Logistics and communications as predicate requisites for productivity growth

Three wild speculations from amateur quantitative macrohistory by Luke Muehlhauser.

Thus I’ll say my first speculation from my brief expedition in “quantiative macrohistory” is this:

Human well-being was pretty awful by modern standards until the industrial revolution, after which most things we care about got vastly better in the span of a century or two.

But that is probably not a surprising claim to most readers of this blog, especially those who have studied economic history.

I dates the Industrial Revolution to circa 1850, or at least that what is visible in the data. He adds two further observations:

Human well-being was pretty awful by modern standards until the industrial revolution, after which most things we care about got vastly better in the span of a century or two.

If we had all the data, and we did a factor analysis of “what mattered for human well-being in recorded history,” I suspect most of the variance in human well-being would be explained by a primary factor for productivity, and a secondary factor for political freedom.

Fortunately, it seems it would take a lot of deaths — maybe 15% of world population or even more — to knock civilization off its current positive trajectory (via deaths, anyway).

Muehlhauser's work is consistent with earlier work but more boldly stated. There are two aspects he does not address but which are almost certainly pertinent.

1) Physical/logistical connectivity - a necessary precursor to the productivity explosion which occurred post 1850. Prior to 1500 there were a few, low volume, but long distance trade routes, principally the Silk Road, the TransSahara, and Intra-Mediterranean. Between 1500 (discovery of the Americas, first European to Indian Ocean sailing routes, etc.) and the emergence of steam ships (1800-1850) created the logistic network that enabled high volume long distance trade.

2) Communication connectivity - Productivity is substantially an outcome of managed processes and processes need high volumes of highly accurate data to ensure coordination of global and regional processes. Thus, the real explosion of productivity depended on the type of two way communication that only emerged circa 1850-1900 with telegraphs and toward the end of that period, phones.

Between 1500 and 1850 the world connected physically and then from 1850 to 1900 it connected in terms of communication. With those two developments the global explosion of productivity, which we are still experiencing, became feasible.