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Brian Villanueva's avatar

This is truly an amazing analysis. I've seen all of this elsewhere and in my econ training, but assembled together like this, it's a truly devastating argument.

"I can find no evidence that a shorter Growing Season seriously undermined English agricultural productivity"

Consider what David Ricardo chose to illustrate his theory -- Portugese wine and English wool -- clearly aware of the constraints of English agriculture. For Ricardo, latitude and precipitation IS comparative advantage. In the progress equation, the multiplier of the "ag-efficiency" variable may be quite high, but there are many other variables, as you say. Clearly, the Anglo-Norman people found a way (Ricardo implies using grazing instead of row crops) to overcome their weakness in this area and make the jump to a commercial society: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-supply?country=GBR~FRA As weird as it sounds, their comparative weakness may have encouraged that jump. I wonder what the meat/grain caloric ratio of Medieval France vs England was?

"For the first time, other regions could escape the trap of geography."

It is ironic that literally while Ricardo was creating his theories predicated on latitude and precipitation, other events were rendering those variables far less significant to comparative advantage and progress.

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Spouting Thomas's avatar

I enjoy all these write-ups. Speaking of geography, NW Europe really stands out when you look at a population density map of the world and notice that it's by far the northernmost part of the world that is densely inhabited. Cities like London and Paris share latitudes with parts of Manchuria and Siberia that are barely inhabited. Which tells you that there must be something very peculiar about NW Europe's geography. I understand this to be, primarily, the Gulf Stream, which I didn't see you call out directly, but presumably it's what accounts for NW Europe's unusually long growing season.

https://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/20.00/10.00

Let me also comment on this:

>I can find no evidence that a shorter Growing Season seriously undermined English agricultural productivity, so I am not quite sure what is going on here.

While I'll admit that I don't have detailed knowledge of the differences between medieval French and English agricultural production, didn't medieval France have something like 5x the population of medieval England on less than 2x the land area? I've always assumed this was mainly a result of French land being much more productive under the state of agricultural technology in that era.

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