Flutterby™! : Farewell to Alms, entry #2

Continuing through Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms, the assertion from chapter 2 is that up until 1800, in Britain's economy, and indeed the economies of the rest of the world, Thomas Malthus was right: War and disease raised the standards of living by lowering the population, as the populations grew, standards of living fell. As I read through I find myself popping over to the net to refresh myself on various historical items to see what sort of things were happening when the graph directions change from positive to negative.

I'm now into chapter 3, where he's illustrating that before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, hunter gatherer societies actually appeared to have higher standards of living than agrarian economies. Among other data, he's looking at average heights of adults, calories produced per work day (where records are available) which is also related to purchasing power measured in calories, and some adjustments for types of calories.

Further, his assertion is that modern non-industrial economies have a lower standard of living than non-industrial economies before the industrial revolution. I have a feeling that this is going to be tied into foreign aid in later chapters; if you take an agrarian or hunter-gatherer economy and remove causes of death then population grows, causing limited calories to be spread further, and the quality of those calories to go down.