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taw comments on Non-Malthusian Scenarios - Less Wrong
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Which is of course total nonsense, as number of calories consumer per capita varies extremely little over huge differences in GDP. some data
Not at all. Even if there's plenty of unused land lying around, if you get unusually low yields, you can get famine. Few civilizations farmed spare land and threw away food, just in case the spare food might be useful, so food margins have nothing to do with availability of free land or lack of it. It takes some time to get new land into use, one year at the very least, more realistically many years to cut forests, build settlements, gather people, animals, and seed and move there, make agricultural tools etc. It's a major project, and conditions of famine do not help at all.
Potato was widely adopted in 18th century, the Eastern vs Western divide refers to Late Middle ages/Early Modern period, which took place long before it. During that time Poland and other countries became major exporters of wheat to Western Europe, using particularly nasty forms of serf labour.
That's not what I meant about 1350. Clearly if land was plentiful in 1000-1250, it must have been even more plentiful in 400-1000, and yet population wasn't expanding back to its Roman levels.
Raiders were Vikings / Muslim / Hungarians / etc. and they were raiding entire Europe. There was no distinction between raidable and not raidable lands. Here's map of Viking raids. Other groups raided other regions. Most of Europe, especially coastal areas were repeatedly raided, these lands were definitely inhabited all the time.
It can, and also GDP/capita was increasing while population was increasing. For pretty much any country you try. Malthusian theory suggests ridiculously high starting GDP/capita, which would then gradually go down as population increased, which is completely wrong.
I'm sorry if I wasn't clear, but I reject GDP for this purpose. I suspect that Braudel and the conventional wisdom about 1300 are like saying that people today are as kings, for they have the greatest musicians of the century at their beck and call on youtube. GDP tells how nice are the luxuries, but it doesn't tell if someone is starving.
Malthusians claim that percent of income spent on food is a good inverse predictor of number of calories, that people eat few calories when they can't afford more. GDP, whether in the 13th century or especially in the 20 century can mask this, because what can be bought with the remaining income is quite variable. Greg Clark claims that the poor in England in 1800 were getting 1500 calories per day, which is off the chart you link to.
I can't find him giving calorie estimates for other years, but he and his predecessors Phelps-Brown-Hopkins and Steffens claim that English labor income peaked in 1450, that the black death raised wages in a malthusian manner, in contrast to the claims you quote. This could be special to England or could be a result of measuring wages in necessities (calories), or could be a result of malthusians putting a finger on the scales. (Clark is a malthusian. I don't know about PB, H, or S.)
How is it measured? If you use nominal wages, you will see this effect, Malthusian or not, because amount of metal money per capita is inversely proportional to population. You need some sort of GDP estimates to adequately measure wages.
Do we at least have this data?
It isn't a terribly useful indicator, as prices are by their nature marginal, and just recently wheat prices varied from 287.75 $/bu in February 2005 to 1280 $/bu in February 2008, 4.4:1. This doesn't mean people got four times poorer just because food got four times more expensive.
But then, with economic history we rarely have the kind of data we want.
They use baskets of goods. But if the basket weights food heavily, it may see different effects than if it weights manufactured goods heavily. You can call it GDP, but 20th century GDP is definitely measuring the wrong thing. PPP deals with some of these issues, but for each purpose you need a different basket.
This is Engel's law. He had contemporary (19th century) cross-sectional data, not historical. I have heard people claim to have some historical data like this, but I haven't run across it recently. Clark seems to claim to have better knowledge of the basket consumed than PHB, so he ought to be able to graph calories, but I haven't seen him do it. Or rather, he claims to have better knowledge of meat consumed, so he should be able to graph protein, which is another part of Engel's law. Protein consumption changed much more across the 20th century than calories, but I'd be nervous about cross-cultural comparisons.
No, we shouldn't say that the people became 4 times poorer from 2005 to 2008, but we should say that poor people who use wheat as a staple and didn't have (flexible) subsidies did become poorer, while I doubt that's visible in the GDP per capita. Just saying that they became poorer, without quantifying it, is a crude measure, but we're only interested in the sign of the change: did the Black Death make people poorer or richer? It may have had opposite effects on the rich and the poor because they consumed different baskets of goods.