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Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

It is risky to use econometrics as even qualitative data to support a hypothesis about the trajectory of history over millennia because the data doesn't exist. If you're not extremely careful in analyzing the provenance of your source statistics, it's very easy to fall into a circular argument of "assuming my hypothesis, my hypothesis is true."

Here, just staring at the GDP per capita data, for example, the source paper pretty bluntly says that it can't back-continue the statistics past 1820, so it uses a completely different methodology to try to offer a number. So the author here commenting that the data is quite different pre- and post-Industrial Revolution shouldn't be surprising considering the data is literally based on completely different metrics! Hell, De Long literally shaves a factor of 4 off pre-Industrial Revolution GDP estimates because he feels like it.

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Life expectancy absolutely is a good metric for comparing the Industrial Revolution to what came before. GDP per-capita less so to some degree, and even today it's difficult to compare 1st world GDP per-capita to places where it's three orders of magnitude slower because GDP measures generally fail to properly capture the production of subsistence farming and other small-scale (but valuable to the people in question) activities . And yet! it is obvious that GDP per-capita has been flatish throughout history by comparison to post Industrial Revolution times precisely because the vast majority of people do not live off subsistence farming, make their own homes, clothing and footwear, etc.

> it is obvious that GDP per-capita has been flatish throughout history

But is it? That's ostensibly the point of this article--trying to actually use data to establish whether or not this "obvious" principle is true [1]. But if you turn to the actual data, the author of the data is creating the historical data using one of three assumptions: either real GDP per-capita is correlated with population growth, which comes both with and without an arbitrary pre-industrial haircut, or real GDP per-capita is literally flat pre-industrial.

It really isn't clear to me if there really is a step change in per-capita GDP growth around the First (and/or Second) Industrial Revolution, or if it's a one-off jump, or if it's a continuous, consistent per-capita growth rate with no real impact. All of those would look pretty similar in a linear-scale graph at first glance. What we do know from other economic proxies from archaeology is that pre-industrial economies weren't exactly static: you can see a clear trend that highlights the rise and fall of Rome (see, e.g., the data in https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-f...), so you better expect that the econometric statistics you use can replicate that trend.

[1] Let's assume the purposes of discussion that GDP here is something meaningful for economic prosperity in pre-industrial times, something that can capture the productivity enhancements that did occur at that time.

There's no such thing as a "pre-industrial" economy.

Sweden and Russia had a military-industrial complex, in the modern sense of the word, back in the Northern War.

The Bronze Age required global supply chains and massive mining of rare earth minerals to function. (And before that, going back to the Neolithic we have the same for flint or jade.)

Europe's medieval economy was a specific reaction to Rome's supply chain collapse, not a default state of humanity.

>The Bronze Age required global supply chains and massive mining of rare earth minerals to function.

I want to see your source or citation for this claim. (Unless you're using "rare earth minerals" to mean something other than the current meaning.)

Strictly speaking, tin is less abundant than many rare earths, although rare earths isn't meant to refer to their abundance in Earth's crust.

The most common reference is the book 1177bc that discusses ancient trade routes and how bronze age collapse disrupted them. It has been mentioned here in HN and the author has a good somewhat academic presentation on youtube

Those two things are not exclusive: one can have near-global supply chains without modern industry. And one can have modern industry without global supply chains.

I was questioning the "rare earth" part, not the supply chain part.

Which makes much more sense.

Yes, tin is a rare earth mineral. (In the sense that it is rare and mined from the earth. Not in the akshually technical sense.)

Prospecting and mining tin was a very serious and complicated business in the 20th century. (Maybe still is, I'm not up to date to current events.)

Copper, tin, gold, flint, jade - this isn't stuff that was just lying there on the ground for the taking. Mining it poses immense technical and social challenges even for today's mining industry.

> this isn't stuff that was just lying there on the ground for the taking.

Bronze age tin mining in Cornwall and Devon literally kicked off 4,500-5 kyears back chasing extensive cassiterite surface deposits on Bodmin Moor.

Neither the element tin nor the mineral tin have been classed as rare earth minerals and while 49 or 50 down the abundancy list they are good examples of highly clumped deposits .. tin regions have plentiful tin and picking it up off the ground lead to trade and to the birth of mining chasing veins.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiterite

No, Russia certainly did not "had a military-industrial complex, in the modern sense of the word" back then because back then, labour was not a commodity (that's the main innovation of the capitalism, after all). The Demidovs' manufakturs in the Ural mountains were using state-provided serfs as the workers. Industrialization, in the modern sense of the world, hasn't happen in Russia until the very late of the XIX century.

Commodity labor is not a necessary characteristic of industrialization. In fact, most cases of industrialization in history involve forced labor.

The standard definition of "industrial revolution" is about the switch to steam from hydropower.

(I don't agree with the standard definition, but what you're saying here is even more "out there".)

> And yet! it is obvious that GDP per-capita has been flatish throughout history by comparison to post Industrial Revolution times

The early part of exponential growth always looks flat compared to the last part, it’s the proverbial hockey stick.

There are actually continuous developments in agriculture through the Iron Age. off the top of my head there are windmills, more and better iron tools, heavy iron plows, improved crop rotation, more advanced irrigation etc. The Arab agricultural revolution changed a lot of farming technology, and facilitated exchanges between east and west. Then there was the post Columbian trade with the new world. Imagine a world without potatoes!

Not forgetting the social and legal structures of these activities. The joint-stock company for instance.

