GDP: We Really Don’t Know How Good We Have It—Asterisk

As someone who has used Madison's GDP statistics in the past, I think the points in here are valid but I also think the effort to measure changes is valuable - historical GDP statistics may be meaningless between 1 CE and 2011, but the comparison between 1 CE and 600 AD, or how the economic "weight" of continents changed with the development of industrialisation in Europe.

The rough consensus to my knowledge is that there were likely no major variations in per capita income among populations due to productivity differences or trade factors until at least the Renaissance era, and possibly as late as the Industrial Revolution.

Basically, per capita income differences or differences in standard of living were due to two things in most of human history.

1. Malthusian factors, a lower population generally meant that a population had higher living standards. The most famous case of this is that the Black death clearly increased wages.

2. Resource access, population with easy to harvest fish like viings for example, where able to eat more meat than other populations for instance.

Is there any good arguments against this view?

The Fed’s First Look at the Eurodollar Market: A Confidential 1960 Report from the Banque de France Archives

https://veridelisi.substack.com/p/the-feds-first-look-at-the-eurodollar