送交者: xj 于 2006-3-21, 17:54:02:
回答: 签名里的姚洋。笑坏我了。 由 Enlighten 于 2006-3-21, 16:13:04:
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
by David S Landes
Page 23
Now look at China, where “agriculture teems… and mankind swarms.”
…
Some two thousand years ago, perhaps 60 million people crowded what was to become the northern edge of China—a huge number for a small territory. This number more or less held over the next millennium, but then, form about the tenth to the beginning of the thirteenth century, almost doubled, to around 120 million. At that point came a setback, due largely to the pandemics also scourging Europe and Middle East; and then f, from a trough of 65-80 million around 1400, the number of Chinese rose to 100-150 million inv 1650, 200-250 million in 1750, over 300 million in 1850, 650 million in 1950, and today 1.2 billion, or more than one fifth of the world total. This extraordinary increase is the result of a long-standing (up to now) reproductive strategy: early, universal marriage and lots of children. That takes food, and the food in turn takes people. Treadmill.
This strategy went back thousands of years, to when some peoples at the eastern edge of the Asian Steppe exchanged nomadic pastoralism for the higher yields of sedentary agriculture. From the beginning, their chiefs saw the link between numbers, food, and power. Their political wisdom may be inferred from (1) their mobilization of potential cultivators, assigned to (planted in) potentially arable soil; (2) their storage of grain to feed future armies; (3) their focus on food supply to fixed administrative centers (as against camps). On these points, we have “The Record of the Three Kingdoms”, which tells of state warfare around the year 200 of our era: