Krugman and Domar go to Whitecastle

Ay, Krugman and Domar are good.

Having written the last post I've re-read both the Evsey Domar paper and Paul Krugman's old article on it and was struck by how good both were. One amazing thing was how much old arguments get repeated over and over again even if they're, well, wrong.

Paul Krugman quotes James Surowiecki on the Black Death(and JS is in turn quoted by commentators on blogs all over);
" "The Black Death helped undermine feudalism. The population decline was so severe that the individual�s labor grew more valuable, which enabled serfs to abandon their lords and become tenant farmers or urban workers. "

and then Paul:

"That sounds plausible, but it's not the way it happened. According to Domar, serfdom actually withered away before the Black Death, as European population grew close to its Malthusian limit. The puzzle is why serfdom wasn't reinstituted after the Black Death. "

And then we go from there. The Domar paper really needs to be the basis for any kind of discussion of how political factors interacted with economic and demographic ones in the Malthusian world.