[VLM]

WRT your PS about meat prices, I did some engineering back of envelope estimates with a million grams per ton and a ton of post-green revolution rice costing about three hundred bucks in 1990 (or so google says) and about 4 calories per gram of carbs, the world GDP "always" being $300 per person before the industrial revolution, and ended up with something around ten thousand calories of rice per person per day. Some googling indicates the green revolution plus industrialization plus factory farms has temporarily quintupled grain production per acre, well, absolute best case anyway. So assuming world productivity was solely focused on rice ag (cheapest calories there is... right?) then every human on the planet consumed 2000 calories per day of rice and absolutely nothing else happened. That sounds very unlikely. I'm not entirely sure people can live long term off absolutely nothing but heavy manual labor and 2000 calories or less of rice per day, for vitamin and mineral deficiency reasons if nothing else.

Generally when you're doing data analysis and some textbook curve pops out, that's a very strong indication you've screwed up your data, not that you've actually discovered anything. Far more likely despite attempts at short term correction the value of a supposedly fixed standard 1990 international dollar inflated exponentially over the past century or so, on a long enough scale. Once that correction is made, the data could be re-run to gather actual, useful results. Or rather than using inflation adjusted counters, just pick a valuable commodity like gold. Supposedly an ounce of gold has represented a year of labor from the dawn of trade up to the invention of steam powered mine pumps. A graph vs gold price might be useful. Or a hybrid of gold/oil for more recent stats.