The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [188]
p. 190 ‘people prefer to press into ever closer contact with each other in glass towers to do their exchanging’. Jacobs, J. 2000. The Nature of Economies. Random House.
p. 190 ‘As Edward Glaeser put it’. Glaeser, E. 2009. Green cities, brown suburbs. City Journal 19: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_greencities.html.
p. 190 ‘the ecologist Paul Ehrlich had an epiphany’. Ehrlich, P. 1968. The Population Bomb. Ballantine Books.
Chapter 6
p. 191 ‘The great question is now at issue’. Malthus, T. R. 1798. Essay on Population.
p. 191 Percentage increase in world population graph. United Nations Population Division.
p. 192 ‘The economist Vernon Smith, in his memoirs’. Smith, V.L. 2008. Discovery – a Memoir. Authorhouse.
p. 193 ‘The Malthusian crisis comes not as a result of population growth directly, but because of decreasing specialisation.’ My argument here is part-way between the Malthusian one advanced by historians such as Greg Clark and the view that pre-industrial economies were always capable of greater productivity, but predation and other intrinsic factors prevented them – as advanced by George Grantham. See e.g. Grantham, G. 2008. Explaining the industrial transition: a non-Malthusian perspective. European Review of Economic History 12:155–65. See also Persson, K.-G. 2008. The Malthus delusion. European Review of Economic History 12: 165–73.
p. 193 ‘As Greg Clark puts it’. Clark, G. 2007. A Farewell to Alms. Princeton University Press.
p. 193 ‘Malthus’. Malthus, T.R. 1798. Essay on Population.
p. 193 ‘Ricardo’. Ricardo, D. 1817. The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. (Adam Smith, looking at China, India and Holland, had thought the same.)
p. 194 ‘the Wiltshire village of Damerham’. Langdon, J. and Masschaele, J. 2006. Commercial activity and population growth in medieval England. Past and Present 190:35–81.
p. 195 ‘a miller in Feering in Essex’. Langdon, J. and Masschaele, J. 2006. Commercial activity and population growth in medieval England. Past and Present 190:35–81.
p. 195 ‘It came suddenly in the sodden summers of 1315 and 1317, when wheat yields more than halved all across the north of Europe.’ Jordan, W.C. 1996. The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century. Princeton University Press.
p. 196 ‘neither the boom of the thirteenth century, nor the bust of the fourteenth, can be described in simplistic Ricardian and Malthusian terms’. See Meir Kohn’s book How and Why Economies Develop and Grow at www.dartmouth.edu/~mkohn/Papers/ lessons%201r3.pdf.
pp. 196–7 ‘the site of a new windmill being constructed at Dover Castle in 1294’. Langdon, J. and Masschaele, J. 2006. Commercial activity and population growth in medieval England. Past and Present 190:35–81.
p. 197 ‘in Joel Mokyr’s words’. Mokyr, J. 1990. Lever of Riches. Oxford University Press.
p. 197 ‘the Japanese had conquered Korea carrying tens of thousands of home-made arquebuses’. Noted in Perrin, N. 1988. Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword. Grodine.
p. 197–8 ‘As the traveller Isabella Bird remarked in 1880’. Macfarlane, A. and Harrison, S. 2000. Technological evolution and involution: a preliminary comparison of Europe and Japan. In Ziman, J. (ed.) Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process. Cambridge University Press.
p. 198 ‘Where Europeans used animal, water and wind power, the Japanese did the work themselves.’ Macfarlane, A. and Harrison, S. 2000. Technological evolution and involution: a preliminary comparison of Europe and Japan. In Ziman, J. (ed.)Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process. Cambridge University Press.
p. 198 ‘They even gave up capital-intensive guns in favour of labourintensive swords’. Perrin, N. 1988. Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword. Grodine.
p. 199 ‘Sir William Petty’. Petty, W. 1691. Political Arithmetick.
p. 199 ‘Adam Smith begged to