"The Malthusian Trap Is Not the Whole Story"

Gavin Kennedy wonders if per capita income captures the full story of what was happening during "the first millennia of commerce":

The Malthusian Trap Is Not the Whole Story, Adam Smith's Lost Legacy: ...I am reading Robert Payne’s ‘The Christian Centuries from Christ to Dante’, 1966. ... I didn’t acquire this book from a religious interest in the topic; my motives for doing so are forgotten now, but my interest ... is from a discussion we were having some months ago on Gregory Clarke’s book, Farewell to Alms ... on The Marginal Revolution Blog...

The proposition that I lodged at the back of my mind which did not seem to fit the assertion that population grew (excluding the Black Death years), subsistence incomes had remained the lot of the population (the Malthusian trap) for millennia. Now, I didn’t deny the statistical evidence; I had trouble reconciling the facts with other evidence that this was not the whole story.

Societies were changing slowly and remained unequal; a necessary consequence of the Adam Smith’s last three Ages of Man (shepherding, farming and commerce). The elites of these societies certainly were not generally on subsistence compared to the majority of their populations. They lived differently, if in many years the differences were marginal.

But, and this is what irritated my understanding of Greg Clarke’s thesis, from the great agricultural settled societies onwards, these settled societies (unlike the mobile shepherding tribes) were associated with stone buildings, defensive walls, armed retainers on them, religious mystics and rituals, later, with special buildings (temples, synagogues, churches), and in some cases, philosophers.

Now all these had to be paid for (even in conditions of slavery), both materials and wages (subsistence goods), or circulating capital in Adam Smith’s theory of growth. The only source of this capital is by extraction from annual revenue of society, which the ruling elites controlled. If this diversion is significant (and it was) the per capita subsistence of the majority is not the key statistic about what was happening from the first millennia of commerce.

Moreover the products of what we call stone-based ‘civilisations’ had a lasting impact on future generations in wide areas of knowledge, the pre-condition of the technology that made what is called the ‘industrial revolution’ possible and the almost simultaneous solution to the Malthusian trap as Malthus was writing his book about it.

Back to Robert Payne’s Christian Centuries, which details the stone-built evidence of centuries of architectural monuments, ever greater in their magnificence, to the extraction thesis applied across Europe. Judging by the accounts in Payne’s book, the substance of my nagging doubts about Clarke’s focus on per capita incomes seems firmer now than before.

But then I am only up the 12th century (‘The Gothic Splendour') of Christian Rome’s complicity in the extraction process. I shall press on with the next chapter...

Comments

[Bruce Wilder]

I don't have either Malthus or Clarke in front of me, to check what I am about to write against their theses.

To model the problem, one has to think about a minimum of two productive arenas, into which resources may be applied: an agricultural arena and a non-agricultural arena. Call them Farmer and Artisan. The productivity of the Farmer places a hard limit on the whole society's consumption of food (and by close extension, allied products of agriculture, like clothing). The society must find ways to produce an agricultural surplus and to capture some of the Farmer's product, beyond subsistence, and divert it to the support of people, who are not Farmers: Artisans, Warriors, Lawyers, Priests, Philosophers, Aristocrats, etc.

There are two problems in agriculture, in addition to the vagaries of weather and epidemic disease, which tend to reduce the Farmer's productivity and surplus. The first is that various farming practices tend to reduce the productivity of the land over time: crops tend to use up the nutrition in the soil, irrigation tends to salt the soil, fishing exhausts the stock of large fish, etc.

The second problem is that adding labor to a fixed or limited supply of land, beyond some point tends to reduce the marginal productivity of the individual farmer, to less than the average. So, each additional farmer reduces the average productivity of Farmers.

The two problems -- exhausting the productivity of the Land (or Lake, whatever) and the congestion effect of adding labor to land -- can interact to drag a society toward immiseration, as the falling productivity of Land drags down the productivity of Farmers, and additional Farmers make productivity fall further.

A Society with an increased division of labor -- an urban society, a commercial society -- can do three things to offset the problems of the Farm, enhancing and protecting the Farm surplus, necessary to feed a population of non-farmers.

