My colleague, jimrandomh, brought this to my attention. The thesis is that due to plague, war, and urbanization, early Modern Europe escaped the Malthusian trap which kept everyone at subsistence with no resources left for advancing science and technology. One source for this is here.
Some people argue Europe broke out of the Malthusian trap around 1300. This is not quite right. 1300s Europe achieved above-subsistence GDP, but only because the Black Plague killed so many people that the survivors got a windfall by taking their land.
Malthus predicts that this should only last a little while, until the European population bounces back to pre-Plague levels. This prediction was exactly right for Southern Europe. Northern Europe didn’t bounce back. Why not?
Unclear, but one answer is: fewer people, more plagues.
Broadberry 2015 mentions that Northern European culture promoted later marriage and fewer children:
The North Sea Area had an advantage in this area because of its approach to marriage. Hajnal (1965) argued that northwest Europe had a different demographic regime from the rest of the world, characterised by later marriage and hence limited fertility. Although he originally called this the European Marriage Pattern, later work established that it applied only to the northwest of the continent. This can be linked to the availability of labour market opportunities for females, who could engage in market activity before marriage, thus increasing the age of first marriage for females and reducing the number of children conceived (de Moor and van Zanden, 2010). Later marriage and fewer children are associated with more investment in human capital, since the women employed in productive work can accumulate skills, and parents can afford to invest more in each of the smaller number of children because of the “quantity-quality” trade-off (Voigtländer and Voth, 2010).
And:
British population maxes out around 1300 (?), declines substantially during the Black Plague of 1348-49, but then keeps declining. The List Of English Plagues says another plague hit in 1361, then another in 1369, then another in 1375, and so on. Some historians call the whole period from 1348 to 1666 “the Plague Years”.
It looks like through the 1350 – 1450 period, population keeps declining, and per capita income keeps going up, as Malthusian theory would predict.
Also, covered in Scott Alexander’s latest post: “1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled”
And: