"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.* . . .
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Other findings in the DeLong study:
The present economic boom took root in the Pleistocene Era, not in the Clinton Administration;
The volcano in '1 Million B.C.' that destroyed Raquel Welch's village actually increased GDP in that year, hoodwinking the cavemen into thinking they were better off;
Taxes and government spending have been increasing for a million years, proving that economic growth does not depend on low taxes;
The Mongols murdered more people than the Crusaders and scorned the then-progressive principle of the divine right of kings;
Ten thousand years ago, the first utility function had only one argument; now they have two or three;
Dinosaurs were able to maximize utility, but only in static terms, not being able to handle the math for dynamic optimization; this explains their extinction (see also Rosser, 1986);
The economy has been in crisis for the past five thousand years;
If suitable property rights had been established for the invention of fire, the economy would have grown faster;
Other notes:
DeLong's results are based on strict, non-testable assumptions.
An error of .001 percentage points in his price index has thrown his results off by approximately 76.42 percent.
Since publication, he has run off with the author of an actual article entitled, "I ran one million regressions."
mbs