First, the Artisan can produce tools, which, passed to the Farmer, increase the Farmer's productivity and surplus: better farm practices, fertilizers, better farm equipment, etc. An ancient society might provide a priesthood able to keep track of the calendar and the critical time of planting, as well as a militia to defend the crops at harvest.

Second, Society can place some restrictions or limits on the number of Farmers, that is, on the amount of labor applied to the fixed supply of Land. The number of fishing boats on the lake may be limited, to manage the supply of fish, for example.

Third, Society can conquer new lands, expanding the supply of Land, particularly fertile Land.

Fourth, a commercial Society can trade agricultural products, permitting more specialized and productive use of land and labor. (Conquest, exploration and trade may combine to supply novel agricultural products.)

The institutional capacity to conquer has tended to dominate in the history books, but the ability to limit the labor employed in agriculture relative to the available land, combined with the ability to produce techniques and tools to increase the productivity of agriculture, was, historically, a critical foundation for all societies with a large urban component, and it was especially a foundation for the industrial revolution.

These are, I think, the main elements for an analysis of dynamics. How the agricultural surplus is "extracted" from farmers is certainly one subject of interest, but, in terms, of measuring the dynamics of subsistence: whether labor in agricultural areas or urban areas is better compensated, for example, or how the per capita agricultural surplus is trending and why, a critical factor is the productivity of labor engaged in agriculture, and congestion is an important aspect of marginal productivity in agriculture.

In England, it is difficult, I think, to explain how the Black Death can have such large effects on agricultural productivity, if you don't recognize the importance of congestion in a society where much of agriculture was organized around resources held in common. And, of course, the importance of Enclosure is both that it forced a large population into urban areas, and that it enabled increases in agricultural productivity.

[Bruce Webb]

Oh my. I thought the contagion started from Marx. To think that Adam Smith was the culprit puts me into despair.

The notion that society proceeded from hunter gatherer to nomad shepherd to farmer to merchant only works is you totally ignore the actual economy of nomadism as it exists and existed. I took a course on the Nomads of Central Asia in medieval times from the deceptively named mild-mannered Prof. Smith some thirty years ago. Shepherding and even more nomadism is a method of exploiting territory that is not directly suited to settled farming but is by no means independent of that. Almost always and maybe always the nomad or shepherd is dependent on settled populations for some of their necessities. Such things as tea, rugs, and gold jewelry, all typical of nomad society, are not produced on the fly, instead they depend on an active if periodic interaction between a mobile nomadic population and a settled agricultural/merchant population. The idea that man ever subsisted by moving flocks around and living on sheep's milk and hand woven wool garments is more a fantasy derived from Sunday School stories of Moses in the Desert than any rational examination of how this actually works day to day. Shepherds can be parasitic on settled populations (think Mongols) or interdependent (think Masai) but rarely if ever truly independent. For example the technology of ceramics and metal is only to a small degree really transportable.

Generally speaking shepherdism and related occupations like pig herding are methods for settled populations to exploit upland or forested areas that are not immediately suited for agricultural production, the notion that they are precursor states is just something that developed before we really understood the concept of ecological and economic niches. Territories that simply don't support wheat farming can be enormously productive under a regime of transhumance pastoralism. Which doesn't mean you can be totally independent of the wheat farmer. Somebody has to stay in the low lands and watch the crops.

[reason]

Bruce Webb ..
While I find your comment, excellent and enlightening - I wonder what you are responding to exactly.

By the way, it meshes in an interesting way in the thesis expounded by Jane Jacobs in "The Economy of Cities" where she speculates that urban trading and manufacturing came BEFORE agriculture, for similar reasons to your explaination of why agriculture came before herding.

[bakho]

Can you lump all ancient commerce together and get a meaningful result? Some economies were highly unequal such as the Roman empire. This led to its replacement by reform societies including the replacement of Roman commerce by more egalitarian Islamic control in North Africa and the Middle East.

[evagrius]

TURKEY: DISCOVERY OF 12,000-YEAR-OLD TEMPLE COMPLEX COULD ALTER THEORY OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
Nicholas Birch 4/17/08

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As a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, representing the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important -- a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable on the planet.

"This place is a supernova", says Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey’s border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here."

