Response to Comments: /Econ_Articles/Reviews/landes.html

In the debate between Frank and Landes, and in the assessment of the meaning of Ken Pomeranz's work on China versus Europe it seems to me that we should keep in mind two things:

1. All economies of the world before 1800 were "Malthusian" in the sense that living standards did NOT depend directly on the production technology. Instead living standards depended on the factors determining the birth rate (fertility control, marriage etc) and on the factors determining the death rates (the disease environment, war, the operation of grain markets etc). Thus Pomeranz's interesting findings that living standards in the Yangzi delta circa 1800 were as high as those in Europe says nothing directly about the relative development of European and Chinese technology. For all we know living standards in sub-Saharan Africa may have been higher than in either of these places (because of the disease environment).

Indeed one interpretation of Pomeranz's results are that they reinforce the work of Chinese demographers who have been emphasizing that Europe was not the only part of the world where there was limitation of fertility in the years before 1800. Though marriage was early and nearly universal for Chinese women, fertility was limited within marriage by means known and unknown.

The high Chinese living standards thus may indicate only facts about Chinese family and social structure (and disease environment), and nothing about technology. Unless you have a theory of the IR which emphasizes high living standards this finding about China will not in itself change any views about what caused the IR.

2. By 1900 there was a huge gap in living standards between even the advanced areas of China like Shanghai and Britain and the USA. In nominal terms at least wages in China were one fifth those in Britain in cotton textiles. Recent work on Britain in the IR and later has emphasized slower and slower growth rates of output and of real wages (see Feinstein's recent work). Was this gap then the result of a collapse in Chinese living standards 1800-1900? Did China just stagnate from 1800 to 1900, or did it actually regress in living standards? And if it did regress, why did that happen within the Malthusian economic framework that still operated in China.

Yours hurriedly!

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