Today I Learned...

Given recent talk of death rates, disease, and productivity, I feel obliged to pass on this article on disease rate and IQ. In essence, there's a discontinuity in IQs in Mexico, corresponding with the time malaria was eradicated. It's not conclusive, but it does address one of my nagging doubts about Farewell to Alms: very few things either kill people or leave them untouched. Often they just take a lot of resources and leave you worst off. This doesn't disprove the hypothesis- it's possible that greater selective pressure would push people to evolve a more efficient brain, for example, but the book can't address them until it owns its hypothesis

Medieval farmers ate ~1500 calories, and 23 grams of protein, a day. 23 grams is probably close to what I ate before I started using protein powder, and I visibly bulked up when I upped my intake, despite the fact that my only exercise at the time was the 3 mile round trip walk to work and yoga. Now that I'm doing weights and martial arts, I'm supposed to get at least 80 grams a day, even though I spend most of my week pushing buttons to make the lights correct. So that seems like starvation level for men doing manual labor all day- although those men were probably significantly shorter than the men I'm used to, I don't think they were shorter than me. So when you consider whether it's worth cutting your caloric intake to get thinner, remember the awesome adaptation power your body posses.

China and Japan were real technological marvels, far ahead of Europe at one point (which I did know), but gradually regressed (that was new).

European preindustrial peasants married late. I expected them to be like religious people now, or middle-class-but-working-class people in the 50s, or maybe like all the royals you hear about marrying at age 11. The actual age of first marriage in the 17th century was 28/26 (male/female); it was all the way down to 26/24 by 1800. And something like a fifth of European women never married at all, which is more shocking when you consider that for a number of reasons, widowers were more likely to remarry than widows. In contrast, the rate of lifelong spinsterhood was something like 0 in Asia, due to female infanticide. The book doesn't mention the male death rate (since it's immaterial to the reproductive rate), but since violent deaths were rare, I assume there were a lot of unmarried men as well.

The industrial revolution benefited unskilled works more than skilled workers, and a lot more than it benefited the wealthy capital owners. If you let wages for building laborers in 1800 be 100, inflation adjusted wages were stagnant around at around 90 from 1200 to just before 1800. They grew exponentially, and are now at 800. The ratio of unskilled worker wage to all adult wages rose from .47 to .57 from 1770 to 1850. You see the same pattern in height and life expectancy. In retrospect, this makes sense: mass production drastically raised the productivity of unskilled workers.

Innumeracy used to be really common. That doesn't mean "trouble with algebra" it means "unable to estimate important things within 5 orders of magnitude." He made convincing arguments for this based on solid data in Europe, including classical Europe, but nothing about Asia. Remember that for later.

Everyone knows, by which I mean I can't be bothered to look up the source, that the poor and uneducated are having more kids than the rich and educated in the first world. There is much crying about what this means for human evolution- they even made a documentary about it. And it's true that in preindustrial times, the rich and literate outbred the poor and literate, and the the thesis of Farewell to Alms is that this, through cultural or genetic evolution, led to the industrial revolution. But did you know that in frontier New France (aka Quebec), where land was cheap, population density was low, and hence wages were high, the poor and illiterate outbred the rich and literate? Once you had enough intelligence for farming, which wasn't that much on such productive land*, anything else would just get you in trouble.

Biology field trip: the number of individuals of a given species that an ecosystem can support is called k, the number that actually exist is called n. The number of individuals a female could hypothetically produce in her lifetime is called r. Some species (most mammals and birds) provide a lot of extremely expensive care for their offspring, and often start reproducing relatively late in life. These are called k-strategists. Other species (most arthropods) just crank up r, provide no parental care, and hope some of their offspring happen to survive. As long as the population is at equilibrium, it doesn't really matter- each adult is going to average two surviving offspring. But if the population is temporarily depressed below k (due to e.g. weather or disease), or k suddenly increases (due to e.g. weather or a loss of predation), r-strategist species will catch up to k much faster than k strategist species. Like most things, it's a continuum, not a discrete choice- rabbits put some energy into their offspring, but less than whales do, and more than spiders. That's (one reason) why the rabbit population in Australia has recovered from the deliberate plague we released faster than the orca population has from us stealing all of their babies. Previous statement "if we raise productivity we just reproduce more and the standard of living stays the same" is mathematically equivalent to "k is determined by resources/person, raising resources raises k." Humans are more or less unique in our ability to raise k. For the first couple of hundred thousand years we did so pretty slowly, but since 1800 or so it's been up like a rocket- in fact, it's going up faster than n.

