growth: De Long view

[Tom Lehman]

Well, the fall of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages doesn't raise a
blip--but--the Black Plague does. At least in the population stats?

Tom Lehman

Doug Henwood wrote:


>  From Martin Wolf's column in today's Financial Times:
>
> "In a heroic paper, Bradford De Long of the University of California
> at Berkeley has estimated the population, total income and real
> income per head of humanity over the past million years.*
>
> A thousand years ago, he says, the world's population was some 270m;
> in 1700, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, it was 600m; today
> it is 6.3bn. A thousand years ago, world gross product (in dollars
> with a constant 1990 purchasing power) was $35bn; by 1700, it was
> $100bn; today it is $41,000bn. And a thousand years ago, average
> world real income per head was $130; by 1700, it was $160; today, it
> is $6,500."
>
> De Long's paper is at
> <http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/1998_Draft/World_GDP/Estimating_Worl
> d_GDP.html>.
>
> Doug