In the year 1--we guess--world population was about 170 million. In the year 1650--we guess--it was about 540 million. This tripling of world population over the course of one and two-thirds millennia was accompanied by very little improvement in the standard of living of the median peasant (though things may well have been very different for the upper-class elite). We can thus say that world real GDP--at least when measured in terms of necessities rather than luxuries--roughly tripled over this one and two-thirds millenium.
We can feed these numbers to a standard Solow growth model with natural resources, as in:
J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Lecture Notes: Econ 101B: Explorations in the Theory of Economic Growth: Natural Resources and Malthusian Population Dynamics" http://delong.typepad.com/print/20060905_lecture_notes.pdf
We then conclude that the rate of real GDP and population growth over this period was roughly 0.07% per year. Under the further assumption that natural resources had a parameter of roughly 0.3 in the world economy's production function back then, we can calculate that total factor productivity growth in the pre-industrial world averaged 0.02% per year.
Compare and contrast that to the 2-3% per year of total factor productivity growth in the world today.
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