I think that that there's also variation in placement on the r-k continuum within a species. Think of all the time we spent discussing concerted cultivation (practiced by well off, well educated people who reproduce late and have few children) versus natural growth (practiced by comparatively poor and uneducated people who start reproducing earlier and have more children**). My hypothesis is that when the human population is well below k, r-strategists (breed quickly, invest relatively little in offspring) are evolutionarily favored. But when we're near k, which is what Farewell To Alms calls the Malthusian limit, k-strategists are favored. n/k was small in in frontier Quebec because there was so much land relative to the number of people, given the farming techniques they had available*** . This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense- if your environment is awesome, why waste time making it more awesome? that's energy you could spend having babies. And if you make your environment more awesome and your neighbor has babies, guess who's better represented in the population next generation? n/k is small now because k is growing faster than we can keep up with it, and so low-offspring-investment strategies are favored. Either intelligence is the driving force behind the increase in k, in which case this will eventually balance out, or it isn't. And while I personally want the world to keep becoming more intelligent, there's no evolutionary reason for that to be "right."

All modern economics show that even unskilled immigrants grow a 1st world economy on both an absolute and per capita basis (with possible costs for high school dropouts). I wonder if this is also a function of n/k- maybe the 2nd derivative of the utility curve isn't uniformly negative (non math people: maybe we don't hit diminishing returns right away). Since that's where we've spent most of our lives, it would we have the capacity to strongly believe that immigrants are threats..****

Special thanks to scythe_of_time, if she hadn't asked about this in a comment on Wednesday's post I might not have realized the significance of the throwaway sentence about New France.


*I so need to write the post about how the difference in European and Asian farming techniques selected for intelligence much more strongly in Asia. But right now this is more interesting.

**I never got a full post out of this, but Unequal Childhoods talks about how lower class families value extended family more than middle class families, spend more time with them, and have substantially less sibling conflict. I feel like there might a thing here, but I haven't worked it out yet

***What about the Native Americans, you ask? The book doesn't say, but I believe that they were at the k allowed by their cultivation techniques, but the more advanced techniques of the French had a higher k.

****Human beings can believe almost anything, but I believe there are certain ideas that we're predisposed to have strong emotional reactions to, similar to the way you can teach a monkey to fear snakes but not flowers.

I haven't figured out yesterday's Thing yet, but don't worry, I'm determined to keep talking until I do. So here are two things yesterday's post made me think of:

Running just to stay in place: I've talked before about how having my adrenal fatigue treated was awesome and gave me so much more energy and health. But if you looked at the state of my apartment you could be forgiven for thinking I was lying. There's two reasons for this. One, the energy went in to things like martial arts, volunteer work, actual work, and having no sense of proportion about the amount of time I was putting in to martial arts. But two: there are threshold effects to the benefits I get from cleaning. Keeping my apt clean enough to get the next quantum of benefit would require basically infinite energy, because it would mean putting everything away immediately. I don't have that kind of energy, I spent it learning the in-out crescent kick. Honestly, I'd rather just keep throwing stuff out till my place looks clean through sheer emptiness.

Positional goods: Most things get more expensive as more people want them, but most things become more abundant as they become expensive, and cheaper as they become more abundant. Eventually things settle down. But this can't happen when the supply is fixed, or nearly fixed. To take a rather convoluted example: say all the water in my village comes from rain falling in a particular pool, which each individual then moves to their own private store through various means (which no, is not how water actually works, but I could either come up with an easy to understand example or a physically possible example, and I chose understandable). Let's assume that people would like to consume more water than is available and that there's no legal authority or means to ration how much water each person gets. Instead, when it rains, everyone tries to move the water to their personal store as quickly as possible before the pool empties. In this case, what matters is now how fast you can move the water, but how fast you can do so relative to your neighbors. If everyone buys a new water pump that costs 10x as much, no one is better off. But you can't opt out of this (without some authority rationing the water) because then you won't get as much water as your neighbors and your children will die of thirst. The water pump is a positional good: a good whose value depends not on its absolute awesomeness but its awesomeness relative to your neighbors goods. This is closely tied in to the concept of a negative externality: which is a negative effect caused by an action that hurts someone other than the actor. Me acquiring a positional good hurts everyone else in the competition.

The ultimate positional goods are things designed to acquire or demonstrate status.* Since status is defined by having more than other people, any increase in my status comes at someone's expense. Status goods aren't perfectly define: buying a big house increases your status, but it also gives you more places to put stuff. Some of the cost of a BMW is the name, but some is because it's honestly better engineered.** And it depends on who owns it: I have friends who would absolutely make use of expensive kitchen gadgets and top of the line stoves, but some people buy them to show off.

People talk about the rich wasting money on things like Fendi bags and how that money could do so much good elsewhere. This is a misconception based on the conflation of cost and price. Cost is the actual resource cost of a thing, price is what you pay for it. The relevant question isn't "could we redistribute the money used to buy that handbag?", because if the supply of stuff the poor need stays constant and we throw more money at the problem, we just drive up prices. The real question is "could we redistribute the resources used to make that handbag?" And without knowing anything about handbags, I'm going to guess the answer is that this would not net us very much.. It's got some material, and some and land time went in to making it and selling it, but the vast majority of the price comes from the invisible status woven into the fabric, which will not do the poor much good.