Behind him are the first folds of the Anatolian plateau. Ahead, the Mesopotamian plain, like a dust-colored sea, stretches south hundreds of miles to Baghdad and beyond. The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe are just in front, hidden under the brow of the hill.

Compared to Stonehenge, Britain’s most famous prehistoric site, they are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 meters across. What makes the discovery remarkable are the carvings of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500 BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.

Never mind circular patterns or the stone-etchings, the people who erected this site did not even have pottery or cultivate wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers.

"Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilizations could build such monumental sites, and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture", says Ian Hodder, a Stanford University Professor of Anthropology, who, since 1993, has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey’s most famous Neolithic site. "Gobekli changes everything. It’s elaborate, it’s complex and it is pre-agricultural. That fact alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time."

With only a fraction of the site opened up after a decade of excavations, Gobekli Tepe’s significance to the people who built it remains unclear. Some think the site was the center of a fertility rite, with the two tall stones at the center of each circle representing a man and woman.

It’s a theory the tourist board in the nearby city of Urfa has taken up with alacrity. Visit the Garden of Eden, its brochures trumpet, see Adam and Eve.

Schmidt is skeptical about the fertility theory. He agrees Gobekli Tepe may well be "the last flowering of a semi-nomadic world that farming was just about to destroy," and points out that if it is in near perfect condition today, it is because those who built it buried it soon after under tons of soil, as though its wild animal-rich world had lost all meaning.

But the site is devoid of the fertility symbols that have been found at other Neolithic sites, and the T-shaped columns, while clearly semi-human, are sexless. "I think here we are face to face with the earliest representation of gods", says Schmidt, patting one of the biggest stones. "They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have arms and they have hands. They are makers."

"In my opinion, the people who carved them were asking themselves the biggest questions of all," Schmidt continued. "What is this universe? Why are we here?"

With no evidence of houses or graves near the stones, Schmidt believes the hill top was a site of pilgrimage for communities within a radius of roughly a hundred miles. He notes how the tallest stones all face southeast, as if scanning plains that are scattered with archeological sites in many ways no less remarkable than Gobekli Tepe.

Last year, for instance, French archaeologists working at Djade al-Mughara in northern Syria uncovered the oldest mural ever found. "Two square meters of geometric shapes, in red, black and white - a bit like a Paul Klee painting," explains Eric Coqueugniot, the University of Lyon archaeologist who is leading the excavation.

Coqueugniot describes Schmidt’s hypothesis that Gobekli Tepe was meeting point for feasts, rituals and sharing ideas as "tempting," given the site’s spectacular position. But he emphasizes that surveys of the region are still in their infancy. "Tomorrow, somebody might find somewhere even more dramatic."

Director of a dig at Korpiktepe, on the Tigris River about 120 miles east of Urfa, Vecihi Ozkaya doubts the thousands of stone pots he has found since 2001 in hundreds of 11,500 year-old graves quite qualify as that. But his excitement fills his austere office at Dicle University in Diyarbakir.

"Look at this", he says, pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an animal, half-human, half-lion. "It’s a sphinx, thousands of years before Egypt. Southeastern Turkey, northern Syria - this region saw the wedding night of our civilization."

Editor’s Note: Nicolas Birch specializes in Turkey, Iran and the Middle East.

Posted April 17, 2008 © Eurasianet
http://www.eurasianet.org

[reason]

evagrius...
Interestingly, Jane Jacobs book starts with speculation about an archeological in - you guessed it - Turkey.

[Bruce Wilder]

A hunter-gatherer society would have found a great usefulness for the output of skilled tool-makers, but specialization in tool-making implies a scale of trade and organization superceding that of the smallish hunter-gatherer group.

Humans, being what we are, tend to get carried away with their economic activities. Hunters overhunt, and have to become herders. Warriors get carried away, turning pillage into conquest, and have to become rulers. The increasing scale of civilization is driven forward by the crumbling foundation of its agriculture.

[hari]

The Babylonian Civilization between Tigris and Euphrates is said to have developed the first agriculture from which not only seeds but also plants moved to Europe with Roman Empire conquests in what's called MiddleEast today.

The Syrians, btw, are one of the few original civilizations from the period. They also provided Emperor's for Rome and Constantinople - as Sarazans of noteworthy recongnition by Romans.

