# What caused world GDP growth rates to skyrocket around the year 1000 AD **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 20, 2020, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704 "2020-01-20T15:05:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Banksiaman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banksiaman/32/3334_2.png) [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2020, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/21 "2020-01-20T21:38:57Z")
A lot of historical research in recent years has tended to find that most pre-industrial reconstructions of population and economic activity are underestimated in non-western parts of the world, including Africa, Islamic Asia and the Americas. This alone would tend to draw some doubts about the sudden blip around 1000 CE. As an aside, I think that rather than worrying about the end of the world, the average monumental stonemason of Europe in CMXCIX was eagerly looking forward to the calendar turning over to ‘M’ and giving their arm a bit of a rest for a decade. ---
**Author:** ![merrick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/58956e/32.png) [@merrick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/merrick)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2020, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/22 "2020-01-20T21:47:45Z")
That’s the sort of thing that log scales were invented for - does anyone have the original graph re-plotted on a log scale? But the bigger issue of the OP’s question is the pre-1500 GDP data is too sparse and too vague to be really worth fitting to any sort of trend. Up until the colonial period (at least), getting a global GDP value involves - Estimating the population of large areas of the globe with zero written records - Estimating a mean living standard for this population (again without written records) - Converting this living standard to a GDP-per-head figure (noting that the overwhelming majority of these people are subsistence farmers, subsistence herders or hunter-gatherers, and none of them use money) - Coming up with a formula to convert the value to constant 2020 dollars in a meaningful way. Given that the historical population estimates (step 1) from various sources can easily vary by a factor of 2 or more, the final number is at best an order-of-magnitude estimate. What was the GDP of (say) North America in 1000AD, and how did it differ from 200 years before or after? We can do some archeology, run some models and make some educated guesses, but that’s all we’re doing. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2020, 10:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/23 "2020-01-20T22:28:49Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Can anyone give us a table with these numbers instead of a graph? A graph is often very deceptive for something that grows geometrically instead of arithmetically. I don’t know of any such table, but let me make up some numbers and show you how deceptive this is. Suppose the GDP for the world is as follows (with the dollar values being for the equivalent value of the GDP in present-day American dollars): > > 100 A.D. $10 million > 200 A.D. $20 million > 300 A.D. $40 million > 400 A.D. $80 million > 500 A.D. $160 million > 600 A.D. $320 million > 700 A.D. $640 billion > 800 A.D. $1.28 billion > 900 A.D. $2.56 billion > 1000 A.D. $5.12 billion > 1100 A.D. $10.24 billion > 1200 A.D. $20.48 billion > 1300 A.D. $40.96 billion > 1400 A.D. $81.92 billion > 1500 A.D. $163.84 billion > 1600 A.D. $327.68 billion > 1700 A.D. $655.36 billion > 1800 A.D. $1.31072 trillion > 1900 A.D. $2.62144 trillion > 2000 A.D. $5.24288 trillion > > Now make a chart for this with the dollar values on the vertical axis and the years on the horizontal axis. Let a hundred years be one inch on the chart and one billion dollars be one inch on the chart. Or let them be any other values you can fit on a single piece of paper. When you chart values that grow geometrically on a table where the values are marked on the axes with arithmetic values, it always looks like the values grow slowly at first and then grow very fast at the end. Hmmm…. Some quick googling tells me… World GDP: $85 trillion World Population: 7.7 billion World Lifespan: 72 years GDP per capita: $11,039 So… can we extrapolate that it takes about $11,000/person of generated GDP to achieve a lifespan of 72? Eh, it’s an internet post, I’ll allow it. However, previous generations didn’t live as long as we currently do, so it’s not like we can just multiply $11k \* global population = global GDP. No, we have to find some way to correlate GDP with life span, and were this a thesis for my Ph.D., this is where I would go into 40 pages of arcane math, regression analysis, and historical data to back up my math, but for this post I’m just