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*Why the invention transition?
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The Eighteen-Year-Old is going to college, which means that I need to think about making more money. (The idea that one might write checks to rather than receive checks from universities still seems very strange to me.) So I have signed up with the Leigh Speakers' Bureau which also handles, among many others: Chris Anderson; Suzanne Berger; Michael Boskin; Kenneth Courtis; Clive Crook; Bill Emmott; Robert H. Frank; William Goetzmann; Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin; Paul Krugman; Bill McKibben; Paul Romer; Jeffrey Sachs; Robert Shiller;James Surowiecki; Martin Wolf; Adrian Wooldridge.
oil, man. It was oil. Or at least that was a major part of it. The labor value of petroleum is unbelievable. What does each of those dots represent? Like 10 years?
Posted by: zach wilson | July 01, 2009 at 10:45 AM
Well, coal first. The takeoff in Britain was 17th century, and oil didn't play much of a role until the late 19th. But what were the factors which led Britain to be the place where the intensive utilization of coal could take place first? The basic properties of coal weren't broadly understood for a long time prior. The late cultural anthropoligist Marvin Harris suggests that it was the lack of social institutions committed to the maintenance of irrigation that allowed northern Europe to go where southern Europe, India, and China had not gone, though it was technologically possible.
The new question is what happens when the cost of the fossil fuel input (both extraction and environmental) begin to close on the value add? Can we continue to grow economically? And if not, do we have a model for how we don't collapse back?
Posted by: Matt P | July 01, 2009 at 12:53 PM
Putting population on a log scale would great;y improve the readability of this graph.
Posted by: Jon | July 01, 2009 at 03:41 PM
oil, baby, oil.
This is why Obama has energy policy as one of his top 3 policies. We will eventually run out of oil. Unless we've used that time wisely--to go beyond nuclear and find other sources of energy and construct the things necessary to harness that energy--we're totally, totally fucked.
Posted by: Ms Jackson | July 01, 2009 at 05:43 PM
In Historical Demography this point of view is definitely confuted! There was never a "Malthusian trap" in the human history! See, for example:
David Levine: Reproducing families - The Political Economy of English Population History, p. 68 ff.
The demographic homeostatis which aimed at balancing the hands of producers with the mouths of consumers can be explained much better with the "niche model" from Johann Peter Süßmilch (1741!). And with transition from patrimoniat to dominion the homeostatic system was dissolved!
Posted by: wilko0070 | July 02, 2009 at 08:34 AM
If anybody likes to inform about another "homoestatic model" that works much better than the Malthusian system, I guess to read this English introduction into the "niche model" from Johann Peter Süßmilch:
http://www.wiwi.uni-muenster.de/wisoge/md/personen/fertig_g/download/hajnal.pdf
Posted by: wilko0070 | July 02, 2009 at 09:01 AM