The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

the Black Death was not caused by overpopulation, but by a bacterium. Ironically, the plague may have been one of the sparks that lit the Renaissance, because the shortage of labour shifted income from rents to wages as landlords struggled to find both tenants and employees. With rising wages, some of the surviving peasantry could once more just afford the oriental luxuries and fine cloth that Lombard and Hanseatic merchants supplied. There was a rash of financial innovation: bills of credit to solve the problem of how to pay for goods without transporting silver through bandit country, double-entry book-keeping, insurance. Italian bankers began to appear all across the continent, financing kings and their wars, sometimes at a profit, sometimes at a disastrous loss. The wealth that the Italian trading towns had generated soon found its way into scholarship, art or science, or in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, all three. Per capita income in England was probably higher in 1450 than it would be again before 1820.