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To: Ilaine who wrote (10480)	9/30/2001 12:41:16 PM
From: Don Lloyd	Respond to of 74559

CB - Random article - nt5.scbbs.com{3A6A}&softpage=PL_frame Material Progress Over the Past Millennium by E. Calvin Beisner "...If Labbe lived to the average age of people born in the thirteenth century, he was under 30 when he died. More likely, since he had survived infancy and childhood (about half did not), he died in his 30s or 40s. Probably at least one wife had preceded him in death, perhaps in childbirth—one of the most common causes of death for women at the time. Assuming he had fathered eight children in his years of marriage, he would probably have buried four of them in their infancy, perhaps another before its fifth birthday, and another before puberty. If he was fairly typical, then, two of his children survived him. Slow Population Growth Such was life, for the moderately better off, in a society in which the death rate was normally so close to the birth rate that population grew at only about 0.17 percent per year, doubling about every 425 years instead of every 42 years, as it would at the world’s average growth rate in the 1980s, or every 51 years, as it would at the average rate for the 1990s.2 Even for the wealthy, life wasn’t much more secure. Infant and child mortality rates were little better for the very rich—royalty and nobility—than they were for farmers and peasants, even into the eighteenth century. Britain’s Queen Anne (1665–1714) was pregnant 18 times; five of her children survived birth; none survived childhood. ..." "...Eighteenth-century French farming, for instance, produced about 345 pounds of wheat per acre; modern American farmers produce about 6.2 times as much, 2,150 pounds.3 Early fifteenth-century French farmers produced about 2.75 to 3.7 pounds of wheat per man-hour, and the rate fell by about half over the next two centuries;4 modern American farmers produce about 857 pounds per man-hour5 —about 230 to 310 times as much as their French counterparts around 1400 and 460 to 620 times as much as French farmers around 1600. (By the way, this means modern farmers also manage to farm from 37 to 100 times as many acres as their earlier counterparts did. Chalk it up to mechanized equipment.) As the great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, life was difficult to live when productivity in wheat fell below 2.2 pounds per man-hour, but for most of the 350 years from 1540 to 1890, productivity was well below that.6 ..." Regards, Don