1. Population and Economic Growth
Chapter 4
Population and Economic Growth

2. To show that our numerical conclusion – that pop growth from zero to 4% means MASSIVE income differences, and Solow cannot account for it
with pop differences alone.

5. Population Map

6. Population Changes from Two Sources
Mortality
Health and Nutrition
Wars
Fertility
Income
Access to Contraception

8. A Description of the Malthusian World
(the “natural state” of mankind)
“No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
From Clark: “The vast majority of human societies, from the original foragers of the African savannah down through settled agrarian societies until about 1800, had an economic life that was shaped and governed by one simple fact: birth rates had to equal death rates on average. Since the same logic governs all animal species, before 1800 in the “natural” economy the economic laws for humans were the same as for all animal species.”
“It is common to assume that the huge technology available to people, and in the organizational complexity of societies, between our ancestors of the savannah and Industrial Revolution England, must have improved the human condition even before modern economic growth began. But Mathus shows that the logic of this natural economy implies that the material standard of living for the average person in the agrarian economies of 1800 were if anything worse than for our remote ancestors. Thomas Hobbes, in the quote above, was profoundly wrong to believe that in the state of nature man was any worse off than in England in 1651.”

9. Key Assumptions of the Malthusian Model
1) Birth-rate is not affected by income per person.
2) Death-rate is negatively related to income per person.
3) Population is negatively related to income per person.
From this, draw two adjacent graph spaces, and ask them to draw out the relationships. What are the implications for population and real wages?

12. What happens in the Malthusian Model (both in the short-run and the long-run) when:
a) A war kills half of the population?
b) A volcanic eruption kills half the population and destroys half the land?

14. Malthusian Virtues and Vices (as interpreted by Clark 2007)
Fertility limitation
Bad sanitation
Violence
Harvest failures
Infanticide
Selfishness
Vices
Fecundity
Cleanliness
Peace
Public granaries
Parental solicitude
Charity

19. World Fertility Map