going to divide Per Capita GDP by lifespan (11039/72) and say that $153.32 is my annual nut for calculating GDP – for every year you lived, your contribution to GDP rose by $153.32/year. So, if you lived 10 years, you produced an average of $1,533.20 of GDP contribution for every year of your life, most of it coming after age 5. And if you lived in a society where the average lifespan was, say, 29 years, you were probably generating a whopping $4,446 in GDP every year. Which, given most of what the ancients made was food, is probably not too far off the mark\*. (Oh, guess what? These are all nominal numbers. You want currency conversions for 4,325 BCE, you go right ahead and work it out for us. You want logarithms, have at it. Me, I’m just trying to type this out during lunch.) So now all we need to do is find some population and life expectancy charts and create a spreadsheet. Our World in Data has population figures, by year, going back to 10,000 BCE. (those stone age census tablets were well preserved, I hear), and they have lifespan data going back as far… though detailed ancient information isn’t needed as much, given that the average global lifespan was 29 years from time immemorial to about 1850 or so: > **[Population Growth](https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth)** > > Explore global and country data on population growth, demography, and how this is changing. > **[Life Expectancy](https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy)** > > People are living longer across the world, but large differences remain. Explore global data on life expectancy and how it has changed over time. So, using their tables of dubious authenticity\* and my argument of extremely dubious logic, we find this: [ul]10,000 BCE: World population of 2.4 million generating about $10.7 billion of economic activity. (To give a comparison about how more productive today’s society is, San Antonio today has 2.8 million people and generates $129 billion of GDP. Also, I would extrapolate that the vast majority of this GDP… and all the way up to about 1750 or so… involves food production.) [li] 3,154 BCE: World GDP reaches $185 billion on 41.7 million people. I bring this up because the video has $185B of GDP hitting around…[/li] [li] 100CE: Where my figures show about $865 billion of GDP being produced by 195 million people. As noted above, all this shit is guesswork\*. [/li] [li] 679CE: Our first trillion dollar year![/li] [li] 1000CE: 295 million people producing $1.3 trillion. I would guess $1.2 trillion of this is food.[/li] [li] 1486CE: This is the first year world population increases by over 1 million in a single year. USA! USA! USA![/li] [li] 1648: The last year (so far) that overall global population experienced a decline. [/li] [li] 1803CE: 1 billion people! $4.45 trillion of GDP![/li] [li] 1920CE: 1.86 billion people producing over $10 trillion (a new mark!) of GDP. [/ul][/li] \*Another cite, this from Wikipedia, has these numbers: > **[Gross world product](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product)** > > The gross world product (GWP), also known as gross world income (GWI), is the combined gross national income (previously, the "gross national product") of all the countries in the world. Because imports and exports balance exactly when considering the whole world, this also equals the total global gross domestic product (GDP).\[nb 1\] According to the World Bank, the 2013 nominal GWP was approximately 75.59 trillion United States dollars. In 2017, according to the CIA's World Factbook, the GW The t... I think these numbers are insanely low – look at that 1 AD GDP figure of $18 billion. Spread among 188,000,000 people, his numbers have mankind producing a mere $96/GDP per capita. That’s insane – the grown food alone is worth more than that. :rolleyes: Anyway, here is my chart: [JohnTs Quick and Dirty Annual GDP Table.xlsx - Google Drive](https://drive.google.com/file/d/145NWBE7EeROvj-HLqsOfmUGx3r80Ah23/view?usp=sharing) ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2020, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/24 "2020-01-20T22:44:02Z")
JohnT, did you notice that I said, “Let me make up some numbers”? Of course those numbers aren’t correct. That’s what I said. My point was that if any function is strictly geometric and is placed on a chart for which the axes are labeled in an arithmetic way, it always looks like the function starts increasingly slowly and ends up increasing fast, even though that’s not at all true. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2020, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/25 "2020-01-20T22:59:15Z")
My chart isn’t derived from your numbers. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [January 20, 2020, 11:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/26 "2020-01-20T23:41:00Z")
