Innovation and Economic Growth: Elementary Models of Human Economies and Demography

Posted: 25 May 2010

Date Written: May 25, 2010

Abstract

Humans have operated two basic kinds of economies over our history. In hunting and gathering economies, humans exploit populations of wild plants and animals. In a simple system of coupled equations representing the human population, the exploited ecosystem, and the innovation of new technology, these economies tends to create human super-predators that cause the collapse of exploited populations and subsequently the human populations as well. The late Pleistocene evidence from Africa exhibits brief outbursts and collapse of technical advance consistent with this model. Only one region of the world, Western Eurasia, seems to have had a stable, advanced hunter-gatherer economy in the Pleistocene. Eastern Eurasia probably acted as a natural protected reserve so that even super-predators in this region could not cause the extinction of their prey. In farming economies, humans can innovate technology to increase the productivity of their domesticated species and more generally in the ecosystems they exploit. Incorporating a term in the exploited ecosystem equation to reflect this change creates an economy with quite different properties from hunting and gathering. Now the system tends to become a runaway mutualism as well as to cycle. For some parameter choices it is possible to mimic the history of human economies in the Holocene. The rate of innovation, productivity and human population growth can evolve very slowly for extended periods of time before transitioning to a short period of explosive growth.

Suggested Citation

Richerson, Peter, Innovation and Economic Growth: Elementary Models of Human Economies and Demography (May 25, 2010). Gruter Institute Squaw Valley Conference – Innovation and Economic Growth, 2010, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1615672

Peter Richerson (Contact Author)

University of California, Davis ( email )

One Shields Avenue
Apt 153
Davis, CA 95616
United States

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