In fact, the land(s) today occupied by normadic Kurds may(be) represent remnants of the old civilization under Byzantian rule. Archiological findings in the region are fueled with ancient conflicts with Turks - from Ottoman times.

[paine]

gavin k ???

smith and even plagoristical malthus
refers to marginal income
not average

naive freshly painted thoughts
on the chrono-dynamics
of clio's
infra marginal social surplus product

from a willfully senile mind ????

no recipe for delight-ful reading

[Lord]

Considering the economy in these periods, it is notable that most of it was not profit driven. Whether serfs for manual labor, taxes used for defense, or donations used for religion, much of which was provided by the assets under the direct control of their respective authorities, it resembled less self-subsistence than self-reliant social hierarchies.

[paine]

"as the falling productivity of Land drags down the productivity of Farmers"

s that how u want to phrase this point ???

fixed land and additional but falling incremental output results
from further applications of toil
means higher land productivity in output per acre
as well as
higher infra marginal rent
even as the productivity
of any marginal unit of labor falls

[paine]

marx has this sequence
bruce ???

where ???

[paine]

land exhaustion is another matter
perhaps you are talking about
the very good point
that as intensity of use goes up
the rapidity of exhaustion may also

one tendency countering the other
netting out up or down ...either way

says...

"fixed land and additional but falling incremental output results
from further applications of toil
means higher land productivity in output per acre
as well as
higher infra marginal rent
even as the productivity
of any marginal unit of labor falls"

paine implies the key point against retro-Malthusian claims. The fact that average, per capita output]productivity doesn't increase because of population increases/resource limitations doesn't negate the fact that it is still a surplus extracting economy with considerable surpluses. Most likely during the early modern period (1500-1800), at least for Atlantic Europe and some of its off-shoots, the number of wealthy and well-off people was increasing and their level of per capita wealth might have been rising as well, but the number of impoverished was increasing more rapidly. In fact, the declining marginal productivity of land and agricultural labor not only lowers the average wage rates, but increases the extraction of "infra-marginal rents". Of course, it is a bit fallacious to retroject modes of economic analysis deriving from modern economies onto economies in which surpluses were not primarily extracted through market mechanisms and which were not highly monetized, and casting a pall of statistical generalization, however reconstructed, might obscure more than reveal what was going on. But it's likely that technical developments, though not negligible, were incremental and limited during that epoch, and such increases in surpluses that did occur were driven primarily through pareto-improvements resulting from the increasing extent and organization of trade rather than direct increases in per capita output. Though, of course, those very resource constraints were driving the outward expansion of trade, to the detriment of Eastern Europeans, Africans and Americans. But new resource bases were opened up, allowing for an increase in extractions of surpluses to sustain the growing mass of urban poor that sustained the growing mercantile economy. (Just think, for example, of the opening up of the Grand Banks and the huge supplies of salt cod that formed a cheap source of supplementary protein for the working masses). Supernumerary peasants, if not hung as vagrants, could be shipped out to sea as sailors! Stagnation in per capita productivity and output does not contradict increases in gross output and increasingly "efficient" extraction of surpluses.

[john c. halasz]

Oops! That was me.

says...

. Of course, it is a bit fallacious to retroject modes of economic analysis deriving from modern economies onto economies in which surpluses were not primarily extracted through market mechanisms

On the contrary, many ancient civilizations (including at least ancient Egypt, Rome and China) used land-based taxation, which is regarded to this day as the economically best method of extracting the infra-marginal surplus of land. (I don't have refs at hand, but they shouldn't be that hard to find.)

[Bruce Wilder]

paine: "s that how u want to phrase this point ???"

Perhaps not. But, as I look on what I wrote, I find several points peeking back at me.

1.) One point is that agriculture tends to be like fishing a lake. Just adding more fishermen, perhaps in more fishing boats, carried past a certain point, does not increase the productivity of the lake or higher inframarginal rent. Each additional fisherman may still, individually catch an average catch sufficient to feed the fisherman, but still reduce the catch of all the other fishermen, and thus reduce the surplus available for trade (and the support of an urban civilization.)

