All of SamHughes's Comments + Replies

Did Medieval Peasants Have More Vacation Time Than Us?

Nice piece, thanks. I hadn't noticed HC's latest video, but am also a fan so look forward to watching the full thing.

An initial thought, though: there seem at least a couple of places where one can grant his facts yet argue his interpretation of these as "good" is backwards.

For instance, one can argue that lower preindustrial working hours reflect chronic underemployment and unemployment, one of that society's chief problems, and that industrialisation alleviated this problem (and even that this was one of the great initial benefits of industrialisation).

A... (read more)

Where I have landed on “ideas getting harder to find”, in a nutshell

SamHughes6mo1

Yes, that’s essentially the stylised model I use – i.e. I understand the long-run history of GDP per capita growth at the frontier as a transition from stagnation (/a very low rate) into sustained growth at a roughly constant rate. And it is very stylised (and I allow that the take-off may have been quite gradual), but I still think it works quite well as a basic framework.

And I agree that Romer’s backwards projection implies that the rate of GDP per capita growth at the frontier has increased over time; but it doesn’t prove that this took the form of a co... (read more)

1jasoncrawford6moFWIW, this Jones & Romer paper [https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/Kaldor200.pdf] names “accelerating growth” as one of the key stylized facts that growth models should explain. See pp. 13–16. One example of accelerating progress they give is from Nordhaus's famous “price of light” paper:

Where I have landed on “ideas getting harder to find”, in a nutshell

SamHughes7mo1

I disagree with (5), that the long-term historical pattern is acceleration (and more specifically, I don't think that the first three charts in your linked piece are sufficient to demonstrate this).

At the frontier, real GDP per person growth has remained remarkably constant for the past ~200 years.

The growth rate for the world might show acceleration, but I understand this as a compositional effect, as more countries leave the zero/low growth regime and experience rapid catch-up growth. But in the long-run each country's growth rate will converge with the ... (read more)

1jasoncrawford7moNo, you're looking at too short a timescale [edit: to be clear, this is referring to your specific point about constant growth rates over the last 200 years]. Zoom out to the last few thousand, or few tens of thousand years. See this from Paul Romer: https://paulromer.net/speeding-up-and-missed-opportunities-evidence/ [https://paulromer.net/speeding-up-and-missed-opportunities-evidence/] Key excerpt: [Further edit for clarity:] I think your contention is: there are basically two growth regimes. There is a low-growth regime, which most countries were in for most of history. Then there is a high-growth regime, which countries enter once they industrialize. This is an acceleration but it's a one-time thing. Any seeming longer-term, more-spread-out acceleration is just a compositional effect. That is a reasonable hypothesis, but I think it's wrong. It may be true that there are discrete growth regimes, but I think there are more than two of them, historically. Progress was extremely slow in stone age. It sped up somewhat in the early agricultural age. It sped up more in the modern era after Gutenberg, Bacon, etc. It sped up more after industrialization. And I think it will speed up still more in the future—possibly after we cross some next threshold, whatever that is exactly.

Tyler Cowen AMA

SamHughes1y1

Should modernisation theory receive more attention in critiques and apologetics of economic development?

1Tyler Cowen1y"Theory" in general is out of style these days. Insights of modernisation theory might end up being tested, but as a "theory" I don't think it will make a comeback. Somehow there is too much academic hyperspecialization for that to happen, and it increasingly seems like the approach of a bygone era. And to be clear, I still have some sympathies for that bygone era, even if most of its hypotheses were wrong.