If Not Malthusian, Then Why?

[Macrobius]

An interesting paper from 2015 (student of Brad Delong)

…Technological improvement in luxury production… faster than improvement in subsistence production, would have kept living standards growing…. [There is] a puzzle of balanced growth between the luxury sector and the subsistence sector…. [The hypothesis is of] group selection in the form of biased migration. A tiny bit of bias in migration can suppress a strong tendency of growth. The theory reexplains the Malthusian trap and the prosperity of ancient market economies such as Rome and Song…”

Evening Must-Read: Lemin Wu: If Not Malthusian, Then Why? - Equitable Growth​

Problems of measuring living standards properly go way, way, way back, as Lemin Wu demonstrates: Lemin Wu: If Not Malthusian, Then Why?: “The pre-industrial stagnation of living standards… …Technological improvement in luxury production… faster than improvement in subsistence production, would...

equitablegrowth.org

The paper: https://economics.smu.edu.sg/sites/default/files/economics/pdf/Seminar/2015/20151016_Wulemin.pdf

EDIT (11/21/2023: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2187113 since above link broken - older version, same thoughts)

 

[Macrobius]

Me: it's an interesting paper, but it becomes even more interesting if you take the 'two sector economy' part of the model, and remember your Sraffa -- final goods come in two sizes. One size, Ricardo's corn, necessary for replacing the human commodity of the labourer, but the other, a 'final good' that makes no such *aggregate* contribution. You can SUBSIST without it, but your DYNASTY can't FLOURISH. It's the latter that raises the population out of the muck.

The problem with Ricardo and Marx is they left out the role of Flowers in assortive mating. Perhaps our modern demographic crisis is simply because Industrial Life under Financial Capitalism is so *UGLY*

'Hey, Baby, would you like to catch a subsistence bug burger at McGates? They have a special on those on the Non-Reserve-Currency 1 post-reset-USD menu today!' Doesn't float anyone's Darwinian boat.

 

[Macrobius]

Thread on twitter that occasioned this one.



> I confess I don't really get it. What does he mean by biased migration

My response:

He is dancing around, how to say as an academic, 'the immigration problem on our southern border',[1] where persons who's culture favours subsistence over luxury preferentially migrate to societies with 'more favourable equilibrium'. But they dilute the culture of luxury with their subsistence ethic. This is modern neo-Liberal thinking on 'the Malthusian' problem.

'The Green Revolution is self defeating because it benefits susistence cultures and creates a population bomb.'

The theory is about the sociobiological tension of individual fitness (my utility is a sound Darwinian guide) vs GROUP fitness (it is better for the group to die off [and prohibit immigration] - because the deaths of some of us subsidize the higher standard of survivor living.

The only thing you can do is halt immigration into countries that have lux..

[1]: hence the bizarre sounding, coded speech, but that's what he means. He also briefly discusses race realism, as part of his making the case that 'this is so discredited that we can consider group biases and sociobiological considerations in economics again'.

 

[Macrobius]

As a Neo-Liberal, Wu Lemin is arguing, in response to this

Malthusianism is a pickle. Eventually you come to a point where there are questions to which there are no non-ideological responses: have faith in humanity's ingenuity and will-to-excellence or embrace sadism

... that Mathusianism is in fact incoherent (a fallacy of reasoning similar to Simpson's Paradox where you get a seeming dilemma out of failure to understand aggregate date *could* be stratified). Therefore, it is a doctrine NO ONE should hold, is false, cannot be consistently held by anyone as an explanation of what it purports to explain, and leads not to ideological choices but incoherent insanity.

BUT -- there is a revised Malthusianism this IS true, but leads to different conclusions.

These conclusions are by no means less repulsive than those of the classical Malthusians, and in fact buttress a callous culling of the poor in order to make life better for the survivors. In Neo-Industrial Britain, this culling was 'the hungry 1840s' which was both a crisis of subsistence and luxury (the poor after enclosure acts and corn laws were enforced had a lower standard of living and higher death rate than rural 18th century Britain -- but after the culling, things got a whole lot better for everyone).

Remember, this fellow was taught by Brad Delong --a protege of Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard, and sometime Assistant Sec of the Treasury himself, a minor bureaucratic role, under Clinton.

I consider the paper interesting because 1/ it gives us some insight into what the Neo-Liberals may actually be thinking behind closed doors as opposed to public piety for Academic Marxist Good-Boy Tendies, and 2/ it does suggest an alternative economic outcome of the current 'Crisis of Neo-Liberal Financial Capital' -- which is a possible *better* equilibrium, not unlike 1850s Britain.

Sounds like pure Brad to me and he used a Chinese burner-student to get his thoughts in play.

 

[Macrobius]

Where this thread is going...[1]

[1] Looking over our shoulder to the broader geopolitical and macro-economic context ... https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?threads/usd-as-reserve-currency-ended-this-week.979/

It seems to me that Wu lemin (and maybe Neo-Liberal thought in general) has not imbibed the consequences of Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), and in particular the notion of ESS (Evolutionarily Stable Stragies) as an alternative to Nash Equilibrium for understanding the stable outcome of repeated games.

Wu's paper is perhaps limited to what was commonplace when his teacher (Brad Delong) went through -- namely EO Wilson's 'Socio-Biology' which subsequently bifurcated into 'Behavioural Ecology' and 'Human Behavioural Evolution' (HBE) and several other disciplines. It doesn't seem that Wu's 2015 treatment covers even the then-current developments of EGT and computational methods.[2]

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_game_theory

But the paper does *point* us to those problems, and given the saliency of this thread: RESERVE CURRENCY STATUS GONE THREAD

We should review the relevance for POPULATION DYNAMICS (and Evolutionary fitness) which Wu (and by extension, the Neo-Malthusians) raise, in an economic context.

Remember in 1947 the madmen did it. They built a national security state with a set of bureaucratic institutions dedicated to understanding game theory, economics, and The Great Game, played for the benefit of... The Group (presumed fit). Is it are group? Is it a good game for INDIVIDUALS? That's a tough question....

This is quite a can of worms mind you. I'm pretty sure that Homo Economicus *doesn't* and never has existed, but Homo Capable-of-and-Fit-for-Reproducticus sure *does*.

For a preview of where we might be going with this topic, look up the 'Public Goods Game' (PGG), especially the variants where players are allowed to 'conform' (to the Group) or 'defect'. This is a standard of Social Network theory, and the design of Propaganda campaigns of course.

Sleep soundly, post-1947 Earthling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods_game

 

[Macrobius]

Quoting the paper:

Group selection is a key concept in my theory. The idea was once a taboo, partly because it reminds one of Nazi eugenics, partly because the old theory of group selection violates individual rationality.

Shhh... don't let the goyim know about Eugenics.