1a.) Just as there are dynamic effects from overfishing a lake, there can be dynamic effects from intensive farming of land. The soil is exhausted or eroded, etc. So, overfishing in year 10 can yield apparent increases in output in year 10, but have severe and difficult-to-reverse implications in terms of output in year 15 or year 20.

1b.) At an extreme, labor-intensive farming, with falling marginal labor productivity, can undermine the effective use of capital and tools. Falling marginal productivity for labor can reduce the marginal productivity of tools in the hands of labor. So, falling marginal productivity (even negative marginal productivity) can mean both i) that Farmers have a smaller surplus to trade with Artisans, ii) Farmers realize smaller gains from the tools they can get from Artisans.

Historians have long accepted the idea that farming -- particularly, the irrigation-oriented farming of Sumeria -- was a slippery slope. The initial returns on effort to the early Farmers and Herders must have been tremendous; those first Farmers may have felt that they were moving up by an order of magnitude from the life of hunting and gathering. But, as time went on, more and more effort was required to maintain yields, and Farmers, in particular, slipped into a standard of living far below that of traditional hunters and gatherers -- working harder for a lower standard of nutrition, and no more guarantee against famine. For the Farmers dependent on early State organization to maintain irrigation systems and the like, oppression followed from the need to maintain and extract a surplus to feed the officials, priests, warriors and engineers, and their retinues.

The tendency for Farming to sink, like a heavy building founded on swampy soil, is a useful dynamic to note. And, so is the congestion effect, which follows from not finding ways to limit the number of people directly engaged in agriculture for trade.

[Alex Tolley]

BW: "Historians have long accepted the idea that farming -- particularly, the irrigation-oriented farming of Sumeria -- was a slippery slope."

references? This seems counter-factual given that there have been societies, especially island ones, that have farmed the land with stable populations for over 1000 years. Even in Merry Old Medieval England, crop rotation was practiced to ensure stable food production.

It is population pressure that is the cause of over-intensive farming. According to Diamond ("The Third Chimpanzee", 1992) 40%+ of the net fixed solar energy of the planet was being extracted at the time of writing. That is not leaving much room for error and bad harvests, especially as the population keeps on increasing.

[Bruce Wilder]

Alex Tolley: "It is population pressure that is the cause of over-intensive farming."

Yes, now. The population of the earth was approximately 3 billion in 1960, increased by roughly 3 billion people between 1960 and 2000, and will increase by another 3 billion by 2050. And, the average consumption per capita has skyrocketed, as well, straining the carrying capacity of the earth. In the U.S. alone, already highly developed economically in 1960, the resources devoted to raising livestock for meat increased 5 times between 1960 and 2000. The methane generated by livestock rivals power generation as a source of global-warming greenhouse gases. The nitrogen runoff from fertilizers contributes to algae blooms and the creation of oxygen-deprived deadzones off the U.S. coastline.

The U.S. has solved the historic problem of agriculture: that increasing human populations dedicated to farming tended to choke off the agricultural surplus necessary to support an urban civilization. Only a very small fraction of the U.S. population is dedicated to agriculture, and the agricultural output per person working in agriculture is not an issue.

There may be a level of abstract generality, where it is sensible to see Clarke's historical thesis, or Malthus' thesis, as covering both past and our immediate future, as one, persistant problem. As I wrote as preface to my first comment, I don't have either Clarke or Malthus in front of me, and so I can't pursue that.

I was a commenting on the post, which observes that an agricultural surplus was diverted in the past to non-agricultural, cultural achievements. I was commenting on the dynamics of agriculture, as they relate to ability of a society to extract and divert a surplus to the support of a population not in agriculture, and the kind of hazards undermining such a diversion. In that regard, historically, I assert that the size of the population specifically in agricultural production matters; an increasing population working directly in, and living off agriculture, can have a tendency to undermine the available surplus and the diversion of that surplus, by undermining the productivity of agriculture.

I don't think there's a continuum between our pushing on the carrying capacity of the earth, and past periods of famine, or failures to improve the welfare of the representative individual amid the masses of humanity. At least, I don't see farm population pressing down on farm productivity, per se. I do see that farm production, and attendant waste, is pressing on the limits of the environment. I would not describe that, in general, as a problem of "over-intensive" farming -- at least, not without working out a careful definition of "intensive"; I would describe it as a problem of too much farming, too much farm production. I, certainly, would not link it to the problem, say, of English Manors in the High Middle Ages having too large a non-tenant population dependent on, and dedicated to, exploiting the Commons.

