Malthusian Progress
Popular Abstract in English The dissertation offers two key contributions. The first is a theoretical demonstration that, even though a Malthusian society is inherently stagnant in the sense that sustained economic growth is absent, scattered advances in technology can permanently raise the long-term wage rate. The key reason why new technology can have a short-term as well as a long-term (i.e. peSome scholars maintain that pre-industrial England was held in a Malthusian ‘trap’, and that this trap prevented the sustained growth of real wages until as late as 1800. Opponents to this view argue that the structural transformations occurring in preindustrial England – urbanization, labour reallocation between sectors, and human capital investments – are features of development that are incompa