"Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second."

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race."

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world."

• Classical economist like Ricardo: assume diminishing returns to land, and land is a fixed factor

• Two Malthusian implications

1. Population increases with living standards

   • suppose technology improves agricultural productivity
   • higher wages and incomes, people are wealthier and can support more children
   • hence, population grows

2. Living standards decline with population

   • A growing population with a fixed supply of land with diminishing returns implies living standards eventually decrease
   • population will die off and return to subsistence equilibrium

• In sum: living standards and population are inversely proportional!
  • you can think GDP per capita \(=\frac{GDP}{population}\) where \(population\) is increasing!

• In sum: living standards and population are inversely proportional!

• Think GDP per capita$=\frac{GDP}{population}$ where \(population\) is increasing!

• "Malthusian" Trap: for most of human history, humans have been unable to escape poverty because of the following cycle:

$$\text{Living standards improve} \rightarrow \text{population growth} \rightarrow$$ $$\text{competition over scarce resources} \rightarrow \text{war, famine, disease reduce population}$$

• Humanity stuck in a subsistence-level equilibrium for 1000s of years

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."

"We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."

"65 million Americans will die of starvation between 1980-1989. By 1999, the US population will decline to 22.6 million."

"If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."

• Predictions: the world would run out of
  • gold by 1981
  • mercury and silver by 1985
  • tin by 1987
  • zinc by 1990
  • petroleum by 1992
  • copper, lead and natural gas by 1993
  • aluminum between 2005-2021

• Basic price theory: demand for resource raises its price

  • Induces recycling, more efficient utilization of resources, development of substitute goods and innovations
  • "It takes much less copper now to pass a given message than a hundred years ago."

• "Engineering" vs. "economic" forecasting:

  • "Engineering forcecasting" takes the amount of physical resources known to be available and substracts an extraplolation of current use rates from this
  • these are often famously wrong
  • "Economic" forecasting: need to include undiscovered sources, sources not yet economically feasible to extract, sources not yet technologically feasible to extract (note they are different!)

• The ultimate resource is people!

• More people \(\implies\) greater extent of the market \(\implies\) more division of labor \(\implies\) more specialization \(\implies\) more productivity

• More chances to have an Einstein or a Mozart

"In [the state of nature], there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth...no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short, (Ch. XVIII).

"For the Lawes of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and (in summe) Doing To Others, As Wee Would Be Done To,) if themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like. And Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all, (Ch. XVIII).

"[A] State is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory."

"If men were angels, no government would be nec- essary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself," (Federalist 51).

"The simplest food-gathering and hunting societies are normally made up of bands that have...only about 50 or 100 people. Anthropologists find that primitive tribes normally maintain peace and order by voluntary agreement...The most primitive tribes tend to make all important collective decisions by consensus, and many of them do not even have chiefs...there is also little or no incentive for anyone to subjugate another tribe or keep slaves, since captives cannot generate enough surplus above subsistence to justify the costs of guarding them," (p.567).

"Once peoples learned how to raise crops effectively, production increased, population grew, and large populations needed governments...voluntary collective action cannot obtain the gains from a peaceful order or other public goods, even when the aggregate net gains from the provision of public goods are large."

"[W]e should not be surprised that while there have been lots of writings about the desirability of "social contracts" to obtain the benefits of law and order, no one has ever found a large society that obtained a peaceful order or other goods through an agreement among the individuals in the society," (p.568).

"In a world of roving banditry there is little or no incentive for anyone to produce or accumulate anything that may be stolen and, thus, little for bandits to steal," (p.568).

"Bandit rationality, accordingly, induces the bandit leader to seize a given domain, to make himself a ruler of that domain, and to provide a peaceful order and other public goods for its inhabitants, thereby obtaining more in tax theft than he could have obtained from migratory plunder. Thus we have seen "the first blessing of the invisible hand:" the rational, self-interested leader of a band of roving bandits is led, as though by an invisible hand, to settle down, wear a crown, and replace anarchy with government," (p.568).

"In fact, if a roving bandit settles down and takes his theft in the form of regular taxation and at the same time maintains a monopoly on theft in his domain, then those whom he exacts taxes will have an incentive to produce. The rational stationary bandit will take only a part of income in taxes because he will be able to exact a larger total amount of income from his subjects if he leaves them with an incentive to generate an income he can tax. If the stationary bandit successfully monopolizes the theft in his domain, then his victims do not need to worry about theft by others," (pp.567-8).

"Thus government for groups larger than tribes normally arises, not be cause of social contracts or voluntary transactions of any kind, but rather because of rational self-interest among those who can organize the greatest capacity for violence. These violent entrepreneurs naturally do not call themselves bandits but, on the contrary, give themselves and their descendants exalted titles..Since history is written by the winners, the origins of ruling dynasties are, of course, conventionally explained in terms of lofty motives rather than by self-interest," (p.568).

"[I]t will also pay him to provide other public goods whenever the provision of these goods increases taxable income sufficiently...The gigantic increase in output that normally arises from the provision of a peaceful order and other public goods gives the stationary bandit a far larger take than he could obtain without providing government," (p.568).