[Alex Tolley]

Bruce: I'm not clear what the difference between your "agricultural dynamics" and overpopulation (local) is. I see no difference between 1 farmer supporting 9 non-farmers and over-working the land and 10 farmers doing the same as "subsistence" on their own plots. If the available land supports 9 people, then trying to support 10 requires short-term over use of the land which may lead to the land only supporting even fewer in the future. There are certainly efficiency arguments to make over too much farm labor, but at core, the available land will only support a certain population. Referring back to Diamond's "Collapse" he shows that typically population rises to its maximum during good years and then starts to collapse as the climate/weather changes to reduce production - at least in the examples he uses. I've read about similar evidence in other sources, so I don't doubt this happens - classic Malthus.

With reference to the substance of this post, I think that the dynamics are such that initial surpluses by technology/social organization that lead to the cathedrals and moon shots is finally eroded as population rises to meet the production limits. Inevitably agriculture becomes over-intensive, especially if food prices rise, and then it collapses.

The west has not escaped the Malthusian trap, just bought time with technology that has more than kept pace with population growth. I don't doubt that it will continue, at least for a while, but clearly hiccups will occur. The problem we face is that our farming practices, highly reliant on energy (mostly fossil carbon today) are not sustainable in the ecological sense. The soil in the US is becoming a sterile, inorganic matrix - we might as well consider farms as just outdoor factories. If we get some nasty disease, that attacks corn or permanent water shortage (Ocalala reservoir dries up), the US is going to really suffer from production shortfalls.

[Bruce Wilder]

Alex Tolley: "I see no difference between 1 farmer supporting 9 non-farmers and over-working the land and 10 farmers doing the same as "subsistence" on their own plots. If the available land supports 9 people, then trying to support 10 requires short-term over use of the land which may lead to the land only supporting even fewer in the future."

One obvious difference is that, in the first case, 9 non-farmers are available to participate in an urban civilization; in the second case, not. A second difference may be that, when famine comes, in the first case, it is an urban famine, and in the second case, it is a farm famine.

These kinds of differences may matter to the rise and fall and shaping of civilization, historically. Which I took to be the subject of the post and Gavin Kennedy's remarks.

[Lafayette]

BW: I took a course on the Nomads of Central Asia

Mankind's transformation from a nomad to sedentary lifestyle brought with it the notion of property.

Nomads had no idea of personal property, unless carried with each individual. They had no homes, rarely had flocks, and lived principally of the protein they could kill. When humans started a sedentary lifestyle, they realized quickly that the division of labor and economies of scale led to surplus foods. This provoked them to barter their surplus foods or artifacts.

The barter brought personally owned objects and therefore the notion of property, not only in terms of their homes they had built but its contents and, of course, the fields/flocks they tended.

The sedentary lifestyle of harvesting cereals also brought an important physical change. The addition of carbohydrates to the diet, aside from purely meat proteins, promoted a growth in brain-size and, it is thought, intelligence.

It was therefore an key advance for mankind.

[Alex Tolley]

Lafayette: "The sedentary lifestyle of harvesting cereals also brought an important physical change. The addition of carbohydrates to the diet, aside from purely meat proteins, promoted a growth in brain-size and, it is thought, intelligence.

It was therefore an key advance for mankind."

The data shows that farmers have poorer nutrition than hunter gatherers and that this showed up in lower stature. Animal borne diseases were worse too.

AFAIK, the great leap forward in human development happened around 40K years ago, when a cultural explosion seemed to occur. I don't doubt that the fixed lifestyle enabled those living off the farmed foods were able to develop the cultural artifacts such as buildings and arts.

[Real Person from the Real World]

You never know what lies ahead of an innovation. Farming came in and replaced hunter gatherers, or so it seems, from the historians above, and balloon mortgages based on notions of increasing real estate value, leading to what? "Creative destruction", isn't that what Schumpeter called it? My only question is, what do you do when you are too old to adapt to the vicious new economy? Roll over and die?