> [@JohnT](#): > > Hmmm…. Some quick googling tells me… > > World GDP: $85 trillion > World Population: 7.7 billion > World Lifespan: 72 years > GDP per capita: $11,039 > > So… can we extrapolate that it takes about $11,000/person of generated GDP to achieve a lifespan of 72? Eh, it’s an internet post, I’ll allow it. > > However, previous generations didn’t live as long as we currently do, so it’s not like we can just multiply $11k \* global population = global GDP. > > No, we have to find some way to correlate GDP with life span, and were this a thesis for my Ph.D., this is where I would go into 40 pages of arcane math, regression analysis, and historical data to back up my math, but for this post I’m just going to divide Per Capita GDP by lifespan (11039/72) and say that $153.32 is my annual nut for calculating GDP – for every year you lived, your contribution to GDP rose by $153.32/year. So, if you lived 10 years, you produced an average of $1,533.20 of GDP contribution for every year of your life, most of it coming after age 5. And if you lived in a society where the average lifespan was, say, 29 years, you were probably generating a whopping $4,446 in GDP every year. Which, given most of what the ancients made was food, is probably not too far off the mark\*. > > (Oh, guess what? These are all nominal numbers. You want currency conversions for 4,325 BCE, you go right ahead and work it out for us. You want logarithms, have at it. Me, I’m just trying to type this out during lunch.) > > So now all we need to do is find some population and life expectancy charts and create a spreadsheet. > > Our World in Data has population figures, by year, going back to 10,000 BCE. (those stone age census tablets were well preserved, I hear), and they have lifespan data going back as far… though detailed ancient information isn’t needed as much, given that the average global lifespan was 29 years from time immemorial to about 1850 or so: > > [Population Growth - Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth) > [Life Expectancy - Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy) > > So, using their tables of dubious authenticity\* and my argument of extremely dubious logic, we find this: > > [ul]10,000 BCE: World population of 2.4 million generating about $10.7 billion of economic activity. (To give a comparison about how more productive today’s society is, San Antonio today has 2.8 million people and generates $129 billion of GDP. Also, I would extrapolate that the vast majority of this GDP… and all the way up to about 1750 or so… involves food production.) > > [li] 3,154 BCE: World GDP reaches $185 billion on 41.7 million people. I bring this up because the video has $185B of GDP hitting around…[/li] > [li] 100CE: Where my figures show about $865 billion of GDP being produced by 195 million people. As noted above, all this shit is guesswork\*. [/li] > [li] 679CE: Our first trillion dollar year![/li] > [li] 1000CE: 295 million people producing $1.3 trillion. I would guess $1.2 trillion of this is food.[/li] > [li] 1486CE: This is the first year world population increases by over 1 million in a single year. USA! USA! USA![/li] > [li] 1648: The last year (so far) that overall global population experienced a decline. [/li] > [li] 1803CE: 1 billion people! $4.45 trillion of GDP![/li] > [li] 1920CE: 1.86 billion people producing over $10 trillion (a new mark!) of GDP. [/ul][/li] > \*Another cite, this from Wikipedia, has these numbers: > > [Gross world product - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product) > > I think these numbers are insanely low – look at that 1 AD GDP figure of $18 billion. Spread among 188,000,000 people, his numbers have mankind producing a mere $96/GDP per capita. That’s insane – the grown food alone is worth more than that. :rolleyes: > > Anyway, here is my chart: [JohnTs Quick and Dirty Annual GDP Table.xlsx - Google Drive](https://drive.google.com/file/d/145NWBE7EeROvj-HLqsOfmUGx3r80Ah23/view?usp=sharing) It seems that life expectancy grows dramatically until you hit $6000 in per capita income, then the rate slows quite a bit. [https://blog.euromonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Life-Expectancy-Preston-Curve-2012.jpg](https://blog.euromonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Life-Expectancy-Preston-Curve-2012.jpg) It may be 70 at $6000, and it is about 76 at $20,000, 80 at $40,000. Most of the jump in life expectancy is due to public health which is fairly cheap. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/27 "2020-01-21T01:08:04Z")
