On the slack clue, cultures that limited their fertility and work hours should have had more capital per person. In conflicts with neighboring cultures, perhaps low capital cultures were more often intimidated or seduced by folks from individually-richer high capital cultures. Or perhaps such capital was especially useful in warfare.

This looks a lot like what I wrote a few months ago:

Maximizing the wealth and power of a nation requires an optimal mix of human and non-human capital. Nations that fail to adopt population controls find their relative wealth and power fade over time as their mixes deviate from the optimum (i.e., they find themselves spending too much resources on raising humans, and not enough on building machines), and either move to correct this or are taken over by stronger powers.

But at that time, your response was “On your capital argument, I think you need to learn more econ growth theory.” Have you changed your mind, or are you making a different point here that I’m misinterpreting to be the same as mine?

BTW, subsistence farmers may on average work light hours, but they work like crazy during planting and harvest. When the crops are growing, there’s less to do.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/future-fertility.html

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/limits-to-growth.html

“Perhaps labor is just especially useful in stealing capital” … interesting when you consider who steals the most today (I’m excluding white-collar crimes here for sake of argument!).

Robin, why would we “return to such a state”? If you believe that we are going to experience decreasing population growth, won’t this ease the “max sustainable level” of population? For all of your talk about how things have improved over time and how much more room there is for improvement in general, why do you hold this contradictory and hopelessly pessimistic Malthusian view of the future? If I’m mistaken, please correct me.