Paul Krugman, "Economic World History in One Picture"

"This graph shows estimates of real income per capita back to the Bronze Age:

What the figure above shows is that over a roughly 3000 year period, during which there was obviously quite a lot of technological progress — iron plows, horse collars, mastering the cultivation of rice, the importation of potatoes into Europe, etc. — living standards basically went nowhere. Why? Because population growth always ate up the gains, pushing living standards back to roughly subsistence.

The figure I used in the previous post helps suggest why: technological change was slow — so slow that by 1600 or so, when England had finally reclaimed its population losses from the Black Death, it found real wages back to more or less 1300 levels again. And here’s the sense in which Malthus was right: he had a fundamentally valid model of the pre-Industrial Revolution economy, which was one in which technological progress translated into more people, not higher living standards. This homeostasis only broke down when very rapid technological change finally outstripped population pressure for an extended period.

Of course, Malthus’s predictive failure wasn’t accidental. Technological takeoff was the product of a newly inquisitive, empirically-minded, scientific culture — the kind of culture that could produce people like Malthus."

- Paul Krugman, http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/