> [@Bear\_Nenno](#): > > Hell, I didn’t even realize that straw was wheat! It isn’t always. Straw is the dried stalks of any small grain; it can be wheat or emmer etc. straw, but could also be rye, barley, or oat straw. > [@Bear\_Nenno](#): > > definitely in at least some of those verses, “hay” is talking about “straw”. > > _“as the hay on the housetops, that is dried up before it comes to maturity.”_ > Nobody was thatching roofs with hay (grass/alfalfa). They used straw (wheat stalks). A grass that was “dried up before it comes to maturity” seems far more likely to me to have been hay than to have been straw. Hay is, indeed, cut before maturity – if it’s allowed to go to seed, there’s not much nutrition left in the grass blades and stem portions. In order to get hay worth feeding, it’s necessary to cut it immature. Straw, on the other hand, is the stems and spent leaves of a grain crop – and a grain crop is generally harvested when it comes to maturity, not before. The straw hasn’t got much in the way of nutrients left in it when the grain’s mature, but it’s still good for bedding, or for some types of house construction, or for kindling. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/28 "2020-01-21T06:58:48Z")
Population can be used as a VERY crude proxy for GWP. The spread of agriculture and stockbreeding had a HUGE effect on population. The “Secondary Products Revolution,” where products like cheese and wool were introduced, increased production, as did the invention of the wheeled wagon circa 3600 BC. World trade increased GWP; there was long-distance trade even before the Bronze Age. > [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > When you chart values that grow geometrically on a table where the values are marked on the axes with arithmetic values, it always looks like the values grow slowly at first and then grow very fast at the end. Yes. One of my pet peeves is graphs where the ordinate should be plotted logarithmically but isn’t. In their defense, people who prepare such graphs are usually more interested in making a point than in conveying useful information. Unfortunately the point they’re trying to make is often wrong. > [@JohnT](#): > > [Gross world product - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product) Here are some of the numbers from that site. They are absolutely ridiculous 2000 BC $3.02 billion 3000 BC 1.59 4000 BC 0.77 5000 BC 0.51 8000 BC 0.43 10,000 BC 0.37 25,000 BC $0.31 billion GWP less than doubled between the Ice Age of 25,000 BC and 5000 BC when the Neolithic Revolution was in full swing throughout the Middle East and much of Europe? Utterly laughable! You have my permission to delete the entire Wikipedia article. If an intelligent chart is to be created, Dopers must do it themselves. Let’s start with a list of inventions or developments that led to huge increase in population or production. I doubt that bronze had great effect, but iron-smelting did. Steam engines will certainly qualify. Others? ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/29 "2020-01-21T15:15:46Z")
My thoughts along the lines of my post above is this: It takes a minimum amount of GDP to grow the food necessary for you to live 29 or 36 or 72 years (this figure not being represented in that worthless wiki citation), and for the vast majority of history the question of “global GDP” is largely (but not wholly) a function of the agricultural output needed to give the globes population an average lifespan of 29 years. Even as late as 1500, over [60% of Europeans](https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture) were in agriculture, still supporting a lifespan of ~29 years, so once we determine what a PPP GDP (because Purchasing Power Parity is really the only way to answer this question without 40 pages of math) is for the agriculture sector, we have answered the question from 10,000 BCE - 2,000 BCE or so. Then we have to determine the GDP contribution of the stuff which _isn’t_ agriculture, right? [I would love to read this 1992 paper](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40572192.pdf?seq=1), but I’m not going to buy it for an internet post… but the abstract does say this: > [@](#): > > This paper traces the decline of the relative importance of agriculture in the economy. This occurs because of the greater rate of growth of industry and services. The importance of agriculture is measured as a percentage of total employment and of the Gross Domestic Product. **Agriculture is shown to have employed 70-80 per cent of the labour force and generated 40-60 per cent of the income in pre-industrial societies** , but has since continuously declined. The decline is a consequence of industrialisation and there have been marked regional differences in the date at which decline commenced. Thus the agricultural workforce fell below 50 per cent of the total in Britain in the 1730s but nowhere else until the 1840s and has still not fallen below 50 per cent in most of Africa and Asia. The fall of the Agricultural Domestic Product follows the same