Malthusian Progress

Abstract: 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. permanent) effect on the wage rate is the fact that a technological development can influence the degree to which the standard of living impacts upon birth and death rates. The second contribution of the dissertation is the empirical illustration that pre-industrial England, in spite of its Malthusian demographic features demonstrated elsewhere, was not a subsistence economy but one that was characterized by surplus labour, human capital investments, and wages above the biological minimum.