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I started reading "The Relentless Revolution" by Joyce Appleby.
Will append reading notes below.
Learning about the economic baseline of "on seven fat years will follow seven lean years": In biblical times, several good harvests in a row caused population to grow so quickly that a period of famine was sure to follow.
Interestingly this is not at all the implication I remember from the bible reference, where it always seemed to be related to fate. This proved to be wrong, as mankind managed to leave this cycle by its own means, with adaptions like four-field crop rotation, import of high-yield crops and later-marriage traditions.
The teleological idea of "what goes up, must come down" seems to have survived though, for example in the "good times create weak men"-meme.
What goes up, must come down (if there are no better ideas).
fragment ↗ · snapshot of v1
Despite the great diversity of communities around the world, they conformed in one way: Their population grew and retrenched like an accordion through alternating periods of abundance and scarcity—the seven fat and seven lean years of the Bible. You can see this “feast or famine” oscillation in the construction record of European cathedrals. Most of these magnificent structures took centuries to complete, with a spate of years of active building followed by long periods of neglect. When there was a bit of surplus, work could resume, only to be succeeded by stoppages during times of acute scarcity. The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (Joyce Appleby)