sequence, beginning first in Western Europe and European settled areas overseas, and then in Latin America and most recently the oil producers of the Middle East. So… determine the PPP value of the agriculture needed to feed the globe’s population, assign a factor based upon the “per cent of income (agriculture represents) in pre-industrial societies” (I would assume this number starts very high in 10,000BCE and slowly declines to the point where it’s ~60% of the income in 1700CE, as cited above), and we should have a good start. I’ve already provided a table with global population estimates from 10,000 BCE to 2015 and my quick and dirty and bullshit formula for GDP gave me a PPP of $4,400 needed to keep someone alive for 29 years (153\*29). If we apply a factor of, say, 60%, that means that a pre-industrial person generated a PPP-equivalent of $7,333 of GDP every year. Which seems high, especially for the truly ancient world, hence the sliding scale mentioned in the above paragraph. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/30 "2020-01-21T15:46:12Z")
Actually, if I merely register to that site I get the article for free, so I did and found this: Page 211, Table: Agriculture in selected low-income Economies, 1988 Country, % of GDP derived from agriculture Uganda, 72% Tanzania, 66% Somalia, 65% Mozambique, 62% Laos, 59% Nepal, 56% Chad, 47% (Guess who had oil? Chad had oil) Bangladesh, 46% China, 32% India, 32% That Uganda number is insane… but helpful. Insane to think that over 200 years after the start of the industrial revolution, there were still parts of the planet which were 60, 70%+ dependent upon their harvest. Helpful in that it gives us some hard modern data which shows just how much agriculture mattered to even industrializing societies in terms of GDP. For ancient societies, that 72% figure may have made you a great empire as it meant a full 28% of your production was surplus, which part of could be redirected to the military to kick some Egyptian ass. In 1988, it made you Uganda. ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/31 "2020-01-21T18:41:05Z")
We’re in GQ and OP’s question has been shown to be based on a fallacy. Perhaps discussion here should cease, and a new thread started like **"What _were_ the major inflection points in the growth of human economy?"** Just measuring production is difficult: For starters is the value of computers and phones their retail price? Or is it the extra productivity they bring to enterprises, and the value to consumers of the leisure and entertainment they bring? So let’s ingnore quantitative measures and just focus on the inventions or developments which led to rapid growth in economic value or production. World trade, and ocean navigation skills may have been very important, yet not qualify as inflection points because these developments were spread over millennia. Let me nominate a few, possibly sharper, inflectional developments in chronological order: Mesolithic tools like bow-and-arrow and fishing gear. Cereal farming. Domestication of Cattle, Sheep, etc. Plow, wagon, secondary products (cheese, wool, leather, beer etc.) Urbanization. ? - Weapons of War. Metallurgy. Iron smelting. Printing Press. Scientific Revolution. Steam Engine. After this, key developments were fast and furious. I’ll single out only the Electric Lightbulb for special mention. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/32 "2020-01-21T18:48:51Z")
I would prefer the thread moved to IMHO or GD rather than closing it, as to keep current participants in the conversation. ---
**Author:** ![Telperion](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telperion/32/509_2.png) [@Telperion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telperion)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/33 "2020-01-21T19:24:03Z")
If the rising numbers were caused by anything of that time, it was probably a difference in the appraisal and estimation of production rather than any technological development. We know that there were several pushes toward more centralized governments around 1,000 AD, such as the formation of the Holy Roman Empire in 962 and the Kingdom of Hungary a few decades later. Several highly detailed taxation surveys were also written during the 11th century, such as the Domesday book and the Catalogus Baronum. So it may just be that we have better records from the 11th century than the centuries before, which would probably be because Europe was in the dark ages and we unfortunately don’t have very good records from other regions. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/34 "2020-01-21T19:47:55Z")
