What Bret Devereaux thinks about energy
Ancient and military historian specialising in the economy of the ancient Mediterranean, who writes the long-form blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry on pre-modern economies, logistics and warfare, and on what popular history, film and games get wrong about them.
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1 dated position, 2022, in their own words. Our reading of what Bret Devereaux has said — not written or endorsed by them.
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Their wordsNew land can be brought under cultivation (or cultivated more intensively) of course, but marginal gains decrease rapidly (because the best land is cultivated first and because adding more labor to already cultivated land, while it can increase harvests, is less efficient than cultivating new land) and there is a fairly hard ceiling on total production of this sort that was, for the most part, fairly low.
↗Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?acoup.blog 5th of 8 in this piece