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Comment by missedthecue | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 :).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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