I think you can push those ideas back further, Telperion - in the ancient world, growth in GDP, especially those parts not related to agriculture, are more related to developments in organization than they are to specific technological changes. Even in Septimus’s list above, there’s a few thousand years gap between “iron smelting” and “printing press”, a period which encompasses the whole of the iron age, Greek and Roman civilizations, and the rise of Christendom… GDP and productivity growth is marked by the very gradual diffusion of these ideas, as well as the improvements in our ability to create and organize societies. ---
**Author:** ![am77494](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/d2c977/32.png) [@am77494](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/am77494)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/35 "2020-01-21T20:28:29Z")
I realize I am coming late to this thread and apologize if this was mentioned earlier in the thread. Did a quick search for warm and climate in this thread and didn’t see anything. I am wondering if this has anything to do with climate change ? Specifically Medieval Warming ? “ The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum, or Medieval Climatic Anomaly was a time of warm climate in the North Atlantic region lasting from c. 950 to c. 1250” - from [Medieval Warm Period - Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period) ---
**Author:** ![Banksiaman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banksiaman/32/3334_2.png) [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/36 "2020-01-21T20:52:27Z")
> [@JohnT](#): > > Actually, if I merely register to that site I get the article for free, so I did and found this: > > Page 211, Table: Agriculture in selected low-income Economies, 1988 > > Country, % of GDP derived from agriculture > > Uganda, 72% > Tanzania, 66% > Somalia, 65% > … > > That Uganda number is insane… but helpful. Insane to think that over 200 years after the start of the industrial revolution, there were still parts of the planet which were 60, 70%+ dependent upon their harvest. Helpful in that it gives us some hard modern data which shows just how much agriculture mattered to even industrializing societies in terms of GDP. For ancient societies, that 72% figure may have made you a great empire as it meant a full 28% of your production was surplus, which part of could be redirected to the military to kick some Egyptian ass. In 1988, it made you Uganda. A significant part of Uganda’s economy is driven by export of tea, coffee and tobacco, plus other stuff, a lot of it to the West. There is probably a big difference between what being an agriculturalist is in Somalia vs Uganda. That said, our lack of understanding of what was happening in the world at about 1000 years ago outside a very small window in western Europe does limit what we can usefully say about excess production or population estimates. Even for the 1918 influenza we cannot accurately determine population effects for large parts of the world, so a thousand years earlier its pretty tricky to determine what the global population was up to. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/37 "2020-01-21T21:15:09Z")
> [@JohnT](#): > > I would prefer the thread moved to IMHO or GD rather than closing it, as to keep current participants in the conversation. Yeah, I’m fine with moving it to GD. I assumed perhaps there was some technological innovation that increased productivity. I vaguely recall some kind of horse harness being invented around this period which supposedly allowed horses to pull w/o choking themselves and didn’t know if there was a clear, easy answer like that. Looking into it, I think it was this. > **[Horse collar | History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_collar#History)** > > Long before the horse collar harness, there was the less efficient throat-girth harness. This, it was claimed, could be found in many ancient civilizations, according to early 20th century French cavalry officer Lefebvre des Noëttes. This type of collar was supposedly used in ancient Chaldea, both Sumeria and Assyria (1400–800 BC), ancient Egypt during the New Kingdom (1570–1070 BC), Shang dynasty China (1600–1050 BC), Minoan Crete (2700–1450 BC), Classical Greece (550–323 BC), and ancient Rom In... > [@](#): > > With this “ancient harness”, ploughs and carts were pulled using harnesses that had flat straps across the neck and chest of the animal, with the load attached at the top of the collar, above the neck, in a manner similar to a yoke. These straps pressed against the horse’s sterno-cephalicus muscle and trachea which restricted its breathing and reducing the pulling power of the horse.[5] Thus, the harder a horse pulled, the more strongly it choked off its own breathing. Because of these supposed physical constraints, oxen were used in preference to horses for heavy work, as they do not have this problem due to anatomical differences and could be yoked to their loads. > > The horse collar eventually spread to Europe c. 920 AD, and became universal by the 12th century > > When the horse was harnessed with a horse collar, the horse could apply 50% more power to a task than an ox due to its greater speed.[1][2] Horses generally also have greater endurance and can work more hours in a day. The centuries-long association that the Europeans had with the use of horses allowed an easier transition from oxen-based harnesses to the horse collar. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/38 "2020-01-21T21:56:09Z")
