Rafael R. Guthmann

Happy to see this paper finally officially published! This paper is about the "quantity of information" as opposed to the typical research in information economics about the "quality of information." onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jp…

That actually depends on a LOT of factors. If it's cheap delivery relative to typical incomes it means high productivity in food delivery services which in turn means prosperity. If it's cheap relative to elite incomes it might just mean high level of inequality where unskilled workers make much less than specialized professionals (which does not necessarily imply in lack of prosperity, but it is statistically correlated with it).

@PeterIsztin I agree it is not a contradiction and it can be interpreted in a consistent way: economic theory done at a lower level of generality and closer to specific applications. I just meant to say that it sounds contradictory.

@GuthmannR I don't think applied theory is contradiction. To me it means you apply the toolkit of economic theory to particular real-world problems.

Its interesting how narrow the definition of an "economic theorist" has become. Back in the 1980s someone could be a "micro theorist" and publish papers on the JPE about the history of economic though. Today, one's work has to be very narrow, usually about decision theory, bayesian persuasion, some forms of applied math.* If one does theory of anything else, then one becomes a "macro theorist" or an "applied theorist." The second term can be regarded as a logical contradiction. My definition of an economic theorist is just someone whose work is not just about extracting information from data but involves theoretical innovations in any field of economics. All great economists such as Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Jevons, Mill, Marshall, Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, were theorists, even if sometimes they wrote books on the monetary history of a country. *Interestingly, since game theory and graph theory (networks) are fields of mathematics with economic applications, one can be in fact a pure mathematician in all their publications and still be regarded as an economic theorist.

This broadly matches modern estimates of Roman and Early Medieval urban populations. The Roman urban population is estimated at ca. 6-7 million in Europe, while Early Medieval European urban population was ca. 500-700 thousand (in both cases considering only cities over 5000 inhabitants). Interestingly, MENA Roman cities also did not survive the Middle Ages. It does look like the Arab civilization that arose in the Early Middle Ages after the collapse of Greco-Roman civilization "operated" along a distinct network of cities.

Looking at Numbeo prices it looks like the World Bank overestimated the purchasing power of the Polish currency by 14% and underestimated the purchasing power of the Japanese yen by 12%, relative to the USD. For most other countries the gap is much smaller (for the UK, Chile, Germany, Italy, and France, I found a 2% deviation on average).

Is it true though? If you look at data that is correlated with GDP per capita from life expectancy to car sales, and this data shows that Poland is still closer to Mexico than it is to Japan. Indeed, I re-computed purchasing power parities with data from Numbeo a couple of years ago and I still found a big gap between Japan and Poland. I think that "official" GDP PPP data from the World Bank underestimates Japan's living standards and overestimate a little bit Poland's. But it is true that gap between Japan and Poland has massively decreased since the 1990s, when Japan's GDP PPP per capita was nearly four times Poland's. Today it looks like it is around 1.5 times higher.

@ThePoliEcon Economics has existed since the 18th century at least, 30 years old is new by that standard.

@GuthmannR “relatively recent” and “from the 90s” is an oxymoron

No, many empirical findings published from a few years ago are already in intro textbooks. In theory side, some relatively recent theoretical models are described in modern intro textbooks like the Mortensen and Pissarides labor search model from the 1990s.

Overall, I think that all ancient civilizations experienced some economic growth. That is why they became "civilizations" in the first place: without growth in material resources, there would be no means to produce the efflorescences of art and culture associated with the emergence of civilization. For example, the Egyptian pyramids were only possible because economic growth over the bronze age allowed for the existence of the material resources to allow for the construction of such gigantic structures. Even if in the case of Old Kingdom Egyptians, the median person's living standards might not have improved much from the pre-dynastic period (thus the distribution of growth was highly unequal).

Well, considering that over a 500 year period the median ancient Greek house found by archeologists increased in size 7-fold* while population densities in Greece increased about tenfold, economic growth in at least some ancient societies was certainly very substantial over the centuries, even if at an annual basis it was likely not comparable to modern societies. *This was a comparable or perhaps greater increase to the increase in housing space per capita in the US from the 18th century to the 21st century.

I don't think one can make such very strong statements like "people in classical antiquity had no concept of progress." When in fact, when I read some translations of Thucydides and Polybius and it seems clear to me that they though that civilization is dynamic and that social and technological progress had been substantial. For example, I recall that Thucydides spoke about not underestimating the bronze age civilization that came before just become their societies were not as materially impressive as his own. He also brings about the comparison between Athens and Sparta pointing out that Athens is materially much more impressive than Sparta but their relative geopolitical weights are much closer than their material means. It is clearly implicit in that concept the idea that there was material progress from the bronze age to the 5th century BCE almost a thousand years later. It is also implicit is the idea that levels of material prosperity could vary across different societies at the same point in time. While I noticed that Polybius had a notion of an historical process of increasing "globalization." That is, different parts of the ancient world were getting integrated in the sense that they were becoming increasingly interconnected as events in one region affected another region, in a way that did not occur in the past. This can be understood as a refutation of the idea that all ancients though of historical processes as being cyclical. In addition they had the concept of regression as well: Hesiod also spoke about his own age (circa 8th century BCE) being an age of regression relative to the Bronze Age. This regression in living standards following the Bronze Age collapse is substantiated by the archeological evidence of material living standards. For example, the average size of Greek houses found by archeologists decreased by a about third from the bronze age to the early archaic period.