Also just the terminology: water-mills, windmills and sailing ships are definitely industrial equipment, even if they're not steam-powered.

> it is obvious that GDP per-capita has been flatish throughout history by comparison to post Industrial Revolution times precisely because the vast majority of people do not live off subsistence farming, make their own homes, clothing and footwear, etc.

I mean obviously that's not true. You mean that the GDP per capita of Venice and the other trade republics stayed flat throughout their rise and fall as trading with the whole known world, becoming absurdly rich and their currency being used as the reserve currency for the whole of Europe? Or that Spain's colonisation of 2/3s of the Americas and the vast riches there such as mountains of silver, didn't impact their GDP per capita? Or that the Ottomans' stayed flat throughout their rise from a backwater band of mercenaries to an empire spanning three continents to a failed state?

> Life expectancy

Life expectancy is a bad measure because infant mortality was pretty high. This skewed the averages down considerably. Humans don't live 50 years longer but only 10 year or so.

Do we even have good measures of life expectancy? In pre-modern times, infants often died with no official government or church records to record that they ever existed.

You can tell quite a lot from anthropological studies of bones excavated in old burial grounds.

For example, contrary to what people think, old people over 70 are really rare in European medieval cemeteries, around 1 per 100-200 burials. A random peasant had a good chance to see their 50th birthday in the High Middle Ages, but 60 was already uncommon. In the Early Middle Ages, with their raids and more primitive agriculture, even 50 was an admirable age to live to.

I hear the line "once you survived childhood, you had good chance to grow old" very often on social networks, but it is basically never supported by concrete data. Anthropological studies of real old bones certainly don't support that.

The only profession where living to be 70 was somewhat more frequent was the high clergy (cardinals, popes) - a mostly safe career with good hygiene and guaranteed supply of food.

Even the vast majority of medieval kings died before reaching 70.

Sure, but I'm not convinced that those old burial grounds actually contain a representative population sample. It seems that some infants who died very young were buried more informally in other places. This would skew the results.

Well, yeah. Complete representation is likely impossible.

Tiny bones of infants often get absorbed entirely over centuries, erasing the very last trace of their short life.

Suicides were buried like dogs, away from Christian cemeteries. Enemy soldiers fallen in battle might have been left to the carrion birds. Executed criminals were buried on the place of execution, gibbetted or dissected. People who died in plagues were buried in plague pits. Jewish people were buried in Jewish cemeteries. A lot of exceptions all around.

Still, a "normal" burial ground is by far the most comprehensive record of the local Christian non-noble population that we can hope for.

Which makes sense if you think about it.

Once you get past the age of fairly widespread deaths from childhood diseases (often prevented by vaccines), a lot of people in modern society don't get a lot of critical medical care from maybe their 20s through 40s. Sure, some do, but tons of younger people don't routinely see doctors--even when doing so is free.

As people get into what we now consider about late middle age, modern healthcare for a variety of things becomes more and more important.

> a lot of people in modern society don't get a lot of critical medical care from maybe their 20s through 40s.

Did you know that in England, 40% of middle aged men have had a fracture? [1]

Personally I haven't seen the inside of a hospital in over 20 years. So I agree with you to that extent. But oh boy have I benefited from sterile surgical techniques, titanium plates and screws, and antibiotics since that one week 20 years ago.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18192607/

Oh I don't disagree. I'm sure there were a ton of people who had fractures that didn't heal properly on their own or with non-invasive care, infections that would be fairly straightforward with antibiotics today, etc. Certainly I've depended on modern medical care many times and probably benefited overall many others.

I've had serious fractures and taken antibiotics on a number of occasions. So I violently agree. But there's probably an age window when modern medicine is less important (outside of war and other especially dangerous activities).

Life expectancy is mostly dominated by medical techniques that change infant mortality

This. The claim that ancient lives were brutish and short, is just a hobbesian concept. That he used to strut his shakey theory. A significant amount of people reached old age even in the middle ages.

It’s a pet peeve of mine that so many people believe humans used to die of old age at a young age when it’s obviously untrue just from thinking about our modern day experience. Most people hit at least 60-70 before needing any critical medical care, even if they just eat junk food and watch TV all day. What do they imagine it is about modernity that is doubling our life span? The cable TV? The pre-packaged snack foods?

We need to teach people that averages are generally not a meaningful way to compare things, except in the very rare case of them both being normally distributed and also about the same standard deviation. People are taught to think day to day by comparison of averages and it really harms our ability to reason about basic things in daily life.

Where I live (SF Bay) it is extremely windy all summer, and nearly dead calm all winter except when a big storm comes through. Average wind speeds are about the same year round.

> What do they imagine it is about modernity that is doubling our life span?

If you take away the knowledge and the medical advances and the social technology, the big difference is food acquisition.

Pre-industrial revolution, most people were subsistence farmers, and city dwellers lived on their backs.

Now our food needs are met by a much smaller % of the population

I don’t think long-term GDP measures are meaningful. What point is there in comparing an economy that produces horseshoes and wooden ships with one that has trains and steamships? A pre-industrial economy can’t produce X% of an industrial economy, because it can’t produce large chunks of that economy at all.

At best you can compare the parts of the economy that remain relatively unchanged - like food, or textiles, and use those as rough and incomplete proxies.

When both economies are existing at the same time, and even trading with each other, you can relatively easily compare them.

Eg you can compare Britain that had already (partially) industrialised with her continental peers who hadn't.

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