The imagination is questionable (Daily, 1997; Dasgupta, 2000b). In any event, we should be sceptical of a theory which places such enormous burden on an experience not much more than two hundred years old (Fogel, 1994; Johnson, 2000). Extrapolation into the past is a sobering exercise: over the long haul of history (some five thousand years), economic growth even in the currently-rich countries was for most of the time not much above zero. The study of possible feedback loops between poverty, demographic behaviour and the character and performance of both human institutions and the natural-resource base is not yet on the research agenda of modern growth theorists
