That’s interesting to think about the transition from early agriculture/​pastoralism to pre-industrial society. The analyses I’ve seen focus on just recovering agriculture and/​or industry. Do you think in between could be a significant bottleneck or it would just take time? Not a peer-reviewed study, but there were some estimates of future recovery times here.
Given the results from Wand and Hoyer, I would expect it to just take time. It seems a pretty consistent pattern that many civilizations increase in complexity over time once they have adapted agriculture. Their scale-up takes around 2500 years and then plateaus. Also many of those complexity developments happened completely independently, e.g. China, the Incas and Egypt.
That’s interesting to think about the transition from early agriculture/​pastoralism to pre-industrial society. The analyses I’ve seen focus on just recovering agriculture and/​or industry. Do you think in between could be a significant bottleneck or it would just take time? Not a peer-reviewed study, but there were some estimates of future recovery times here.
Given the results from Wand and Hoyer, I would expect it to just take time. It seems a pretty consistent pattern that many civilizations increase in complexity over time once they have adapted agriculture. Their scale-up takes around 2500 years and then plateaus. Also many of those complexity developments happened completely independently, e.g. China, the Incas and Egypt.