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Young environmental activists often say that older generations are creating a future climate disaster. They argue that current generations are obligated to take decisive action against global warming now to [...]

Motivated by the basic adage that man does not live by bread alone, we offer a theory of historical economic growth and population dynamics where human beings need food to survive, but enjoy other things, too. Our model imposes a Malthusian constraint on food, but introduces a second good to the analysis that affects living standards without affecting population growth. We show that technological change does a good job explaining historical consumption patterns and population dynamics, including the Neolithic Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Great Divergence. Our theory stands in contrast to models that assume a single composite good and a Malthusian constraint. These models generate negligible growth prior to the Industrial Revolution. However, recent revisions to historical data show that historical living standards--though obviously much lower than today's--varied over time and space much more than previously thought. These revisions include updates to Maddison's dataset, which served as the basis for many papers taking long-run stagnation as a point of departure. This new evidence suggests that the assumption of long-run stagnation is problematic. Our model shows that when we give theoretical accounting of these new observations the Industrial Revolution is much less puzzling. (JEL BIO, 131, J1, N1, 030), I. INTRODUCTION A traditional view of historical economic growth is that prior to the Industrial Revolution there was very little change in per capita consumption. (1) This characterization is based [...]

We study when cooperation and conflict emerge in a class of “folk theorem” games such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. We make use of two simple ideas: existing strategies are more likely to be imitated than new strategies are to be introduced, and it is possible to identify how an opponent will behave prior to the interaction. Both global interactions and the local interaction model of Ellison [1993] are examined. We use methods introduced by Kandori, Mailath and Rob [1993] and Young [1993] to examine the long-run evolutionary limit of this system. This limit contains only pure strategies. A sufficient condition for a unique limit is that a strategy beat all others in pairwise contests. When players can perfectly determine the strategy used by their opponent, full cooperation is achieved. When identification is imperfect, the long-run limit can be interpreted as a model of endogenous preferences where players who appear similar are treated altruistically, and players who appear to be different are treated spitefully.