farm slightly less and do all sorts of other productive things (raise animals, barter labor with each other, etc, etc) more and increase their standard of living.

It's not lump of labor fallacy.

Standards of living rose because the scarcity of labor rose relative to the scarcity of land.

Peasants had to pay dearly to aristocrats for the ability to use land to farm on, often somewhere close to 100% of their surplus production. Number of peasants going down while the amount of arable land stayed the same led to peasants being able to drive a better bargain and keep more of their surplus.

Shocking that the only appearance of the word "land" in TFA is England. Which, of course, itself tells you about the primacy of land for all types of production.

It's also strange that we don't recognize human reproduction as a factor of production. Even if the universe created the physical laws that allow us to exist, we are still reliant on a previous human to give birth to us.

Because it was a zero-sum economy and they didn't have things like nursing homes. Back in premodern times mass death was the biggest thing that would always jolt the economy. What happened after the black death and the fall of Constantinople? The Renaissance.

Remember that the farmers were tied to the land by medieval relationships. After the labor disruption of the plague, and because the demand for their labor greatly increased, farmers were better able to negotiate the relationship for better personal outcomes, including wages.

Being able to leave their current landed relationship and seek better prospects elsewhere was probably the greatest of gains.

The lump of labor fallacy is actually valid in a Malthusian society like medieval England; adding people didn't grow the economy, it just meant about the same amount of work in the end because they had to feed themselves.

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