This is just a pet theory of mine, but I like to divide status goods into three categories:

1. Genuinely valuable things. I think it's Argentina where building your house on arable land is a status symbol. This does damage the economy and the not-rich.

2. Meaningless symbols. See: Fendi bags. It's not useful per se, but it's not hurting anyone either.

3. Things that are expensive and rare due to large upfront costs. Think early cell phones, or GPS. People bought these because they were genuinely useful, but people who care about their useful traits also usually care about value and reliability and other things new technology is not known for.

I love that rich people buy expensive useless electronics, because eventually that technology gets cheap and I walk around with a phone more powerful than the computer I went to college with. And I don't mind that they buy Fendi bags, because they're going to have to do something with their money and I'd rather they not choose something that was actually rare and valuable.*** Rich people who waste their money are doing us a favor, because otherwise they'd be buying stuff we wanted and driving the price up.

But wait, you say, the target markets for Fendi bags and GPS are different. This is true, because there is more than one kind of status. There's old aristocracy status and finance guy status and tech nerd status and academic status, and you buy different things depending on which you want to acquire. This is awesome, because it lets more people be the best at what they care about. It does not actually change my point, except to note that certain status groups drive more useful innovation than others, and that something being useful does not exclude it from being a status good.

Well that failed to produce anything relevant to medieval survival rates. Hopefully tomorrow will be more productive.



*These two things are so hard to distinguish I'm just going to treat them as the same for now.

**Important note: I know nothing about cars. Feel free to substitute something expensive but well made in place of BMW

***Actually, there's a lot of fighting going on in places like Colorado which the same land is both good farm/herd land and a valuable vacation house location. I don't count this because the value of the land comes from its proximity to other rich people, not its use for farming, and America is not in any way running short of herd land.

Before I can start the actual post, I need to define some terms:

Demographic Shift: As countries modernize, the birthrate drops, and we don't know why. It's clearly tied up in women's liberation, but we don't know the direction of causality. My favorite hypothesis is that children are economic assets when farming, or even industrializating, but become extremely expensive consumption goods in modern society. Even if you expect your kid to support you post-retirement, that's a much weaker incentive then when you could use your kid to remove pests from your crops starting at age 4.

Farming was a huge step backwards for humanity: Hunter/Gatherers ate better and worked less. If you had the choice of being an isolated H/G tribe or an isolated farmer, go hunt and gather. Farmers nonetheless drove H/Gs off their land because there were more of them. Essentially, hunter/gatherers were the elves, beautiful and strong but ultimately waning in number, and farmers were the orcs: stupid an weak but present in overwhelming numbers. This is because hunter/gatherers suffered more variation is food availability, and kept* their population at a level that could be sustained at the lowest point. At any time other than the worst, they ate pretty well. Farmers had a much more consistent output, but the loss of variation meant they suffered deficiency diseases even before their population level increased to the absolute maximum capacity of their food supply. Another way of putting this is that population size is determined by the arithmetic mean of food availability but individual health is determined by the geometric mean of food consumed: this means that increasing variability decreases population but increases their health. And again, children were economic assets to farmers but dead weight to hunter/gatherers.

My current book, Farewell to Alms makes an additional point that any increase in population will decrease the standard of living, because food production has diminishing marginal returns. Once that way is exhausted (e.g. you're already feeding all the people you can on grazing animals) you have to start something with lower returns (e.g. grain cultivation).

Malthusian Trap: But wait, there's an escape from that: make everyone more productive (e.g. invent tractors). For most of human history, this failed to raise living standards, because we just bred more instead. We escaped this around 1800 (+/- 100 years, depending on who you ask), with the advent of industrialization. The questions is, how did we escape this, and reach this lovely state where things get awesomer every year, immigrants are boons to the economy, and my cats eat substantially better than most medieval farmers? Obviously the Demographic Shift helped, but that really just kicks the question up a level, plus the Demographic Shift is generally considered to have happened later.

In nature, if creatures don't exploit their food source to exhaustion, it's because they are themselves food to something else. Predation stopped being a population-level threat to us long ago, but as our productivity gains allowed us to specialize, we started to form cities. And with cities came the one predator we couldn't hit with sticks: disease.** Paradoxically, the fact that our richest form of productivity growth required us to live in disease-vulnerable conditions actually made them more useful. This means that the societies with worse hygiene (Western Europe) had higher per capita incomes than societies that thought maybe they shouldn't bathe in human waste (China and Japan).

So it appears that England lucked into disease ridden conditions long enough to allow industrialization (along with other factors), which allowed them to grow fast enough to trigger the demographic shift, at which point productivity increases continue to outpace population increases and everything becomes progressively more awesome. On average. Apparently Malawi farmers eat considerably worse than medieval English peasant farmers.


*I'm using an active verb because primitive tribes did practice a variety of forms of birth control and infanticide to keep their numbers down. But if they hadn't, starvation would have done it for them,

**Keeping poorly fed herd animals didn't help here either, but to really control the population, you needed density.