"How were the agents of the state to begin measuring and codifying, throughout each region of an entire kingdom, its population, their land holdings, their harvests, their wealth, the volume of commerce, and so on? The obstacles in the path of even the most rudimentary knowledge of these matters were enormous. The struggle to establish uniform weights and measures and to carry out a cadastral mapping of landholdings can serve as diagnostic examples. Each required a large, costly, long-term campaign against determined resistance. Resistance came not only from the general population but also from local powerholders; they were frequently able to take advantage of the administrative incoherence."

Each undertaking also exemplified a pattern of relations between local knowledge and practices on one hand and state administrative routines on the other, a pattern that will find echoes throughout this book. In each case, local practices of measurement and landholding were "illegible" to the state in their raw form. They exhibited a diversity and intricacy that reflected a great variety of purely local, not state, interests. That is to say, they could not be assimilated into an administrative grid without being either transformed or reduced to a convenient, if partly fictional, shorthand.

Obliged to grope its way on the basis of sketchy information, rumor, and self-interested local reports, the state often responded belatedly and inappropriately. Equity in taxation, another sensitive political issue, was beyond the reach of a state that found it difficult to know the basic comparative facts about harvests and prices. A vigorous effort to collect taxes, to requisition for military garrisons, to relieve urban shortages, or any number of other measures might, given the crudeness of state intelligence, actually provoke a political crisis. Even when it did not jeopardize state security, the Babel of measurement produced gross inefficiencies and a pattern of either undershooting or overshooting fiscal targets. No effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible without standard, fixed units of measurement.

Only wealthy aristocrats tended to have fixed surnames…Imagine the dilemma of a tithe or capitation-tax collector [in England] faced with a male population, 90% of whom bore just six Christian names (John, William, Thomas, Robert, Richard, and Henry).

Most early measures were human in scale. One sees this logic at work in such surviving expressions as a "stone's throw" or "within ear shot" for distances and a "cartload," a "basketful," or a "handful" for volume. Given that the size of a cart or basket might vary from place to place and that a stone's throw might not be precisely uniform from person to person, these units of measurement varied geographically and temporally.

Because local standards of measurement were tied to practical needs, because they reflected particular cropping patterns and agricultural technology, because they varied with climate and ecology, because they were "an attribute of power and an instrument of asserting class privilege," and because they were "at the center of bitter class struggle," they represented a mind-boggling problem for statecraft.

The pint in eighteenth-century Paris was equivalent to 0.93 liters, whereas in Seine-en-Montane it was 1.99 liters and in Precy-sous-Thil, an astounding 3.33 liters. The aune, a measure of length used for cloth, varied depending on the material (the unit for silk, for instance, was smaller than that for linen) and across France there were at least seventeen different aunes.

Virtually everywhere in early modern Europe were endless micropolitics about how baskets might be adjusted through wear, bulging, tricks of weaving, moisture, the thickness of the rim, and so on. In some areas the local standards for the bushel and other units of measurement were kept in metallic form and placed in the care of a trusted official or else literally carved into the stone of a church or the town hall. Nor did it end there. How the grain was to be poured (from shoulder height, which packed it somewhat, or from waist height?), how damp it could be, whether the container could be shaken down, and finally, if and how it was to be leveled off when full were subjects of long and bitter controversy.

A good part of the politics of measurement sprang from what a contemporary economist might call the "stickiness" of feudal rents. Noble and clerical claimants often found it difficult to increase feudal dues directly; the levels set for various charges were the result of long struggle, and even a small increase above the customary level was viewed as a threatening breach of tradition. Adjusting the measure, however, represented a roundabout way of achieving the same end.

The local lord might, for example, lend grain to peasants in smaller baskets and insist on repayment in larger baskets. He might surreptitiously or even boldly enlarge the size of the grain sacks accepted for milling (a monopoly of the domain lord) and reduce the size of the sacks used for measuring out flour; he might also collect feudal dues in larger baskets and pay wages in kind in smaller baskets. While the formal custom governing feudal dues and wages would thus remain intact (requiring, for example, the same number of sacks of wheat from the harvest of a given holding), the actual transaction might increasingly favor the lord. The results of such fiddling were far from trivial. Kula estimates that the size of the bushel (boisseau) used to collect the main feudal rent (taille) increased by one-third between 1674 and 1716 as part of what was called the reaction feodale.

"Absolutist France in the seventeenth century is a case in point. Indirect taxes-excise levies on salt and tobacco, tolls, license fees, and the sale of offices and titles-were favored forms of taxation; they were easy to administer and required little or nothing in the way of information about landholding and income. The tax-exempt status of the nobility and clergy meant that a good deal of the landed property was not taxed at all, transferring much of the burden to wealthy commoner farmers and the peasantry. Common land, although it was a vitally important subsistence resource for the rural poor, yielded no revenue either."

What must strike any observer of absolutist taxation is how wildly variable and unsystematic it was...[T]he main direct land tax, the taille, was frequently not paid at all and that no community paid more than one-third of what they were assessed. The result was that the state routinely relied on exceptional measures to overcome shortfalls in revenue or to pay for new expenses, particularly military campaigns. The crown exacted "forced loans" (rentes, droits alienes) in return for annuities that it might or might not honor; it sold offices and titles (venalites d'of/ices); it levied exceptional hearth taxes (foua ges extraordinaires); and, worst of all, it billeted troops directly in communities, often ruining the towns in the process.