Things like the horse collar and other technical advances did not make the World GDP suddenly jump. The main reason is that at first they were only in local use and their spread was gradual. It often took centuries for a new invention to spread from, say China, to the Middle East and then to Europe. And even within a narrow geographic region, it might have taken years for an invention to spread completely among all the people who speak the same language and even longer to cross language boundaries. So even if we had the data, it’s unlikely we’d see any sudden jumps in World GDP. As I said above, some sudden drops would happen due to pandemics, but that’s about it for sudden changes. ---
**Author:** ![merrick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/58956e/32.png) [@merrick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/merrick)\ **Post date:** [January 21, 2020, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/39 "2020-01-21T22:21:23Z")
> [@dtilque](#): > > Things like the horse collar and other technical advances did not make the World GDP suddenly jump. The main reason is that at first they were only in local use and their spread was gradual. It often took centuries for a new invention to spread from, say China, to the Middle East and then to Europe. This. And it’s worth adding that for thousands of years prior to 1492, _no_ technical advances spread from Eurasia to the Americas and very few spread south of the Sahara. Yet we can’t ignore the blank areas of the map - current best guess is that the Americas had maybe 2/3 of the population of Europe as late as 1500, Africa maybe 1/2. And it’s hard to argue that the average American maize farmer or African herdsman was drastically less productive than the average European or Indian or Chinese peasant. I tried some quickly Googling for an estimate of the population of the Americas in AD 1000. I couldn’t find a site that would even venture a guess, but Wikipedia did offer the following quote: “Historian David Henige has argued that many population figures are the result of arbitrary formulas selectively applied to numbers from unreliable historical sources” Trying to relate pre-modern “GDP” to technical or social changes is a mug’s game. Change occurred very slowly, over a long timescale, as the result of a large number of interacting events. And the data quality is terrible, even for the places where we have any records at all. Even large-scale effects like climate change - unless it pushes a large chunk of the planet in the same direction for generations or centuries - are simply lost in the noise. TL;DR _Any_ step or jump or kink you see in a graph of “World GDP” prior to the modern era(1) is the result of inaccurate data. Nothing more. Those neat little dots on the graph should be fuzzy blobs. Very big, very fuzzy blobs. (1) OK, maybe not the Black Death. But even then, some theories suggest that the long-term effect of the plague was to make Europe _richer_. There isn’t a simple relation of trends to single events. ---
**Author:** ![JohnT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnt/32/15048_2.png) [@JohnT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnT)\ **Post date:** [January 22, 2020, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704/40 "2020-01-22T00:39:41Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > It seems that life expectancy grows dramatically until you hit $6000 in per capita income, then the rate slows quite a bit. > > [https://blog.euromonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Life-Expectancy-Preston-Curve-2012.jpg](https://blog.euromonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Life-Expectancy-Preston-Curve-2012.jpg) > > It may be 70 at $6000, and it is about 76 at $20,000, 80 at $40,000. > > Most of the jump in life expectancy is due to public health which is fairly cheap. Good find, and you’re quite right about the impact of ‘basic’ sanitation services have on life expectancy, which goes to my point about the big factors in increasing LE are not technological changes but organizational capacity and specific policy decisions made by the societies involved. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-caused-world-gdp-growth-rates-to-skyrocket-around-the-year-1000-ad/846704.md?page=3)