Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990

Kremer, Michael

doi:10.2307/2118405

Cited by 1,231 publications

(770 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…And a larger population may make creative ideas and technological progress more likely. Kremer (1993) supports this hypothesis and concludes that for most of human history, societies with larger initial populations indeed experienced faster technological change. We leave aside this debate to focus on the household-level dynamics that we 7 outlined above.…”

Section: Cies That Help Individuals Reduce Unwanted Fertility Are Expsupporting

confidence: 69%

Fertility, household size and poverty in Nepal

Libois

Somville

2018

World Development

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Population control policies keep attracting attention: by increasing the household size, having more children would directly contribute to a household's poverty. Using nationally representative household level data from Nepal, we investigate the links between a household's fertility decisions and variations in their size and composition. We show that the relationship between number of births and household size is positive when the mothers are young, but becomes negative as the mothers grow older. Elderly couples who had fewer children host, on average, more relatives who are outside the immediate family unit. This result sheds light on the heterogeneous relation between the number of children and household size over the life cycle. It also implies that reductions in a household's fertility may have an ambiguous impact on its per capita consumption, which depends on how the household's composition responds to new births and changes over time: in this sample, an old household's per capita consumption is not affected by the number of births. We use the gender of the first-born child to instrument the total number of consecutive children.

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Section: Cies That Help Individuals Reduce Unwanted Fertility Are Expsupporting

confidence: 69%

Fertility, household size and poverty in Nepal

Libois

Somville

2018

World Development

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“…Note that here we are talking about a mathematical singularity (division by zero) of the kind described for example in von Foerster, Mora, and Amiot (1960); Meyer and Vallee (1975); Kremer (1993); Johansen and Sornette (2001);Bettencourt, Lobo, Helbing, Kühnert, and West (2007). This is different from the "technological singularity" discussed by various authors (Vinge 1993;Kurzweil 2005;Yudkowsky 2007) 5 .…”

Section: Generalized Nonlinear Regression Resultsmentioning

confidence: 87%

Superexponential long-term trends in information technology

Nagy¹,

Farmer²,

Trancik³

et al. 2011

Technological Forecasting and Social Change

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Moore's Law has created a popular perception of exponential progress in information technology. But is the progress of IT really exponential? In this paper we examine long time series of data documenting progress in information technology gathered by Koh and Magee (2006). We analyze six different historical trends of progress for several technologies grouped into the following three functional tasks: information storage, information transportation (bandwidth), and information transformation (speed of computation). Five of the six datasets extend back to the nineteenth century. We perform statistical analyses and show that in all six cases one can reject the exponential hypothesis at statistically significant levels. In contrast, one cannot reject the hypothesis of superexponential growth with decreasing doubling times. This raises questions about whether past trends in the improvement of information technology are sustainable.

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“…More generally, total population positively affects population growth and technological change in a very long-run perspective (e.g., Kremer 1993). Population density, as Klasen and Nestmann (2006, 623) point out, 'generates the linkages, the infrastructure, the demand and the effective market size for technological innovations'.…”

Section: Methodsology and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

The long-run impact of human capital on innovation and economic development in the regions of Europe

2018

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Human capital is supposed to be an important factor for innovation and economic development. However, the long-run impact of human capital on current innovation and economic development is still a black box, in particular at the regional level. Therefore, this paper makes the link between the past and the present. Using a large new dataset on regional human capital and other factors in the 19 th and 20 th century, we find that past regional human capital is a key factor explaining current regional disparities in innovation and economic development.

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Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990

Cited by 1,231 publications

References 15 publications

Fertility, household size and poverty in Nepal

Fertility, household size and poverty in Nepal

Superexponential long-term trends in information technology

The long-run impact of human capital on innovation and economic development in the regions of Europe

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