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Imagine if partway into the first agricultural evolution someone attempted to extrapolate what parts of the world would end up with settled agricultural societies or which ones would be the wealthiest. This is a similar level of absurdity as the "deep roots literature" (thread)
The economic transformations that began with the Industrial Revolution have hardly had time to work themselves out at all, given the scale of the change. We have absolutely no idea what the future portends once societies have had time to truly adapt to the new reality.
The "deep roots" literature thinks that you can look thousands of years into the agricultural past—data about which is incredibly unreliable, unsystematic, and spotty—and learn something meaningful about why countries rich today have become so.
Louis Putterman and David Weil in their 2010 paper claimed to have created a dataset that adjusted "state history" based on population flows, and to have shown a strong relationship with contemporary wealth. Please see @JBriggeman's criticism of that paper econjwatch.org/articles/long-run-determinants-of-economic-growth-putterman-and-weil-revisited
P&W are big names whose paper was published in a top journal. Yet all @JBriggeman had to do was perform some of the most basic robustness checks, noting also that their boasted data set is full of holes and of rather poor quality. Embarrassing! econjwatch.org/articles/long-run-determinants-of-economic-growth-putterman-and-weil-revisited
"We didn't have the time to use specialist knowledge *to build a dataset about 1500 years ago* so we used Britannica. Hope someone does better later!" Meanwhile the dataset continued to be used by other authors rather than the hoped-for improved version econjwatch.org/articles/long-run-determinants-of-economic-growth-putterman-and-weil-revisited 
(the screencap is from the P&W paper, not Jason's; there was frankly too much about the P&W paper for Jason's one paper to call out, but do be sure to see what made the cut econjwatch.org/articles/long-run-determinants-of-economic-growth-putterman-and-weil-revisited )
Definitely a meaningful relationship in that top graph wouldn't you say econjwatch.org/articles/long-run-determinants-of-economic-growth-putterman-and-weil-revisited 
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Nick Gillespie @NickGillespie
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Apr 1, 2022
Is the replication crisis coming to economics? Sounds like it would be a good idea. Great threat from @adamgurri abt @JBriggeman's imp work. Reminds in part of John VC Nye's War, Wine, & Taxes which undermined shallow understanding of European econ history