From Malthus to Solow: How did the Malthusian economy really evolve?

This paper uses a variety of time-series methods and a new real wage series from [Clark, G., 2005. The condition of the working class in England, 1209 to 2004. Journal of Political Economy 1131 520 1307-1340.] to re-examine economic-demographic interactions in pre-industrial England. We confirm that there was a Malthusian economy in the sense that real wages were stationary until the end of the eighteenth century but we find that these was no positive check and that the preventive check broke down in the mid-seventeenth century so that Malthusian controls were absent from that point. There is no evidence of a positive feedback from increasing population size to technological progress as postulated by unified growth theory. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.