Chapter 20 Supplement F Comments on Economics and Demography

F Comments on Economics and Demography The issues discussed in Chapter 8 have been studied since the birth of economics.It can be said that scientific economics began in 1681, when William Petty (a colleague of Newton, slightly older than him, and one of the founders of the Royal Society) explained the reasons for the rapid development of the City of London. fan.To everyone's amazement, he found that it had grown larger than Paris and Rome combined, and in a paper entitled "The Growth, Multiplication, and Multiplication of Mankind," he explained why the larger Population density induces a wider division of labor:

Each artifact is divided into as many components as possible.In making a watch, if this wheel is made, and the spring is made, and another person engraves the dial, the watch will be better and cheaper than if all these jobs were done by one person. We also find that in the streets of towns and great cities, where all the inhabitants do nearly the same trade, the goods peculiar to those places are better and cheaper than elsewhere.Moreover, if a certain place manufactures all kinds of wares, a ship sailing from it will at once fill its holds with as many kinds of goods as there are in the ports to which it must go in order to obtain them. Compare.

Petty also recognized that "few men are the real poverty; a country with eight million people is twice as rich as a country with a similar territory but only four million people; Serving more is as good as serving fewer" (1681/1899: I, 454-55, 1927: I, 43).These general ideas were apparently passed on to Adam Smith via Mandeville (1715/1924: I, 356), who, as noted in Chapter 8, noted that the division of labor was limited by the size of markets, that population growth is the key to national prosperity. While economists have paid much attention to these issues from earlier times, recent anthropologists have not paid enough attention to moral evolution (which is, of course, something that is almost always difficult to "observe"); , as well as socialist bias, are making people less confident in pursuing evolutionary explanations.We find, however, that an eminent socialist anthropologist, in his study of "urban revolutions," defines "revolution" as "the accumulation of progressive changes in the economic structure and social caused by, or accompanied by, a marked increase” (Child, 1950: 3).Important insights can also be found in the work of Herskovitz, who states:

The relation of population size to environment and technology on the one hand, and its relation to output per capita on the other, poses the greatest challenge to the study of this combination which produces economic surplus for a given population.  … Generally speaking, the smallest social survival pressure is also the greatest.In contrast, social leisure is only possible in larger groups where specialization—the basic condition for supplying goods in excess of what is needed to sustain all people—appears (1960: 398). What is often described by biologists (eg Carl-Sanders, 1922; Wynne-Edwards, 1962; Thorp, 1976) as the main mechanism for limiting populations can also be seen as a mechanism for increasing populations.Even better, since it takes advantage of all the advantages that may arise from any harm that may be caused by temporary overpopulation, that is, new opportunities to maintain a larger population, it is also to adjust the population to match the capacity of the territory. mechanism of long-run equilibrium.Nature is as creative in one respect as in another, and the human brain is perhaps the most successful structure which has given a species the power and size above all others.